Aida Tomescu, Violet with Candles, 2020. Oil on Belgian linen, triptych, 200 x 460cm. Courtesy: the artist and Fox Jensen McCrory, Auckland.

The Heart was a Place Made Fast includes heroic works whose new larger fields has altered the opportunity for her paintwork to enact form and intonation in a newly liberated way. All the works are dramatic and forceful – colour is corporeal, gesture is authoritative, the ambition and scale of her endeavours is clearly evident.

The abovenamed triptych, the sister painting to Sewn onto Stones in the Sky, (Collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales), has a composition that has both delicacy and power. Layers of colour and gesture collude in an unexpected collage that sustains the intensity of the rich magenta crescendos. Seldom do we see painting that is sufficiently brave as to disentangle itself from the comfort of what we know and determinedly pose what we fear.

Exhibition opens: 5:30-7.30pm Thursday 30 January 2020

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