Yavuz Gallery is pleased to announce Dream Brother, Guido Maestri’s debut presentation in New Zealand as part of Aotearoa Art Fair.
With a practice that spans over two decades, the Archibald-winning Australian artist is renowned for his visceral, expressive, and inventive works that explore painted materiality, gesture and render subjects from the natural world. Maestri’s work prompts us to consider our experience of, and relationship to, the landscape.
Maestri’s Dream Brother takes the form of paintings accompanied by a painted bronze sculpture of the artist’s son. Referencing nature’s cycles, ancient ecosystems and drawing on both present-day environments and those from Maestri’s childhood, this body of work reexamines Maestri’s experience of place. Paintings dance between authenticity and narrative, challenging us to determine what is factual and what is fictional.
As Maestri writes, “These paintings are no longer of anywhere. They are images and ideas sewn together to investigate my experience of the natural world in 2022 and so they are plasticised and affected, pixelated and unnatural; drawn from sources other than the real. A human element is materialising and plays a part in these new worlds; these deep fake landscapes.
These works happen through the filter of memory, family, conditioning, history, etc. I don’t want to understand these paintings, nor do I want them to be specific to, or of, any specific place. They are dreamt or felt rather than known. How do we address the notion of place without considering human intervention?”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in Mudgee, a country town of New South Wales, Guido Maestri (b. 1974, Australia) is known for his highly textural, expressive works that explore the painted materiality, gesture and observation. Although he is noted for his en plein air paintings, recent works are solely studio based and draw on ancient ecosystems, nature’s cycles, imaginary realms, sites from his past, and his immediate physical and emotional environments to question notions of reality and explore humanity’s impact on the natural world.
A graduate of The National Art School, Maestri won the prestigious Archibald Prize in 2009 and is an eight-time finalist in the Wynne Prize (2012-2017, 2020-2021) for Landscape at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Australia). His works are collected widely, including institutions such as National Portrait Gallery (Australia), Art Gallery of New South Wales (Australia), Art Gallery of South Australia, Macquarie Bank (Australia), Parliament House (Australia) and Fubon Art Foundation (Taiwan).