Griffith Regional Art Gallery Presents Errol Fielder’s Retrospective Exhibition

Griffith Regional Art Gallery’s first major exhibition for 2024, a comprehensive retrospective of a Wagga-based artist whose life in art consists of surreal interrogations of the myths and realities of the Australian landscape, opened on Friday, January 19.

Errol Fielder’s paintings are surreal “theatre sets” of both real and imagined events. This body of work from 2014 to 2023 is particularly pertinent to Griffith and inland Australia in its themes addressing flood, climate change and mythologies of regional landscape.

Errol Fielder: Retrospective will remain open until March 3.

A floor talk with Dr Neill Overton will be offered on Saturday 10 February 2024 at 11am providing an overview of Errol Fielder’s approaches to rural surrealism, and discussing works within the exhibition.

Exhibition Curator, art historian Dr Neill Overton, said as an artist, Fielder does not occupy a convenient ‘ism’, although I tend to refer to it as ‘rural surrealism’, in its inventive narrative scenarios, and drawn images melding personal biography with larger psychologies of the regional landscape of The Rock Hill and the Murrumbidgee River.

“When we view Errol Fielder’s paintings we enter into his visual discussion with these assembled phantoms of history, literature and art, and with McCubbin and Drysdale; in his continuing assertion of and a questioning of the jagged rock scape of The Rock Hill - scantly occupied, removed from time, dissolving in heat haze, imposing itself both on that thin barbed wire line of the horizon and on our modernity,” Dr Overton said.

According to Dr Overton, “Fielder’s paintings emerge like sleepwalkers; there is nothing literal about them, they are poetic excursions into place.”

Griffith Gallery Coordinator, Ray Wholohan, said Fielder has been an important part of the Riverina art scene for over 40 years.

“He has a considered focus on regionality and landscape tropes of inland Australia, and its issues of the river in flood, land use, and how we are inevitably informed by where we live. I have always admired his narrative skill as a painter,” Mr Wholohan said.

To quote the artist Errol Fielder, who spoke of Australian painting as often being “Drama set in front of an inert background”. Fielder went on to say “The landscape appears to be inert - does it do anything, or do we change in relation to it?

“We live and play out our lives in the shadow of monoliths and boundaries - between The Rock Hill and the river.”

Gallery hours are Wednesday to Friday from 10am to 5pm and weekends from 11am to 2pm.

Direct enquiries to Griffith Regional Art Gallery on 6962 8338 or gallery@griffith.nsw.gov.au.

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