Vivienne Binns
Vivienne Binns | Australia b.1940 | Wire weave plastic mesh: a paradox of irritations 2007-08 | Synthetic polymer paint on canvas | The James C Sourris, AM, Collection | © The artist
Ten Years of Contemporary Art: The James C Sourris AM Collection | 12 November 2011 — 19 February 2012 | GOMA | Free admission
The indomitable Vivienne Binns burst onto the Sydney art scene in 1967. That year, her first solo exhibition ‘Vivienne Binns: Paintings and Constructions’ at Watters Gallery, Sydney, included a multitude of sexually explicit and suggestive works. It was a sharp and incendiary riposte to the unemotional, male-dominated genre of hard-edge abstraction on the Sydney scene. Binns stopped painting immediately after the exhibition and by 1974 was part of a core group involved in establishing the Women’s Art Movement in Sydney, which promoted women’s art and explored cooperative working methods. In the mid 1980s, Binns returned to painting, exploring connections between domestic surfaces, fabric patterns and high art.
The colours and forms of Wire weave plastic mesh: a paradox of irritations 2007–08 reflect design and interior decoration. Its gridded abstraction also resembles the vernacular form of weaving, an ‘amateur’ art often made by unknown women, reinventing and reclaiming associations with the feminine. The consistency of vision underlying Binns’s early works to her recent practice is startling: her more contemporary works are no less emphatically feminist.
