Geoff Harvey

Shadowlands

8 March – 5 April
opening 5-7pm Friday 7 March

Geoff Harvey

Joy
110×82cm acrylic on board
$7,700

With these latest works, Harvey revisits a recurring theme that has defined his career for over fifty years, expressing his admiration for the everyday yet noble buildings that surround us.

Constantly photographing and exploring the city, he reinterprets it through an emotional lens—not just offering a descriptive portrait of Sydney, but also reflecting core artistic concerns related to perception and appearance.

Visual memory comes into play as the mundane takes on a sense of romance. Impressions of the familiar are transformed into something more poetic. As he says, “It’s in my blood.” For him the texture of enduring buildings carry deep resonance. While these structures express their abandonment and decay, they evoke memories of Paddington before gentrification and these paintings celebrate ‘home’ and experiences of growing up here.

The cool geometries and large forms of inner-city and outlying industrial sites take on an intangible presence. Deliberate inaccuracies in perspective are part of his unique visual language. By manipulating composition he yields a dynamic, ordered sense, where skewed angles and the rhythmic elements selected evoke a profound sense of time and place.

This body of work echoes the vision of early Australian modernists such as Russell Drysdale and Sali Herman, with an influence from the American Charles Sheeler’s sense of geometry.