Diena Georgetti

'Artists are people foremost, amongst a community of people, showing back something within themselves and of that group only seen in art. What do you see, what do you feel as you see, what is the education you profit - what comfort, what assurance, what relevance - from this historical humanity' Diena Georgetti

Diena Georgetti has been a significant figure in Australian contemporary art, making paintings that cut through expectation since the outset of her career in the late 1980s.

Her work emerged within the context of the artists and curators surrounding Store 5, the influential artist-run-initiative in Melbourne where she was one of the youngest artists to regularly exhibit. Since then she has marked out an idiom entirely her own, inspiring a pronounced and dedicated following particularly amongst the art cognoscenti.

Georgetti's medium is aesthetic value. She works it with her tools of selection (judgement of value) and composition (arrangement of value), deeply engaged with but irrespective of style or specific historic movements (in painting, sculpture, architecture, interiors, furniture, textile design, fashion).

Her recent paintings are composite pictures comprised of obscure fragments reworked from the margins of the archive. Symmetries, bipartite and tripartite divisions feature prominently in extraordinary amalgamations of colour. The recombination process of collage implicit to the making of Georgetti's work enables the transporting and transposition of spirit and identity which, for the moment of that painting, she may adopt as her home, her place of commune and intermingling.

In making these paintings, she re-heartens and re-inspirits our own moment by crediting contributions beyond her time and place in history and making clear that art is essential, a motivating life force and is binding of communities.

Source: THE COMMERCIAL, Sydney

© Diena Gerogetti