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Two invitations: BODIES Pool Art Fair Miami Beach 1320 Ocean Drive @ 13th Miami Beach, FL 33139 www.poolartfair.com December 7 - 9, 4 - 10pm Roving Eye Roving Eye New York 2007/08 is the fourth in a series of annual exhibitions organised by Advance, to highlight current works by Australian artists working beyond Australia's borders and this year featuring shows in both New York and London. Opening Reception Thursday December 13, 2007, 6 - 8pm Exhibition December 11, 2007 - January 12, 2008 ROBERT STEELE GALLERY 511 West 25th Street New York NY 10001

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Simplicia and the tick. Staring Guenevere Donohue as Theresa Byrnes.

ALPHABET CITY IV

Oral Histories of the East Village Onstage at metropolitan Playhouse

An all new series of real-life Lower East Side stories.

(Avenue A solo series) 3 solos in one night

Wednesday August 8th at 8PM

Saturday August  11th at 8PM

Friday August 17th at 8PM

Sunday August 19th at 2PM

Reservations: 212 995 5302

Metropolitan Playhouse proudly announces our 4th series of all new solo-performances

celebrating the neighborhood heros of the East Village

... in their own words.

Tickets:

$15 one show

$10 for a second

Directed by Derek Jamison

Metropolitan Playhouse

220 East Fourth Street

New York, New York 10009

Office: 212 995 8410  Tickets:  212 995 5302

www.metropolitanplayhouse.org

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PRESS RELEASE   Theresa Byrnes   BEINGS   June 28 through June 30, 2007   Rogue Space is pleased to announce an exhibition of new ink paintings by Theresa Byrnes. This is the artist’s second exhibition with Rogue space.   Byrnes often refers to her studio as a laboratory, and equates this current work to that of a mad scientist creating creatures. Water, fabric and maternal love are the commonalties at all human birth; it is these elements that Byrnes utilizes to create "Beings".   Byrnes develops unique techniques to accommodate her intention for each new series, building crude apparatus to help realize specific effects.   For "Beings" Byrnes created an elevated bamboo canopy. Beneath it Byrnes lays large sheets of paper, then wet fabric, applies ink directly to it, and finally pours mixed inks and water through the 4ft high canopy. After a week of drying the fabric is peeled up to reveal each new "being".   Byrnes’ painting roots are in portrait painting. Since 1996 she has been exploring abstraction. Byrnes’ grounding in portraiture and oil painting enables her to fully release into the abstract, giving her abstract work a distinctively humanistic quality.   Byrnes was born in Australia in 1969. She lives and works in New York.

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You are invited to a performative work for film by Theresa Byrnes

Theresa Byrnes Studio
526 West 26th Street
Studio 1003

Friday, September 29th, 2006
6 to 8PM

Contact: Bobbi Bennett 212-729-6368

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Fractals of Thought

ink paintings by theresa byrnes

 Exhibition Dates – opening September 28 until October 21 2005

Sponsored by - air tahiti nui & saatchi & saatchi

rsvp

Embassy of Australia
1601 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036-2273
t. 1 202 797 3176
f. 1 202 797 3414
e. maryanne.voyazis@dfat.gov.au

“Light, space and time blur into one, seeming to be truth but really it is just blurring – painting.”

 Based in New York since 2000, Australian artist Theresa Byrnes has exhibited annually since 1985. In 1996 she founded the Theresa Byrnes Foundation Inc., which funded a research fellowship to further gene-transfer therapy. Byrnes was awarded a Young Australian of the Year award in 1998. She published her autobiography The Divine Mistake in 1999 (Pan Macmillan Australia).

20 years ago I had my first exhibition. My paintings were figurative. Figuration was my apprenticeship. Through 10 years of painting representationally I learned the magic and technique of painting.

I explored the brush stroke, to make portrait, figure or scene, until I just wanted to explore the brush stroke itself. I didn’t want to arrange marks to make an image of something known. I chose painting to show me what was unknown.

