PETA MINNICI
‘Debutantes’ section
Peta Minnici has been a stand out student whist completing her MFA at the National Art School over the past several years. In 2015 she won The John Olsen Award for Figure Drawing as well as the Parkers Fine Art Award for Painting, both held at NAS. In 2017 she was also a finalist for the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship and has participated in group shows with Dominik Mersch Art Gallery, Manly Art Gallery and GAFFA Gallery, all based in Sydney. With a forthcoming solo exhibition at May Space coming up in 2019, her subtle yet emotive artworks are garnering a lot of attention by gallerists and curators alike.
Minnici’s tonal still life and figurative compositions evoke a pensive nostalgia akin to a faded photo album. Embracing the traditional medium of drawing, she employs the painstaking method of cross hatching to build up evocative images that shift between abstraction and realism. In a parallel series of watercolour and oil paintings, she slowly builds up her images with layers of translucent paint. Often drawn from private photographs, her works become a subjective recording of personal memories and past events.
Describing her current practice the artist remarks: “I aim to undo the photographic representation of each subject into small brush strokes of tone and colour, imbuing each image with a sensation associated with recollection of a memory and also symbolic in that each mark creates a recording of what I have seen, heard and felt. . . . I would like to think that my paintings capture nostalgia with wistful affection and sometimes cynical humour without being too melancholy.”
Sydney Art writer and editor, Victoria Hynes
