In 1972 Gerhard Richter declared that he was making ‘photography’ by other means, confounding the relationship between painting and photography. While much work has focused on the interplay of painting and photography, Peter Alwast’s exhibition continues his interests in the possibilities of painting by interrogating its relationship to digital media and drawing. At the heart of Alwast’s recent works are ideas related to translation and the interface between virtual tendencies in the material practice of painting and painterly conventions in media practices.
Translation is not only a formal device for Alwast but becomes a vehicle for a range of personal and political meanings related to immigration, social fragmentation and the desire for origin and presence. All works in the exhibition are identified by the artist as either painting or drawing and resist simple catergorisation of how painting might be defined; line and saturated colour shift into deep pictorial space, while dematerialised images land onto exposed linen surfaces.
Peter Alwast’s work is held in public collections in Australia and the United States. Alwast’s practice employs a range of media including video, computer graphics, painting and drawing. In 1999, Alwast was awarded a Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship and since completing his Masters in Fine Art degree from the Parsons School of Design, New School University, New York in 2001. Between 2001 and 2003 Peter worked as an assistant to Richard Tuttle and Julie Mehretu in New York City. In 2008 he was the inaugural recipient of The New Media Art Award, hosted by The Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia. In 2010 Alwast’s video animation work Everything received an honourable mention in Update III, at the Liedts Meesen foundation in Ghent, Belgium. In 2011 he created a solo exhibition Future Perfect at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and his work was seen in the group exhibition Experimenta Utopia Now travelling to MONA, Tasmania as well as Selectively Revealed at the Aram Art Gallery, Seoul, South Korea. In 2013 Alwast undertook a residency and solo exhibition at Videotage in Hong Kong. Recent exhibitions include Always Forever Now - Timelessness and The Currency of New Media Art, Das Weisse Hause, Vienna, Austria and A Time and A Place: Landscapes from The Griffith University Art Collection, 2015. Peter is a lecturer in Painting at The School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra.
