Anthony Griffis Solo Exhibition

Opening Drinks: Thurs Sept 8, 6 – 9pm
Gallery hours: 11am – 5pm

In 2019, a chance visit to Tito Bustillo Cave on Spain’s northern coast sparked an unexpected fire in me, resulting in these latest works on both paper and board.

These works are all about simplicity, stripping back. In some instances, I’ve used ash and moulding paste to build my own ‘cave walls’, which I scrawl on and etch into, developing my own visual language.

Between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago the rock walls of Tito Bustillo Cave were a huge canvas. The galleries are covered in countless animals, and handprints reminiscent of Australia’s own ancient Indigenous artists. One cavern, known as The Chamber of Vulvas, boasts crude renderings of female genitalia, which are thought to be fertility symbols.

This cave art had a profound effect on me, one which I honestly struggle to explain fully. I suppose it was seeing evidence of that natural human urge – to make a mark. To have an artist speak to you across the vast chasm of time was deeply moving. Imagining these people, struggling to survive day-to-day but nevertheless driven to draw, paint and carve – by the poor light of a single guttering flame, perhaps – was intensely humbling.

Anthony Griffis is a self-taught artist whose works have been hung in galleries alongside such notables as Wendy Sharpe and the late Adam Cullen. Over more than twenty years, he has had more than a dozen solo exhibitions, and been featured in several group shows. His works are held in corporate and private collections in Australia, Europe and the USA.

Explosive yet pensive. Visceral yet cerebral. There's a raw physicality to nearly all of Anthony Griffis' works, coupled with a restless intelligence. As one gallery director says, 'Anthony's work displays a sophisticated control of mark-making that takes the work beyond surface superficiality and decoration, into the realm of deep physicality.' Another says, 'Never fussy or over-worked, Anthony's work is like a surge of emotion.'

Whether it's pouring black coffee and red wine over textured paper, layering thick swipes of paint on canvas or carving images into paint using a screwdriver, Griffis is always probing, always questioning.

The finished works are the result of painstaking editing. That process is obvious in the finished works, with previous layers still partly visible. Griffis adds and subtracts, until everything making up the work co-exists with the desired depth and intensity.