-
Details
- Date
- 1986
- Media category
- Painting
- Materials used
- oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 217.0 x 156.0 x 6.5 cm frame
- Signature & date
Signed and dated centre left verso, green pastel "Susan Norrie/ 1986".
- Credit
- Gift of the Moët & Chandon Australian Art Foundation Collection 2000
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 161.2000
- Copyright
- © Susan Norrie
- Artist information
-
Susan Norrie
Works in the collection
- Share
-
About
During the 1980s Susan Norrie rapidly became one of Australia’s most prominent painters. Her considerable technical ability was matched with an intellectual inquiry into the nature of painting after modernism. Along with many other postmodern painters, Norrie had an ambivalent relationship to painting: as was remarked upon at the time, her well-painted images, increasingly slick surfaces and elegant compositions deliberately set out to both seduce and repel.
Early works such as ‘Fruitful corsage, bridal bouquet, lingering veils’ 1983, exhibited in Australian Perspecta 1983, have a deliberately feminine sensibility and subject matter as they both draw on, and mark a departure from, the ‘central core’ imagery of 1970s feminist artists. In this work the thickly painted accoutrements of a dressing table are sexually charged. Resembling fetish objects and genitalia, they also seem to suggest a decaying moment in time, reminiscent of Miss Haversham’s wedding breakfast. By the later 1980s Norrie drew more directly on both historical paintings and on pop culture. ‘Fête’ 1986, which won Norrie the inaugural Moët & Chandon art award in 1987, has a surfeit of imagery but most prominent is the Mickey Mouse figure in a Pierrot’s costume, recalling Watteau’s famous ‘Pierrot’ of 1718/19. The commercialisation of culture, entertainment and leisure seemed the subject of this layered and ambiguous painting.
‘Untitled’ from the series ‘Peripherique’ came out of the Moët & Chandon residency Norrie undertook in France. The series title is the name of the ring road that encircles Paris, a confusing road marked by innumerable signs to potential destinations. In Norrie’s painting the word ‘debit’ is repeated again and again in differing scales, emerging from and submerging into the deeply varnished, darkly toned layers of paint. The elaborate copper-plate writing recalls the text of historic documents but is actually derived from Hallmark greeting cards. The word debit suggests loss, owing, debt; of paying your dues. It perhaps refers to the debt of artists to the past, but also of course to financial credit (another painting in this series had the word ‘credit’ repeated across it) and debt that structure contemporary living and have become even more pervasive since this painting was finished. Repeated with this much attention and scale, the word ‘debit’ seems to imply a central lack in this societal structure that is far greater than just economic.
A sense of the gothic and an affinity with death pervade many of Norrie’s paintings. In ‘Model seven’ from the series ‘Room for error’ Norrie has repeated a recipe for embalming fluid found in a house-hold book from 1926, ‘Henley’s formulas for home and workshop’. Each panel is coloured to refer to bodily fluids and the sticky surface (like ‘Untitled’ from the series ‘Peripherique’) implies decay and corruption. In the early 1990s Norrie broadened her conceptual enterprise to include sculpture, installation, moving images and sound. Her subsequent installations using both found film and original video are among her most impressive works to date.
© Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006
-
Exhibition history
Shown in 2 exhibitions
Moët & Chandon Touring Exhibition 1987, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 28 Jan 1987–08 Mar 1987
Moët & Chandon Touring Exhibition 1987, The George Adams Gallery, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, 02 Apr 1987–26 Apr 1987
Moët & Chandon Touring Exhibition 1987, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 18 Jun 1987–19 Jul 1987
Moët & Chandon Touring Exhibition 1987, Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra, 15 Aug 1987–06 Sep 1987
Moët & Chandon Touring Exhibition 1987, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 24 Sep 1987–26 Oct 1987
Moët & Chandon Touring Exhibition 1987, Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane, 07 Nov 1987–06 Dec 1987
Susan Norrie Paintings 1986-87, L'Hotel Pozzo di Borgo, Paris, Dec 1987–Dec 1987
Susan Norrie Paintings 1986-87, Galerie Passages, Troyes, Troyes, 09 Jan 1988–28 Feb 1988
Susan Norrie Paintings 1986-87, Foire d'art Contemporain, Stockholm, Stockholm, 16 Mar 1988–21 Mar 1988
-
Bibliography
Referenced in 4 publications
-
Moët & Chandon, Susan Norrie Paintings 1986-87, Epernay, 1987, (colour illus.). no pagination or catalogue numbers
-
Moët & Chandon Australian Art Foundation, Moët & Chandon Touring Exhibition 1987, 'Susan Norrie: Moët & Chandon Fellow', Melbourne, 1987, cover (colour illus.), (colour illus.). no pagination or catalogue numbers
-
Virginia Spate, Susan Norrie Peripherique, 'Peripherique', pg.7-21, Wollongong, 1989, 18, 19, 24 (illus.).
-
Wayne Tunnicliffe, Contemporary: Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection, 'Cultural memory, critical distance', pg.154-203, Sydney, 2006, 182.
-