VIRGINIA CUPPAIDGE

EXHIBITION ESSAY

LETTING LOOSE

My first encounter with the abstract painting of Virginia Cuppaidge was the unfurling of a three-metre wide canvas titled Lyon in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. We wanted to include it in a forthcoming display about abstraction, but first it needed to be stretched and considered, having spent much of its life in a New York storage facility before being sent ‘home’ by the artist. It was a revelation. Planes of soft colour partitioned by horizontal beams of more colour – not really a grid, but grid-like - the dissolving intersections of a cityscape that is trying to find open space. When I finally met Virginia on a muggy, close day in Sydney, I understood my initial reaction to the work when she explained to me that Lyon is from her first body of geometric abstractions painted in New York in 1972-73. They started life as a response to her immersion in one of the world’s most coveted concrete jungles, thus they were about the skyscrapers and the topography of streets that go on in a seemingly never-ending street map that is New York City. But then, Virginia’s subconscious started to seep through and an echo of the wide, open landscapes of Australia began to paint its way into the scene.

Virginia landed in New York in 1969 following a teenage dream to experience Abstract Expressionism first hand in the city of its birth. She arrived with one small suitcase and the phone number of Australian sculptor Clement Meadmore. The city was overwhelming to the young Brisbane-born artist, daughter of a botanical painter, educated in the cosseted surrounds of Frensham Girls’ School in Mittagong. By day two in New York, walking in a straight line to avoid getting lost, she covered ten blocks to find a working telephone, and when she did, she called Clem. Thus, began one of Australian art history’s great love stories set in Manhattan. Meadmore would name his monumental Corten steel sculpture that now rests in the NGA Sculpture Garden on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin after her, and she named Lyon in his honour (Lyon being Meadmore’s middle name).

The 1970s and 1980s were a time of great transition in New York and Virginia’s work evolved with the times. Trailing the Perimeter, the title of this exhibition, is an exploration of the work she produced there in the post-modernist decade of the 1980s. It was a time of great plurality and momentous shifts in the political landscape. It was the end of the Cold War, replaced by the concepts of Perestroika and Glasnost, symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the streets of New York, Electro funk music and the early strains of Hip Hop were emerging out of the Jazz scene, which had been the predominant soundtrack to Meadmore and Cuppaidge’s life there. Tom Wolfe was writing Bonfire of the Vanities; Oliver Stone was directing Michael Douglas in his career-defining role as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Everywhere, interior designers were blasting plaster walls in apartments to make way for exposed bricks and playful Memphis Milano gelato-coloured angular furniture and Alessi kitchenware. Once the precinct of artist studios and lofts, SoHo was becoming gentrified with galleries popping up alongside fashion boutiques.

A marked departure can be observed in Virginia’s work of the 1980s – perhaps a response to the vast cultural and political changes afoot in the world at the time. The picture plane begins to loosen up and her lines, shapes and forms now float in space, no longer anchored to the surface. The palette softens, with the occasional lurid break out. Amoeba-like shapes dance across the canvas, or a gentle line arcs and curls through a grainy, sfumato colour field. But always, through her evolution, her constant friends – nature, light and colour remain steadfast. As critic, Corinne Robins observed in her catalogue essay for the artist’s 1986 exhibition at Stephen Rosenberg Gallery in SoHo; ‘The viewer…is convinced that Cuppaidge has caught for us, depicts before our eyes the process, the mid-point between ebb and flow, of organic change’. Life Wave (1986), one of the key works in the exhibition is a great summation of this new sensibility emerging in her work of this decade. Soul Search (1984) reflects Virginia’s seeking of new ways of looking and being. But, if ever there was a work to place in one’s SoHo loft beside the perfect Ettore Sottsass Carlton bookcase (1981), it would be Vrinda (1982). Thus, there is an inevitable nostalgia to the works in Trailing the Perimeter. For this curator, who is trying to be detached and reasoned, I give in and allow myself to be swept back by the power of the work to my formative taffeta-clad hey days of the 1980s when the world turned decidedly post-modern.

Lara Nicholls

Canberra, November 2018