In abstraction there is nothing to copy. Abstraction is like jumping off the earth into the universe, letting go of mother’s hand and stepping into the ether of thought.

I find myself in the great void of potential. This subject does not dictate its structure to me but demands I release all ideas of knowing and open to new ways of seeing. When I paint I feel like an explorer of new paths and am privy to the experience of beauty unfolding in ways I have never seen.

The medium becomes almost irrelevant; it is the intent that gives my work consistency. My approach is not about finding a style but rather using style and medium as a vehicle.

As a child I wanted to be a scientist. My parents supplied me with science kits. I would sit on our concrete driveway warmed by the sun, ignite the Bunsen burner, set out the elements and chemicals, discard the instruction manual and endeavor to make dramatic explosions of color and froth.

I had to have an immediate reaction to feel I was going where no one had gone before. I longed to be delighted and surprised by the result and then think back to understand the technique. Experiment led to technique - not the other way around.

My parents bought me my first oil painting kit when I was five. We would go out as a family and set up easels to paint en plein air. Dissatisfied with science kits, not wanting to work with manuals I returned to painting. It was dangerous, it was not child proof and it gave me the thrill like nothing else could.

In this series I work with the flow of water and the reactions of certain colored inks added together by an eyedropper. I layer paper to manipulate the stream and create shapes (inkling # 1 & 2, Shuffle, Merge). I remove the layers and they become works in themselves (Road Trip came from Stone, Frond 1-3 came from Greenhouse.) I have disconnected from the surface. As Leonard Shlain explains in Art and Physics, “The crack between cause and effect, a brief moment occurred which was out of control, like the gap in a spark plug, this moment is what Aristotle once proposed as Potentia.”

Dr Masaru Emoto in his book “the Message of water” photographs the molecular effect on water by thought. His results show the dramatic effect thoughts have in shaping water molecules.

Painting with the basic element of life intensifies the experiment of creating reality with thought. I pour water, it pools to rivulets running with colored inks that merge in curves of paper becoming landscape, geological and biological, mirroring nature in the unifying patina that suggests both the outer and the inner world.

In physics, mathematics and nature there are shapes and structures which appear irregular and random, but nevertheless have a special pattern of regularity called self similarity. The term fractal was invented by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975.

One God is made up of 112 ink drops causing fractalizaton. It represents the cornucopia of souls that make up humanity and is also reminiscent of the individuality of each and every snowflake or of stars popping in the night sky. God is every particle; I am reminded of this by the uniqueness of every humble ink drop.

Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix once speculated “it would be worthy to investigate whether straight lines exist only in our brains”. Leonard Shlain writes “The Western adherence to the illusion that the link between objects in space and events in time is a straight line is similar to belief in a religious dogma”. There are no straight lines in nature, except for the horizon and even that is curved.

American minimalist painter Agnes Martin has me enthralled by her work. Her straight lines are tinted with human frailty. Imperfection blurred by seeing the painting as a whole, iconic and essential like the horizon. Her repetitive, delicately dispassionate minimal lines are sublime and move me like the ocean’s current. I feel it but do not have the reserve to express in that considered repetitive way.

The cut out and placed strips I use to create Strings 3 & 4 add repetition with out forcing me to meditate on the mundane. With this technique I can utilize structure while maintaining my passionate and explosive approach.

The strips started in 1983 where I applied masking tape diagonally on canvas and spray gunned paint, in 1994 I represented trees and buildings simultaneously with single lines and in 1996 I made 14 Foot lines by rolling on a dolly on my back, with the canvas above, making a continuous line with an 8 inch brush while in motion (On the Way To the Awakening series). In 1998, with the Nature Behind Bars series, I made splatters and daubes with a row of ordered lines in front. And in 1999 in The Digging Sticks series, lines represented my aboriginal mothers, symbolized as digging sticks, the female tool for harvesting water from the earth.

