Tony Oliver, Requiem for a Dream, 2018-19. Oil on board, 120 x 800cm (20 panels). Courtesy: the artist and Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney.

Tony Oliver‘s Requiem for a dream deals primarily with the nature of memory. The work, an epic composition which can be loosely read from left to right, spans decades. It pictures moments from the artist’s life – some real, some imagined – as narrative vignettes that bleed one into the next. Like the painting itself, which is a play of spatial contradictions, of ambiguous volumes and planes of flat colour, memory is here presented as an episodic and impressionistic thing; the identity it traces constantly in flux.

Requiem for a dream is Oliver’s first solo exhibition with Martin Browne Contemporary.

Exhibition opens: 6–8pm Thursday 25 July 2019

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