Marina Strocchi studied art in Melbourne (1979-82). She had a two-year sojourn in Europe (mainly Paris), then returned to Melbourne and commenced her social practice as an artist. She found herself in central Australia in January 1992 where she began her first series of landscape paintings. She returned to live at Haasts Bluff in August of that year and during the 1990’s worked with an iconic generation of Aboriginal artists.
For over 20 years now her own studio practice has been paramount. Her paintings express a sensitivity to landscape with an awareness of “what lies beneath”, her perceptions drawn from sharing an environment and experience with Indigenous artists.
Since a survey exhibition at Araluen Arts Centre (Alice Springs) in 2015, her work has grown in ambition while subjects initially became more domestic and internally-focused. Still life dominated her Kitchen series (2015-16) before a Kangaroo Valley residency (inland New South Wales) followed in 2018. It is paintings from this experience that comprise Terra Firma, her response to the dramatic landscape of that place. The flatness and verticality that emerges in the Escarpment paintings is dramatic, with abstracted forms from the landscape pressing up against the picture plane. Her work continues to use a limited palette but blocks of colour become sculptural, divided by thick lines.
Strocchi has exhibited in the USA, Europe and all over Australia during the last thirty years. Her work is in many major Australian institutional and private collections, and private collections in Europe and the USA. She has undertaken commissions, won awards and is a many time finalist in significant prizes.
To view the exhibition, please click – HERE
Image: New York Taxi II 2020Acrylic on paper35.5 x 28.0 cm
