WENDY STAVRIANOS EXHIBITION REVIEWED IN THE AGE

Wendy Stavrianos’ exhibition ‘Early Works from The Gathering Series’ has been reviewed in The Age today, Sat 4 April 2026, by Tiarney Miekus

‘Wendy Stavrianos has been painting for nearly 60 years. She empathically yet acutely grasps landscapes and has captured the reality and mortality of climate change while rendering scenes that are natural, psychological and mysterious. This exhibition features her “gatherer” paintings from the 2000s. They are influenced by Jean-Francis Millet’s The Gleaners (1857), capturing the hardship of rural workers via three female labourers who gather leftover grains, giving dignity to the women and the landscape. In one painting, Stavrianos sets two workers on a yellow plane, both abstract and figurative, collecting objects in an almost apocalyptic landscape. Another references the gathering cloths and pouches from Millet’s painting, while others feature these cloths to both literally and spiritually gather what has been forgotten, ignored or destroyed; burnt landscapes, harmed animals, the future via a childlike figure. Filled with symbolism and meaning, they are imbued with Stavrianos’s immense, complex sensitivity to landscapes.’ Tiarney Miekus