Press Release: Wayne Eager - New Work 2010

Wayne Eager (b. 1957)
Exhibition opening Saturday 6 March 2010, 3-5 pm

Wayne Eager’s paintings are a careful consideration of the nuanced and changing Australian desert landscape. Whether a painting’s title denotes a specific place, such as Backyard View; one of the five senses, like Fragrance; or a time of day, being Early Morning, Eager’s work is characterised by an earthy awareness of his relationship to the environment. Collapsed picture planes pulse with the layered depth of interlocking primordial shapes evocative of stones, fossils, and foliage. A frenetic entangling of brush strokes might illustrate the dimensions of a man-made structure while an even spacing of varied squares might convey hectares of richly hued land or the view of a lone hill from the window of his studio. Irrespective of these differing subjects, Eager infuses all of his paintings with gravity and an unabashed appreciation for vibrant color and form that is reminiscent of twentieth century Western art movements such as Abstract Expressionism.

Beginning his art career as a founding member of the Melbourne-based art collective Roar Studios in the 1980's, Eager has continued to involve himself with the support of grassroots Australian art communities. The aim of Roar was to create a dynamic and collaborative environment in which young artists could paint freely without concern for the stifling constraints of the commercial art world. The ideologies adopted by Roar continue to motivate Eager’s artistic practice and are reflected in his preference for living in the desert bush far from Australia’s urban art centres. In the early 1990's he relocated with his wife, Marina, Strocchi ,to Haasts Bluff, Northern Territory to aid in the establishment of the Ikuntji Women's Centre. What was intended to be a few months stay became a five-year stint for Eager as well as the mark of a new dimension in his artwork. Eager subsequently became Field Officer for the Papunya Tula Artists, commuting regularly between Kintore and Kiwirrkkurra. Eager is currently affiliated with Ananguku Arts in APY Lands, South Australia, assisting several regional art centres. Additionally, he and Marina have curated an exhibition including painters from APY Lands and the Western Desert that will be on view at the Adelaide Museum in March of this year.

Eager has maintained a solitary approach to painting yet continues his involvement with neighbouring indigenous art centres. While he acknowledges a continued interest in landscape painting, he points out an evolutionary branch from his earlier works such as Untitled Yellow, 1992, in which there is a clear bifurcation between land and sky. Eager’s recent work is not overtly marked by this separation of the elements, but is rather more a testament to the integration of them in order to represent the concept of wholeness—an inextricable, multi-layered portrait of the environment.