STATEMENT
I was born in Bologna, Italy, where I attended the Academy of Fine Arts in the ’60s.
My four years at the Academy consisted in the study of painting, anatomy, printmaking & art history. While still at the Academy I was involved in the formation of a pre-Arte Povera group of artists working in the Studio Bentivoglio, Bologna, in 1967. Later we exhibited our work in Venice at the Palazzo Comunale.
I left Italy at the end of 1967 for London & Paris, later Eastern Europe, Middle East and Asia – especially India.
I arrived in Sydney in 1970, then Melbourne the year after, where I have lived since.
In Melbourne I attended Melbourne Teachers’ College in Carlton for a Bachelor in Art & Craft, majoring in photography under the guidance of Mark Strizic.
In the seventies photography was very important to me – and still is, however, without giving up painting.
I have exhibited extensively in Melbourne over the last 35 years, as well as teaching Art in Secondary Colleges.
In the late seventies I was very interested in Photo-Realism & its relationship to photography & media in general.
My work was very abstract in nature throughout the ‘90s and still is, in part. Presently, however, I travel extensively to the Centre and/or North of Australia in an attempt to understand the essence of this land; bring the experiences back to my studio & develop a body of work (paintings) that incorporates my European roots with an understanding of the land in Australia.
My work is simultaneously abstract and representational, symbolic and figurative.
My most significant achievement as an artist would be to bridge the conceptual aspirations of the late sixties in Italy, to the desire of any Australian artist of European extraction to understand the essence of this land, without forgetting or denying my European descent.
Statement 2 (Jan 2010)
Painting as we know it in the Western World – from Pre-Renaissance to the 1960s – is well and truly dead. It is not possible however, to consider painting itself dead, since it is the most primordial and poetic form of expression.
I take it upon myself to be concerned with the re-birth of a New Painting, fresh in terms of perception, inclusive of all cultures and sensibilities and divorced from the intellectual posturing of contemporary art in the western world.
I find myself in an ideal position here in Australia, away from the Old Country and free from the presence of Classicism.
Bruno Pasqualini