“. . . finding beauty in banality.”
I visited the studio of artist Yanni Pounartzis on a cold, foggy Canberra morning. The cavernous, light-filled space is an informal survey of his practice. There are painted canvases neatly stacked against the wall, hard lines and colour blocked. The constraint of geometric abstraction contrasts with the chaotic spray of balls of colourful paint splattered on the studio wall, the remnants of Yanni’s Tennis paintings series, 2023. These visual vignettes perfectly capture Yanni’s multidisciplinary practice, which ricochets between media, abstraction and figuration, but is always informed by composition, colour and the architectural influences of the urban landscape.

Yanni Pounartzis in the studio. Photograph: Sophia Halloway
Yanni is best known for Big Swoop, 2022, a sculpture of the much-loved but maligned magpie. Big Swoop is colossal in scale, asserting its presence in Canberra’s Garema Place in the same way its real-life counterparts do when swooping a passerby or stealing a hot chip. Big Swoop leans down to peck at its own giant chip, a point of humour which softens its intimidating scale. Big Swoop was born of a placemaking grant, which supports short-term arts events and activations, but the sculpture was so readily embraced as a new icon of Canberra’s visual identity that it became a permanent fixture. Yanni shares with me some fan mail which had been addressed to Big Swoop, who now features on postage stamps and a one dollar coin.
The impetus for a sculptural work, Yanni’s first, was to resist having his practice categorised by media. Prior to Big Swoop, Yanni was established as a painter. Vineyards, 2021, is a geometric intervention in a back street in Orange, New South Wales; it’s green monochrome spilling out from the wall onto the street. Yanni’s murals follow the form of the surface, taking sewerage pipes, power cords, air-conditioning units and street kerbs as opportunities, not obstacles. The Snowgum series, 2020, represents a eucalypt forest in colourful, minimalist lines, the palette morphing into black and grey tones after the bushfires. The Lost Plans, 2016, abstract Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin’s original architectural plans for Canberra.

Yanni Pounartzis in the studio painting Snowgums, 2020
The artist’s latest body of work, the Canberra Street series, is the figurative evolution of The Lost Plans. Yanni works from photographs taken around Canberra of pedestrian crossings, car parks and shopping centres. In one work in progress, a solitary figure stands by the road waiting to cross, sporting a lanyard. It is almost uncanny how quickly a public servant – as ubiquitous to the Canberra landscape as Yanni’s other subject, the magpie – might recognise themselves in this image. These are observations of the quotidian moments of an ordinary life, finding beauty in banality. Yanni’s style is unmistakably informed by Jeffrey Smart, the twentieth century painter who captured urban modernity. Like Smart, Yanni is reluctant to ascribe a narrative to his composition. Rather, the solitary figure provides a recognisable point of interest, onto which the viewer attaches their own understanding. Each of Yanni’s works, however diverse the breadth of media and surface, is born from place, whether they are works that intervene in the landscape itself or capture the landscape in the image.
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Sophia Halloway is a writer and critic based in Canberra.