Peter Griffen, born in Adelaide, and now working as a full time artist in Sydney, first exhibited in 1972 and has since had over fifty solo showings throughout Australia, five in London, four in Paris, two in St.Tropez, one in Lyon and one in New Zealand.
His work has been exhibited in art fairs in Europe, UK, Canada and Asia. He exhibits widely in group exhibitions, has been commissioned several times and his work has been acquired for private, public and corporate collections in Australia and overseas.
Peter Griffen works and lives in his studio and also enjoys working en plein air in various parts of the world, especially in the outback of Australia.
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Links
http://jomurray-art.blogspot.com.au/search?q=peter+griffen
https://www.artest.com.au/tutor/66
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Canberra Times, August 1991
Painter Presents First Canberra Show
By SASHA GRISHIN
PETER GRIFFEN, Paintings
Solander Galleries, 36 Grey St, Deakin
PETER GRIFFEN at 43, with a dozen solo shows to his credit, cannot be really described as a young , unknown, emerging artist. Yet, he has always worked on the edge of the establishment, acquired by the private sector rather than public galleries and is having his first Canberra exhibition.
Trained in Adelaide and Sydney, he works in what could be termed the cosmopolitan language of abstract-expressionism as mainly applied to the landscape. His work echoes of American painting of the 60’s, particularly the work of Willem de Kooning and Hans Hofmann and their countless imitators.
Critical to his method of work is the need to record on canvas the process of the emerging image.
The expressionist virtues of spontaneity, the emotionally charged brushwork and the portrayal of energy are all central concerns. The success of each individual canvas depends on this expression of the artistic personality and the sense of unique discovery.
It is the notion of the canvas as an arena on which the artist performs and on which he leaves his traces.
All of this may sound familiar but in the uncertainty of the 90’s there is a revival of good, solid painting with its sensuous joy in the medium and its self indulgent preoccupation with the individual personality. Here there are no concerns nagging at a social conscience or difficult conceptual demands.
The exhibition presents a selection of work from the past five years in a variety of mediums – oils, acrylic and collage.
This approach to art necessarily involves a high failure rate and the show would be considerably stronger if it were pruned back. I thought the most impressive paintings in the show were Crossroads (No. 4), Wharf Painting (No. 7) and Road North (No. 8).
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The Weekend Australian June 27-28 1987
By Elwyn Lynn
Arthur McIntyre, Robert Pingelly, Peter Griffen
Holdsworth Contemporary Gallery
…….There’s relief at hand in some loose and optimistically lively abstractions by co-exhibitor, Peter Griffen, especially with his Ship Under the Bridge and Kirribilli Leapfrog………
The Weekend Australian, 1989
…Richard MacMillan at King St on Burton / Richard Pingelly, Peter Griffen, Brandt Lewis (all solo) at the Holdsworth Gallery.
By Elwyn Lynn
…….Peter Griffen at the Holdsworth Gallery, though a restless expressionist of reckless arcs, linear maelstroms and extravagantly impastoed surfaces, would agree about content with MacMillan but might think that form really is the content, certainly for emotion. His colour evokes a choking intensity; scattered heroic forms are congested, piled and furious with frustration……..
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In response to previewing Peter Griffen’s new exhibition, “Wildness 2”, which will open in Lyon, France, 28Sep2006 ………….
Peter Griffen, Abstract Expressionist
Randomness and chaos metamorphoses into order in the works of Griffen. His works begin with an unconscious ‘big bang’ of pictorial elements gradually distilled into order.
There is a movement from the unconscious to the conscious mind.
Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Miro, Klee, Tapies and Soutine have influenced Griffen’s work and paradoxically Mondrian’s and the Zen school of painting.
The Australian painters Nolan, Williams and Fairweather have greatly influenced him.
The chief inspiration for the paintings comes from Australian landscape and Aboriginal art although his work is stylistically unlike it.
From the landscape Griffen derives his energy, colour, movement, tone and asymetry of form. There is not one atom of geometric form in the works and yet they are structured.
Outwardly the paintings do not illustrate anything, there is nothing illusionist in them. They are themselves and nothing else.
Subject matter consists of interacting calligraphy, colour, line and shape.
The ordering principle in the works can be seen but not described; meaning is shown by the relativities of the pictorial elements.
Randomness and chaos discover the problems which the works resolve. Despite resolution the problems remain embedded in the works.
Remnants of the beginning, middle and ending stages of the work give a sense of the origin of the imagery and thus a visual history of how they were made.
The complexity of the paintings might have led to a war amongst their competing elements, but the artist has successfully integrated them so that the elements serve rather than annihilate each other. For example, it is so easy for colour to crush line or vice versa, and for shape to ruin space and light. Because Griffen pulls no punches any miscalculation would be immediately obvious in his work. He works on a tight rope, he is a risk taker, a gambler, a high roller, what we call a larrikin – a type embedded in the Australian character. The larrikin character is a form of defiance, a weakness, a strength. It is contradictory in nature, unpredictable, willing to explore outside of convention, willing to shock and above all, humerous and self satirising. As a people we are easy going , we mock pretentiousness and hate authority. We are secure in our mateship.
The works exude energy, and endless outpouring from the inner world of the artist sourced from the energy of the natural world and condensed into painting.
Griffen is now in mid career and one of the most promising artists of his generation. His work is highly original, imaginative and wild but not frenzied. It is alive and a celebration of the life force and ‘joie de vivre’ expressed in a uniquely Australian way.
Stephen Wilson
Master of Fine Arts, College of Fine Art, University of NSW, Australia.
30/08/2006