Through the Surface: Jonas Balsaitis, Paintings
1968-1992

About the exhibition
Another in Monash University Gallery’s series of mid-career survey exhibitions, Through the Surface presented over two decades of work by artist Jonas Balsaitis. Spanning the period from the 1960s to ’90s, the exhibition displayed the artist’s progression from hard-edge abstraction to drawings and paintings that—in the words of critic Robert Rooney—took ‘complexly layered grid patterns . . . near to a random disintegration’ . Balsaitis was associated with the avant-garde Pinacotheca Gallery in Melbourne, exhibiting there regularly from 1970 onwards, and, for a period, he focused on experimenting with film animation. In an oeuvre full of the oppositional tensions between surface and depth, Balsaitis’s 1990 series of Imprint Image paintings exploded this dynamic.

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^{Image: Jonas Balsaitis, XXXC Time Painting 1981, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 122 x 173 cm. Collection of Bruce Pollard. Photo: Richard Crompton and Graham Baring}