Curated exhibition: David Green: Revisiting yesterday arriving tomorrow

In curating and designing this comprehensive retrospective exhibition of the works of David Green, the exhibition scope of drawings, paintings and large wall works covered the entirety of the major installation space downstairs of the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. Its exhibition design and curation was intended to identify key periods of the artist's works, primarily from the 1980s through to 2017, and to give particular contemporary emphasis to the value of "drawing" as a discipline intrinsic to the artist/designer - in terms of contemporary art discourse. It ranged from his early career in Britain through to his academic working life in Australia. David Green has a significant background in drawing and painting, from the 1960s in Britain to now, which was the predominant focus of my curation and extensive archival work being undertaken towards this retrospective of his work. It sourced private collections, in particular the artist's own archives/collections in studios in Queensland, the CSU archival collections of David Green's work both in Wagga Wagga and in Bathurst, in addition to the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery's own collection.

The curatorial mandate was towards the strengths of visualisation which have always been Green's imperative - of the utilisation of the drawing process, means of working in the studio, and idea invention that reinvest "still life" with neo-surrealist, obsessional detail studies aligning object and shadow, conjoined in an abstract pictorial compositional interplay with vast "fields" of black and white. His earlier series draw markedly upon memory-scapes of his young childhood lived in Kent during the bombing of Britain in World War Two, and these pivotal drawings, paintings, and troves of relentless rapid sketches - are of an artist transforming lived memory into their own multi-layered, diaristic, explosively visual depictions of state of mind.

David Green: Revisiting yesterday arriving tomorrow
Saturday 16 September – Sunday 3 December, 2017

Wagga Wagga Art Gallery presented this unprecedented survey of the works of acclaimed artist David Green, in the new exhibition Revisiting yesterday arriving tomorrow. Curated by Dr Neill Overton, the exhibition reveals the extraordinary creative scope of this pivotal figure in the visual and textile arts of Australia, and his career as a designer, painter, embroiderer, drawer and illustrative artist of sleeping surrealisms.

David Green graduated from the Royal College of Art (United Kingdom) in 1964 and taught at Croydon College of Art and Goldsmiths’ College of Art, before emigrating to Australia in 1978 as Senior Lecturer of Textiles at RMIT in Melbourne. In 1985, Green moved to Wagga Wagga to take up the position of Head of the School of Visual and Performing Arts at the now Charles Sturt University, where in 1989 he was appointed the inaugural Professor of Visual Arts. He was appointed Head of the Wagga Wagga Campus in 2001, and Emeritus Professor in 2011 following his retirement.

In terms of the impact of this exhibition, it is noteworthy that throughout his extensive career David Green has held over a dozen solo exhibitions and participated in over fifty group shows nationally and across the globe. His work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) in Sydney, the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, and the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery.

David Green: Revisiting yesterday arriving tomorrow was on display at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery from Saturday 16 September until Sunday 3 December, 2017. The exhibition was officially launched on Friday 22 September at 6pm by the exhibition curator, Dr Neill Overton, giving an expansive public lecture on this artist's biography as an art maker and educator.

The exhibition was attended throughout by national visitors from Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney and surrounding regions during the course of its scheduling.