Jan Murphy Gallery is proud to present Portals, a new exhibition by Guido Maestri.
After spending many years living in the city, Maestri has recently returned to Pittwater—an area where he spent much of his youth. This landscape has long captured his imagination, especially the nearby Ku-ring-gai National Park, which he considers his childhood backyard.
This exhibition reflects Maestri’s reconnection with that environment: the bush tracks he wandered as a teenager, the way light filters through dense eucalyptus trees, and the powerful presence of nature in both its stillness and chaos. Many of the works feature fallen trees—remnants of violent storms—highlighting nature’s raw power and the quiet transformation that follows. For Maestri, these moments reveal a tension in the landscape: it becomes vulnerable yet monumental, disrupted but not destroyed. His aim is to capture that fragile strength through paint.
Rather than depicting the landscape literally, the paintings in Portals explore the space between memory, familiarity, and rediscovery. The surfaces shift with textured clashes of colour—layers of vivid rivulets resting against soft pastels. The palette carries a quiet sensitivity and echoes the tones once used by Arthur Streeton, who famously painted the Hawkesbury and Pittwater regions over a century ago.
Maestri’s work is a tribute to the enduring influence of place. It expresses reverence for untouched pockets of nature and the emotional experience of returning to the landscapes that shape us—seeing them not as they were, but as they are now.
