“. . . an exploration into the nature of creativity.”
As I speak with Wendy Sharpe in early May, she’s busy packing up half her studio to install at the Art Gallery of New South Wales; a clear indication that her show Spellbound is going to be far from a traditional exhibition. Designed to be an exploration into the nature of creativity, it encourages the viewer to delve into the artistic process.
Divided into two rooms, one is a salon-style hang of multiple works created in recent years, comprising paintings, drawings, ceramics and objects, works on paper, sketchbooks and artist books. Some works are hung very high, some quite low, some are touching, one is upside down. The display is the antithesis of the symmetrical displays characterised in commercial galleries. Envisioning the room as one cohesive work, this ambitious concept is known in German as gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”).
L–R: Wendy Sharpe in her studio, 2024. Photograph: John Fotiadis / Wendy Sharpe painting a mural within the ‘Wendy Sharpe: Spellbound’ exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, May 2024. Photograph: © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Felicity Jenkins. Courtesy Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Sharpe comments, “When you walk through there, you will, I guess wander around this whole very large exhibition room and see all these different components, which go to make up a whole world.”
The second room steers us even further from convention, with a small recreation of Sharpe’s Sydney studio, incorporating her own furniture, rugs and couch, and the painter herself working in this simulated “studio” every Friday morning. Sharpe describes this room as a kind of backstage, or behind the scenes – a room that viewers never usually see, intending her audience to bear witness to the process of making, as well as viewing completed artworks.
Working between studios in Sydney and Paris, this renowned Australian painter has more than seventy solo exhibitions under her belt. Sharpe’s familiar sensuous and exuberant figurative paintings fill the entire gallery space.
A key painting features herself, with hands clasped over eyes, fending off a cartoonish green dragon that clutches at her ankles. This, according to the artist, captures the essence of the creative process, as she quotes the Italian painter Sandro Chia: “Art is a monster. You don’t know where it comes from or indeed where it is exactly. But as an artist, you have the responsibility of entering the labyrinth and bringing back its head.”
Wendy Sharpe, Art is a monster, 2024, oil and acrylic on linen, 190 × 130cm. © the artist. Photograph: John Fotiadis
In her self-reflexive compositions, many of the works centre on a female artist in the act of creation, surrounded by amorphous floating shapes and figures from her imaginary world. A prominent piece in the studio section is a larger than lifesize paper mâché sculpture, a quasi-doll-like rendition of the artist. The viewer can then see painted depictions of this artist-doll in the studio section of the exhibition; thereby acting as both physical object and visual subject of an artwork.
The alchemical process of creation is best demonstrated in Sharpe’s wall mural, carried out in her “studio” space. More than six metres in size, the artist will paint her mural for the duration of the show; the completion of which concludes the exhibition and later is to be painted over.
Wendy Sharpe, Four last songs, 2022, oil on wood, 40 × 58cm. © the artist. Photograph: John Fotiadis
There is a flourish of theatricality that seems to pervade the entire exhibition. In her previous collaborative associations with theatrical companies Sharpe mentions the marked contrast between “onstage” and “backstage,” between the prosaic everyday world and the esoteric world of artistic creation. Spellbound therefore promises to be a unique visual phenomenon, in which Sharpe invites us all to share in this artistic journey – and in the process, experience a little of that ineffable mystery of the imagination.
Victoria Hynes is a visual arts writer and editor based in Sydney.
Wendy Sharpe: Spellbound
Art Gallery of New South Wales
25 May to 11 August 2024
Sydney
