GEORGIE HILL
In Georgie Hill’s paintings different visual systems collide. Gestural, emotive energy is held in tension against an analytic impulse, a hunger for the schematic – even the diagrammatic. These schemas shift against each other; they vibrate, poised to explode. Hill’s works are rich with immediate sensory detail. They make use of dynamic, calligraphic brushstrokes and atmospheric veils of vibrant colour. However, physical intervention and manipulation disturb or complicate these fields. Hill draws on a range of techniques – including incision and folding – to alter her works’ paper and canvas. The paradox of Hill’s mark-making is that it is at once both raw, visceral, energetic – and evidence of intent care and control. This duality offers a lens on the doubleness at the centre of human existence – that between emotion and analysis, exteriority and interiority, the mythical and the personal. An impulse that can be read as both investigative and destructive, it suggests a desire to unpick the threads of pattern that make up the phenomenal world.
Georgie Hill has been the recipient of several awards and residencies including the Olivia Spencer Bower Foundation Art Award, the C Art Trust Award and the Youkobo Art Space residency in Tokyo. Her work is held in the collections of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, the University of Auckland and The Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Key solo exhibitions include: Feint at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, 2014 and the Beijing Contemporary Art Fair, 2019.
