Irene Wellm

Floating Radicals, 2005
Oil on Canvas
152.5  x 152.5 cm

Irene Wellm, born in Melbourne in 1963, often uses images of childhood – a strange televisual childhood at that – perhaps as a way of coming to terms with the adult world. In her carefully constructed and beautifully painted works, toys seem to stand in for children and float in an environment of near-psychedelic alienation. Her Floating Radicals is an apparently ‘glossy’ representation that explores, as she says, the way the superficial appearances of ‘happiness’ and ‘niceness’ cover up our ‘hidden motivations in personal and social relationships’.
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© The Artist. Licensed by VISCOPY, Sydney 2008.