Philip Hunter: The Territory - 1st Hemisphere

About the exhibition
This solo exhibition brought together  paintings, etchings and drawings by Philip Hunter that comprise the artist’s major long-term project begun in 1989. Consisting of three interrelated compositional cycles—The Continent, The Visit and The Garden—the works were developed simultaneously across all media, forming a continuum of self-analysis. Conceived as a work-in-progress presentation, the exhibition showcased one of Australia’s significant landscape painters and his sustained engagement with the imagined poetics of the landscape.

The exhibition also reflected the profound impact of Hunter’s first trip to Europe in 1986, which informed his ongoing investigations into the visual language of ‘Old Master’ painters such as Peter Paul Rubens, Jean-Antoine Watteau and Eugène Delacroix.

The works presented in The Territory—1st Hemisphere are bold, fictionalised statements; the result of automatism rather than direct observation. As curator Jenepher Duncan notes in the exhibition catalogue: ‘[Hunter’s] landscapes are places of no fixed address, indeed, mostly of no fixed vanishing point either. They read like quasi-dreamscapes, unfolding freely across the picture plane.’

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