Wilma Tabacco works in the tradition of Italo-Byzantine painters, who used gold leaf extract when creating manuscript scrolls. Tabacco’s richly layered paintings evoke the quality of the medium, both concealing and revealing the complexity of the gold leaf.
Often geometrically constructed, her images feature sharply angled forms, fiercely marked by metallic divisions. An intellectual process as much as a practical one, Tabacco’s work imbues the effort of the hand by which it is created, whilst simultaneously interacting with a more sustained tradition of materiality.
Langford 120
1 to 30 June, 2013
Melbourne
Gilt Edge, 2013, metal leaf and oil on linen, 183 x 153cm
Courtesy the artist and Langford 120