Now in 2005 Strings 3 & 4 reflect on the theory of super strings. String theory requires the universe to possess more than three spatial dimensions and offers the first self-consistent approach to combining quantum theory and general relativity into a single unified theory of all physical phenomena.

When I was a child I would run around on hot summer days in my Aunty Agnes’s back yard with my cousins. I would run by the old wooden paling fence. What was behind was obscured, dissected and abstracted by the spaced intervals of line. As I ran past it created a strobe effect. Foreground and background were separated but inseparable. Straight lines represent our assumption of sequential time. As I ran by the fence, form and order became music and what was clear and upfront became unknowable like behind.

A unity of self occurs while painting and through that state comes art. Rene Magrite called this “presence of mind”. This state is the heart of being an artist.

Art like science is an endless experiment, and it is never finished. Life and truth are constantly evolving and I am committed intently to continuing the experiment.

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Theater for the New City presents
"Tantric Paintings" by Australian Artist, Theresa Byrnes.

New York, NY - Australian artist Theresa Byrnes' new exhibition, Tantric Paintings will premiere at the Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue at 10th Street, November 15, and remain on view through December 22, 2004. Opening night is Monday, November 15 from 6:30 - 9:30 pm, featuring Byrnes's Tantric Paintings and a performance by the artist at 9 pm sharp. The opening reception is sponsored by The Australian Consulate General.

Byrnes' paintings follow in the tradition of ancient Indian Tantric Painting (meditation aids). They capture a moment of rapture generating a stirring or thrill that awakens the spirit. Delighting in the slick and sensual response of enamel paint on aluminum, Theresa Byrnes considers the big issues of eco-feminism, war, consumerism and the metaphysics of existence. This exhibition includes such provocatively titled pieces as Nipple Bomb, In Me, Divine Juice, and Gush. Her paintings demonstrate bold use of color, experimentation with the chemical reactions inherent to enamel, and delicate yet un-restrained gestural marks.

Theresa Byrnes was born in 1969 and was given her first professional oil painting set at the age of five. She has exhibited since the age of sixteen, from 1985 in Australia and from 2000 in Europe and the USA.

In 1987 she studied visual arts at Sydney College of the Arts. Beginning as a figurative painter she stepped into abstraction 10 years ago. Always exploring new mediums her paintings are consistently fresh and exciting. This exhibition debuts two years of painting with enamel on aluminum. Byrnes received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2003 which supported the production of this work.

Byrnes moved to New York in 2000, and her first major solo show in New York was in 2001, Knot Not Know at Cristianne Nienaber Contemporary Art. It was followed by a group show, Art Science Fusion at Sapienza University, Rome Italy and in 2002 a solo exhibition, Landscape of Mistake at the Australian Embassy in Washington DC. Piri Halasz reviewed her work, writing, "…reflecting the far flung influence of the splatter and daub school. Her colors can be shrill and acid, while the way she applies paint can recall Pollock and Cy Twombly. Her paintings have a poetic, sometimes unforgettable intensity." ("From the Mayors Doorstep." Issue #33)

After September 11th 2001 Byrnes felt driven to performance art, to express ideas directly with her body, to integrate the global and the personal with commitment and clarity. Her performances are painterly, intellectually layered, short and powerful. The performance aspect of Byrnes' art has become the final say of each body of work. Her abstract paintings are ambiguous in meaning, relying on the imagination while performance is the arena in which Byrnes is exacting with her message. Her paintings seduce and her performance knocks you out.

In 1996 she founded the Theresa Byrnes Foundation Inc, which funds research toward developing a cure for Friedreich's Ataxia, a fatal degenerative disease of the nervous system which she has and as a result is wheelchair-mobile. She received a Young Australian of the Year award in 1997 and was appointed as Australia Day Ambassador in 1998. In 1999 Byrnes published her autobiography, The Divine Mistake. Byrnes produces a feminist performance art event annually for the Howl Festival in the East Village. Theresa lives in New York City.
 

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My portrait by Greg Weight is included in this book:

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