Through the Decades
- Wayne Eager

Wayne Eager paints in an organic manner with a gestural use of lines at times. His work is a type of abstraction and draws on the elements of nature using form, colour and texture to create a personal response to his environment.

His method is based on the accretion of layers from which his paintings find their form. Compositions are built from fragments and structures that evolve over time. Colour is intensified or modulated from one session to the next, so the viewer is able to trace the narrative through gestures and layers of paint. Eager’s paintings oscillate between intense working and loose simplicity, to create a fresh vision of the Northern Territory landscape, where he painted for the last three decades. In 2021 Eager moved to the Yarra Valley, which is where he spent his childhood.

Wayne Eager was a founding member of the dynamic artist-run-exhibiting space ROAR STUDIOS in Fitzroy, Melbourne, the first such venture in Australia. His early works were exhibited there in 1982. ROAR STUDIO’s contribution to the revival of Australian painting has been the subject of three texts which all recognize Eager’s role in its development.

His work has the integrity of an artist whose life has been devoted to discovering the purity of painting.

“My paintings are arrived at through a distillation process of a series of overlaid marks and shapes. In the 1990s I was more interested in a depiction of the landscape surrounds, whilst now the paintings are more non-representational (abstract) although the basic inspiration remains the central desert landscape, where I live.” – Wayne Eager, 2019

Through the Decades is the first exhibition for Wayne Eager at Australian Galleries and will coincide with the Victorian release of the recent publication Wayne Eager, a Survey 1982-2020.