26 July – 19 August 2023
Despard Gallery is proud to announce a significant exhibition, surveying the paintings of one of Tasmania’s most illustrious contemporary landscape painters the late Geoff Dyer (1947 – 2020).
The artistic legacy of Dyer remains preserved through his major contributions to the Australian arts scene, sharing the raw beauty of the Tasmanian landscape through immersive paintings, rich in texture and colour. With a professional career spanning fifty years, Dyer was a leading voice for Tasmanian contemporary painting. Through his many accolades and achievements, Dyer restored national revere around Tasmanian artistic contributions, reorientating attention towards our wealth of creative talent and unique natural assets.
Often contrasting thick impasto and subtly blended tones, Dyer mastered the complex, formidable and sometimes harsh conditions that underpins the Tasmanian landscape experience. Most distinctive to Dyer’s work, was his authentic and often abstract approach, scraping paint across the canvas with his palette knife and pushing limits of how the landscape could be described. From these visceral interpretations Dyer was able to capture the essence of place, evoking a response from the viewer that was earnest and emotive, but never sentimental.
This exhibition marks the second major release from the Dyer estate, carefully curated to reflect the depth of his creative repertoire, combining quintessential works that evidence his use of tone, light and texture. This includes fifteen major oils, a suite of smaller studies, as well as a small selection of works on paper.
Click here to register your interest for Geoff Dyer.
Geoff Dyer in his Studio, Hobart 2016.