Peter Boggs, Venetian interior at night. Oil on canvas, 41 x 33cm. Courtesy: the artist and Beaver Galleries, Canberra.

Beaver Galleries presents work by renowned Australian painter Peter Boggs, whose exhibition comprises of both landscape and interior scenes inspired by his travels throughout Australia and Europe.

The gallery will open its doors to the public at 10 am on Thursday 28 May. This exhibition can also be viewed on the gallery website. View exhibition here.

Sasha Grishin writes on this exhibition in the current issue of Art Collector:

From his studio in the Blue Mountains, Peter Boggs has for many years created subtle tonal paintings and drawings that have led to sell-out exhibitions in Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane. Although he works in a figurative mode, he is not essentially a narrative painter – or at least his narratives lack a recognisable story line. Nothing much happens in his paintings and they are devoid of human presence.

He creates situations where beautifully observed passages of light and the play of shadows hint at enigmatic presences and at something that can be experienced rather than observed. His art finds affinity with the metaphysical painters, the surrealists and the masters of the uncanny, yet does not neatly fit into any one category.

Born in New Zealand, Boggs studied at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, and taught painting and drawing in England and Spain before moving to Australia in 1987.  He has since held 50 solo exhibitions across the region.

In his more recent paintings, as shown in this exhibition at Beaver Galleries in Canberra, Boggs is increasingly moving away from the immediate and the specific and embracing the universal. The rooms and gardens that we encounter in these paintings he knows well and has observed on many occasions. But in this work, there is little specificity. They are memory paintings of feelings that he’s experienced when encountering the spaces, and it is these feelings that he shares with the beholder.

Speaking of this body of work, Boggs notes, “Increasingly, I think my paintings are becoming more paintings of ideas and visible thoughts, rather than of subjects. The subject is more a prop – a sort of disguise in that they are fairly nondescript and quite ordinary perhaps, set up like a stage that invites contemplation and consideration about ‘what’s this about?’” These are some of the finest tonal paintings being made in Australia today.

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