5 February – 1 March 2025
Despard Gallery is proud to host Floating World, solo exhibition featuring new paintings by established Tasmanian artist Ian Parry.
With a professional career spanning nearly forty years, Parry is widely respected for his original contribution to the genre of contemporary landscape painting. This includes a personal fascination with the wavering threshold where the sea, land and sky converge, which has informed much of Parry’s work.
With his first solo with Despard Gallery, Parry presents a bold new body of paintings that references the traditional Japanese woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e, or ‘Pictures of the Floating World’. Parry has adopted a similar mode of pictorial refinement, translating the landscape within elongated and asymmetry compositions, as well as large planes of colour which are interspersed with bold abstracted curvatures and lines to represent energies passing between the land and sea. By distilling each work down to its core elements, Parry has mirrored the clarity and directness captured by the Japanese printmakers. Parry’s use of paint has also allowed him to capture the tangible nature of the landscape, combining soft edges with rich colour and texture to describe its geological forces, including the shifting interactions of water and light. Through multiple layers of glazes and scumbles, each painting appears to exude its own light, which continues to rise and fall in intensity.
Focused by a commitment to explore the rituals, processes and techniques that underpin the aesthetics of the painted image, Parry’s career reflects the hallmarks of a lasting and genuine creative investigation. As such, his work maps a personal creative journey that has been steered by asking questions, diverse approaches to painting and breaking new ground. At the heart of this pursuit is a profound admiration for the power and stirring influence that can be generated through paint, including finding satisfaction in both the act of painting and the painting as object.
Click here to register your interest for Ian Parry.
