Sweet and sour: Anne Wallace’s ‘Strange Ways’ at QUT Art Museum

Anne Wallace: Strange Ways, exhibition installation view, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, 2019; image courtesy QUT Art Museum, Brisbane; photo: Carl Warner

‘Strange Ways’ surveys nearly three decades of Anne Wallace’s compelling, unnerving paintings. The exhibition is the first substantial presentation of the artist’s work in her hometown since ‘Private Rooms’ at the former Brisbane City Gallery (now Museum of Brisbane) in 2000.

Wallace’s practice is remarkable for its singular commitment to figurative painting. Although informed by the artist’s ongoing engagement with cinema, literature and music, her paintings actively resist a conventional narrative reading. Using her considerable technical skill, Wallace draws viewers into seductive images of alienation, ennui and trauma, withholding just enough information for us to fully apprehend the image.

The exhibition brings together around 80 paintings and works on paper, including rarely seen early works, most notably Sour the Boiling Honey (1991), a formative example of Wallace’s oeuvre. Painted when she was 21 years old, a staged tableau unfolds across three large panels depicting adolescent boys and girls at play by the sea, with the androgynous central figure representing the artist herself.

It is fascinating to view Wallace’s early works, concerned with adolescent experience, alongside subsequent ones, which are often focused on a solitary (adult) female figure, her back turned or avoiding the viewer’s gaze, set inside airless interiors characterised by their unusual treatment of perspective and lack of extraneous detail. Wallace reflected on this ambiguity in an essay published in Recent Paintings (Arts Queensland, 1999): ‘What I like about representational painting is the fact that an image can be trapped forever and, if there is a sufficient lack of information, it will never go back or forward or yield up its story.’

Curator Vanessa Van Ooyen has sensibly avoided a chronological or didactic display, opting instead for thoughtful juxtapositions that emphasise the consistent trajectory of Wallace’s practice, eliciting gradual developments in style and content. Pleasure Garden (2019), a recent counterpoint to Sour the Boiling Honey, depicts another group of androgynous youths, languidly sunbathing in a fertile garden. In this and other recent works, Wallace zooms out from the tightly cropped scenes of her earlier paintings, the previously dominant figures now subordinate to the overall composition.

Some viewers may find the lack of artwork and expanded labels frustrating, given the significance of Wallace’s titles and their intertextual references which provide a valuable entry point for her paintings. This criticism is offset, however, by the substantial exhibition publication featuring newly commissioned texts on Wallace’s work by Gillian Brown, Francis Plagne and Van Ooyen.

QUT Art Museum is to be commended for its commitment to presenting focused survey exhibitions of mid-career Australian artists. On view until 23 February, ‘Strange Ways’ represents a rare opportunity for Brisbane audiences to see a comprehensive survey of Wallace’s work. The exhibition will then tour to the Art Gallery of Ballarat and Adelaide’s Samstag Museum of Art during 2020.

Hamish Sawyer, Brisbane