Footnotes

PROVENANCE
The Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, Sydney

For the publication Twenty: Sherman Galleries, 1986-2006, Tony Bond interviewed William Wright in detail about the gallery's then stable of artists. Of Philip Wolfhagen and his hermetic approach to working, Wright notes,

'Philip has studiously avoided working away from where he refers to as 'my country' and, indeed, he does have an ongoing love affair with his country, assiduously exploring its surrounding landscapes, its forms and contours, its clouded atmospheres and moods. The resulting paintings extend into an extraordinarily concentrated visual tangibility, existing physically as tactile object and subject illusion; they evoke light; the specific poetic of light atmospherically inclined in a certain way at a certain time, and invoking, capturing, a fugitive and otherwise forever lost spirit of place.

Philip is very conscious of how his paintings also exist as abstraction: the displacement of colour and tonal mass and density is something he apprehend purely in his approach to seeing, as to realising, to making. He looks at the broad sweep, of the major forms and movements that constitute his aesthetic vista, and so his works are landscapes realised as abstraction; as, of course, are most of the best figurative and landscape paintings of the European tradition past and present. There are a number of Philip Wolfhagen's paintings which utilise another stratagem; a dual functionality where he actually paints the same landscape or seascape twice, literally, side by side, either on the same canvas or where he abuts two canvases. The shifting perception of the viewer is thrown into a kind of slippage; the simultaneously bisociative visualisation of two subtly different temperature moods or time of day renderings takes on a kind of poetic assonance, where a heightened sense of apprehension occurs. I value artists who are capable of applying critical parameters in their practice and in his way Philip Wolfhagen epitomises this. He is an artist very close to his subject and processes.'