Louise Forthun

The Artist

Louise Forthun: Urbania, Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney, 2010;
Louise Forthun: Paintings & Sculpture, Charles Nodrum Gallery, 5 - 26 March, 2022, no. 10

Dr Rosemary Hawker, Louise Forthun: Urbania, exhibition introduction, Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney, 2010:
"...Since the mid 1980s, Forthun has used this process [of stencilling and painting] in addressing the city as subject. It is an effective means for making a bridge between painting and photography and one that opens up a number of complex and productive comparisons across mediums that make these works all the more affecting in their immediacy. These paintings register the trace - the founding principle of photography. They begin in photographs of great cities or mundane urban life. These images are cut into stencils and then marked out onto a canvas already prepared with paint…. Our expectations of photography and painting are also inverted when Forthun’s paintings slow the time of the photograph–supposedly the instant–through the considerable labour of making the stencil image. Isolating positive and negative she cuts huge sheets by hand over long hours, making them more and more fragile and further away from the robustness and cohesion of seamless photography with each cut... Even as Forthun insists on real places as her subject, the refusal of these images to coalesce into a single coherent surface or subject opens the space between painting and photography. We know Melbourne or Brisbane, Rome
and Tokyo quite differently when they are charged by the immediacy of both painting and photography, their drawing together and springing apart."