Greg Creek: Paintings

Greg Creek: Paintings comprises a suite of new large-scale paintings that embody Creek's ongoing interest in issues of history, politics, identity and the everyday, and the connections between these distinct realms and registers. These complex paintings combine abstract and representational elements (key imagery is taken from Creek's own photographs) and various painting techniques to provide commentary and reflection of this fraught, complex contemporary moment.

Greg Creek's practice over the past 30 years has represented a political perspective on personal and public histories - engaging narrative, allegory and satire in large painting, drawing and installation projects. Described as 'one of Melbourne's most complex and demanding artists', Creek's practice poses compelling questions about art history, politics, aesthetics and, not least, the question that perpetually hovers over art making today: the relevance of painting as a medium for contemporary practice.

Creek is perhaps most well known for his large scale allegorical and history paintings, which includes Ha Ha–Theatre painting presented here, while large desktop works - begun as the throw away blotting sheets for his oil paintings - have since become a focus of his practice, significant in their own right. Creek uses a range of different graphic styles and mediums: representational and abstract rendered drawings, watercolours, diagrams, notations from everyday life and collage among so many others, sometimes applied to cut canvases. Creek's works often incorporate aspects of the working process such as spills and stains and, much as Creek constructs the works themselves, this excess of information begins to form an idiosyncratic, philosophical narrative.

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