Community of the People / yellow

Diena Georgetti has held a prominent role in contemporary Australian art since her career began in the 1980s. Georgetti’s enigmatic paintings have evolved in style, from early blackboards with scrawled text and monochromes, to more recent works that forge a unique logic of painted abstraction. Yet, her interest in art historical archives and manipulation of found imagery through collage and fragmentation have remained constant. She has continually drawn inspiration from diverse creative sources, at first poring over magazines, catalogues and films, and now perusing vast online art archives since the rise of the internet.

Community of the People / blue and Community of the People / yellow are part of Georgetti’s ongoing Community of the People series, which depicts connections between the artist’s creative predecessors. Her latest paintings manipulate and coalesce disparate fragments into compositions that swell with vibrant hues and overlapping geometries. As a group they highlight similarities between painterly abstraction across time and place. They also emphasise colour. Each pairing represents a complementary tonal relationship that can activate associative meaning. In this instance, yellow and blue might recall the sun and sea or sky.

As with all her recent work, they integrate digital collage techniques, wherein Georgetti forms new compositions based on collections of found imagery, which are then further manipulated with secondary paint application once printed on canvas. While Georgetti’s works cite specific art historical references, her composite compositions read as allegorical evocations of historical visual languages, familiar yet also slightly hard to place.

Georgetti has also written prose to accompany these works and further illuminate their chromatic cosmologies. Below is an excerpt of the poem, titled Community of the People 2023:

Community of the People / blue yellow

From that dark on dark and light on light
The unseeable to you
Evolved a worldly comprehension outlined by the colouring of material
A through and through of object and colour
Ruby a stone, ruby a colour
The blue, the yellow
The primary stain of you