Terri Brooks: The Profundity of Nothing

Terri Brooks

Principia
Works 2016-20
October 4 to November 10
The Exhibitions of Sineresi
Sineresi Arte, Italy

Critical text A.J.Byrnes
Edited by Anna R.J.Rivelli
Photograph Alan Cotton

http://www.sineresiarte.it/terri-brooks-la-profondita-del-nulla-principia/

Many thanks to Giovanni Cafarelli and editor Anna R.J.Rivelli

www.sineresiarte.it

Minor Variations, 2003, oil and enamel on canvas, 153 x 183 cm. Private collection Australia

'The deployment of reductionist aesthetics and the modernist grid – albeit an often disassembled one in Brooks’ work, provide key points of departure for both artist and viewer. The physical properties of the grid offer stasis and a lack of hierarchy, which informs the transformative promise of this work. Attention is given to the simplicity of the works’ structure, to their ordered qualities and muteness, which directs the viewer back upon the quality of his or her own perceptions. The viewer moves from a state of chaos to inner equilibrium and focused attention and as a consequence, one is urged to reflect on the present at a profoundly physical level. Every aspect of such an experience, its reflectiveness, the manner in which it illuminates the nature of our feeling and knowing through an object, a spatial situation, suggests an analogy to the posture and method of phenomenological inquiry.' Excerpt A.J.Byrnes, The Profundity of Nothing.

Arc, 2010, oil and enamel on paper, 41 x 31 cm x 2. Private collection Germany

With Black Dot, 2011, oil, enamel, pigment and PVA on canvas, 43 x 33 cm. Private collection Australia

White Process, 2019, oil on canvas, 137 x 183 cm.

Brown Black Lines, 2020, oil on canvas, 41 x 31 cm

'Since 1989 Terri Brooks has held over twenty solo shows in Australia, New Zealand, Italy and the Netherlands as well as participating in numerous exhibitions including art fairs in the US, UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, Poland and Hong Kong. Her work is in the Neubrandenburg Museum Collection, Germany, The Macquarie Group Collection, Westpac Bank, many other corporate and private collections around the world. For over ten years her work has been incorporated into projects by leading interior designers and architects for exclusive and award winning interiors. In 2018 she completed two major commissions for the Westin, Perth and Sheraton Four Points, Sydney. The mark making of my abstract paintings comprises the use of opposite elements including black, white, dot and line and horizontals and verticals. Natural processes, architecture and ‘found marks’ observed walking in the city and landscape inform the work.' Sineresi Arte

Update

'Terri Brooks la profondità del nulla, Dal caos dell'equilibrio interiore', Sineresi Arte, Cronache del Mezzogiorno, It. July 19, 2021. p5.

Line and Weight

'In her seminal 1979 essay ‘Grids’, Rosalind Krauss writes that ‘logically speaking, the grid extends, in all directions, to infinity’. The grid within an artwork is therefore ‘a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric’. The paintings in Line and Weight convey both this sense of the infinite spatial grid and, through the building up of layers, the infinite and repetitious nature of time. Washed over, painted across, re-written, line by line.' Anna Dunhill 2019.

Over the Edge

`The neglected zones of urban existence – alley ways, awnings, walls, gutters and shutters – occupy a unique place within the history of painting. Perhaps inadvertently, artists have been depicting such insignificant elements as cracked window ledges or the dark recesses of architraves since the time of Giotto. Ubiquitous, utilitarian and often worn down, the marginal nature of such sites and the phenomenological questions they raise has dominated Terri Brooks practice for the past two decades and continues to inform her work today.' Phe Luxford, 2011.