George Alexander: Not Waving- but Drawing 2021

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This is George Alexander's 3rd solo show. His latest offering, 'Not Waving, but Drawing', is a riff on the title of a famous poem by Stevie Smith, 'Not Waving , but Drowning'.

It covers 2 years of dismal luck - personal tragedy, bushfires, pandemic- drawings and paintings, mostly on paper, evoking the dark and the light of it all. A section of the exhibition is devoted to the Quarantine Series, made during confinement in hotel quarantine in Haymarket at the beginning of 2021. Painting with brush and ink on the brown paper bags, as well as the carton containers, that brought the food to the door 3 times a day over the 2 week period.

For the rest its a dreamy merry-go-round of images - many sensual, some nasty, mostly arresting - from the combat zone of the sex-wars to the demons faced alone. Eros and Thanatos here are like two slapstick characters in a Greek Shadow Play. Eros and Thanatos, as subject matter, are as old as the hills.

In gouache, brush and ink, or graphite - on posh paper, newspaper, and carton - there's a cover-the-earth energy at work, that will take you out of your own dark and into a corner of George Alexander's.