The power of the monument is well accepted. The gravitas of the miniature much less so. Natasha Bieniek lets her diminutive paintings lasso the viewer with a quiet grace, pulling the eyes in and halting the gaze. Hers are not the kind of pictures to take in with a passing glance and it is the physical tension between the image and its audience that motivates the artist. “I want to test the limits of the painter and the viewer’s relationship, to take representation to the extreme.”
Bieniek succeeds in this challenge by the most anachronistic means: the miniature portrait, first prominent in 16th century Britain, later made redundant by photography and now ubiquitous in contemporary form as the mobile-device digital photographs which, like their earlier counterpart, are always on hand as a memento of social belonging. In an age of face recognition technology, an acute human likeness rendered in the labour intensive craft of oil painting captivates with its sense of time invested and timelessness.
Natasha Bieniek (b. 1984, Melbourne) graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2006 and received the post-graduate Nino Sanciolo Art Scholarship to study ancient painting in Florence, Italy.
She has been awarded significant art prizes including The Wynne Prize (2015), The Portia Geach Memorial Award (2015) and The Metro Art Award (2012) and is a nine-time Archibald Prize finalist. Her 2016 Archibald Prize portrait of Wendy Whiteley was named highly commended and toured Nationally in ‘Archie 100: A Century of the Archibald Prize’.
Other short-listed prizes include the Darling Portrait Prize (2020), Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize (2019), John Leslie Art Prize (2018), Geelong Contemporary Art Prize (2018), Glover Prize (2017), Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship (2015) and the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize (2012,2013,2014). Bieniek’s work has been curated into major exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Portrait Gallery, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery and Warrnambool Art Gallery.
