Peter Sharp, After the fires, Forster, 2019. Acrylic on board, 23 x 25cm. Courtesy: the artist and Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne.

Over a period of thirty years, Peter Sharp has sought visual expression for a sense of reality shaped by natural phenomena. He has created extensive bodies of work about the veiled undertow of the ocean, the woven beauty of spiders’ webs and the play of light through trees. The hundred-year history of modernist, abstract painting has provided him with inspiration and an ongoing impetus to experimentation.

If we wish to, we can enjoy Sharp’s plein air paintings for the many delights they offer, asking nothing more. They stand as a body of work. If we want to understand the artist in his entirety, this exhibition reveals the complex, even contradictory impulses that animate his aesthetic intelligence, and reminds us of the breadth of resources he draws upon.

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