Fame came late to the New Zealand born artist Rosalie Gascoigne (1917–1999). Emigrating to Australia in 1943 as a war bride she settled in Canberra as the wife of astronomer Ben Gascoigne raising three children and practising nothing more artistic than flower arranging. She progressed to more rigorous Japanese flower art of Sogetsu Ikebana and achieved such individuality to be praised by the creator of the discipline, Sofu Teshigahara. With more time to spend on art she began to experiment with the now familiar assemblages of scrap iron, packing crates and other found objects.
The retrospective exhibition covers her short but very productive professional career beginning with her whimsical assembalages similar to, if not inspired by, her near contemporary, the American Joseph Cornell. As her profile increased her work lost some of that fantasy as she worked toward a more abstract use of found material. The most important of these experiments were the work created from wooden packing crates, cut up and re-assembled with her natural eye for the beauty and potentional of such material. She progressed into an ability to place pieces of warped sheet metal alongside each other with a feeling for form, space and placement that, knowing her skill with the rigourously simple Ikebana, is hardly surprising.
It is a pity that she never returned to the whimsy and nostalgia of her earlier assemblages with their more powerfull manipulation of such banal material as the Arnott's parrot or scraps of art-deco linolium but, constantly refining towards kind of "less in more" visual Zen, she achieved a great deal in a short time.
The retrospective exhibition covers her short but very productive professional career beginning with her whimsical assembalages similar to, if not inspired by, her near contemporary, the American Joseph Cornell. As her profile increased her work lost some of that fantasy as she worked toward a more abstract use of found material. The most important of these experiments were the work created from wooden packing crates, cut up and re-assembled with her natural eye for the beauty and potentional of such material. She progressed into an ability to place pieces of warped sheet metal alongside each other with a feeling for form, space and placement that, knowing her skill with the rigourously simple Ikebana, is hardly surprising.
It is a pity that she never returned to the whimsy and nostalgia of her earlier assemblages with their more powerfull manipulation of such banal material as the Arnott's parrot or scraps of art-deco linolium but, constantly refining towards kind of "less in more" visual Zen, she achieved a great deal in a short time.
Federation Square, Melbourne
19 December 2008 - 15 March 2009
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