Fiona Harman Position I 2020. Oil on board, 32 x 42 cm. State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased through the Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation: TomorrowFund, 2021.
Fiona Harman
State Collection
Gallery 01
Until 30 January
Five small-scale paintings hone in on lonely scenes of water and suburban structures.
Over the past ten years, Fiona Harman has been honing an intimate approach to painting that pulls from and extends the legacy of a critically oriented tradition of Perth representational painting. While her works are small in scale they possess a cinematic quality.
AGWA presents seven of Harman’s works, drawn from the State Art Collection. Simultaneously low-key and dramatic, these are dream-woozy waterscapes and throbbingly lonely scenes that appeal like newly-found half surreal outtakes from the movies that have shaped our imaginative realities.
Harman channels influences as diverse as Alex Katz and Luc Tuymans while speaking of the tender precarity of our attachments and world views. With an enveloping reach, Harman’s work offers a richly sumptuous and deeply felt series of reflections on place as an ambiguous and shifting compilation of mood, memory and possibility. In this spirit, her paintings often exist as fugue states, full of emotion and careful, observational nuance.
“I’m interested in the menacing undertones of suburbia, without naming anything too specific.” — Fiona Harman, The View From Here 2021
