Gwyn Hanssen Pigott

The four still lifes by Gwyn Hanssen Pigott in the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award are representative of the silent, intuitive and exploratory assemblies for which she has been acclaimed since first showing a still life in a Bicentennial craft exhibition in Melbourne in 1988. Yet there is a restraint in these recent compositions, Hanssen Pigott restricting the still lifes to assemblies of bowls, beakers and cups, excluding the sensuously lipped jugs and attenuated bottles that comprise so many groups, and that rightfully evoke the quiet order of Giorgio Morandi’s painted still lifes. Hanssen Pigott saw a major retrospective of Morandi’s works in Paris in 1972 and, as she has stated, she loved ‘his searching, obsessive describing of the common objects that were his subject and measure. A bottle: a dense, palpable block of creamy white. A bottle: a wavering half line holding space’ (G. Hanssen Pigott, artist’s statement, The Biennale of Sydney 2000 (exh. cat.), pp. 60–1).

Jason Smith
Curator, Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria
Excerpt from exhibition catalogue

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott
Australia 1935
Fade, 2003
translucent porcelain
13 pieces, 16.0 x 117.0 x 18.0 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane