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Gallery News 2007

Philip Wolfhagen
Winner of the Wynne Prize 2007
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

The Wynne prize is arguably Australia’s most prestigious painting prize for landscape painting.

The Wynne Prize is awarded to the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours or for the best example of figure sculpture, by an Australian artist. Philip's winning painting - Winter Nocturn IV  2007, Oil & beeswax on line, unframed, 200h x 210w cm (stretcher size)

Cambridge, Kings College Chapel from exhibition
Vaults 2006 - 2007

San Juan de Dios, Granada, Spain
from exhibition
Domes 1993 - 2000

A few highlights from the past twelve months in the remarkable career of David Stephenson

·   Australia Council, Visual Artist Fellowship, 2007-2008

·   Cross Currents, Focus on Contemporary Australian Art, curated by John Stringer, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2007

·   Vaults exhibition, Julie Saul Gallery, New York, 2007

·   Symetries Sublimes, Photographs by David Stepehsnon, a major survey exhibition, Centre Cultural Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris, 2006

·   David Stephenson: Visions of Heaven: The Dome in European Architecture, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, second edition 2007; French language edition 2007.

Art Forum Magazine Review by Brian Sholis
David Stephenson Vaults
Julie Saul Gallery, 
535 West 22nd Street, 6th Floor, New York September 6–October 6 2007

For ten years, David Stephenson, an American photographer based in Australia, has documented the recondite geometry of the interiors of cupolas at religious buildings and palaces throughout Europe. In 2004, the Julie Saul Gallery exhibited a healthy selection of the often-symmetrical square-format prints, which boggled the mind despite their visually apparent ordering logic.

In this exhibition, Stephenson presents recent work that fruitfully expands on the earlier series, combining images of naves, apses, and crossings into diptychs and triptychs that more fully explore the Gothic architecture of cathedrals in northern Europe. What is most striking about these images, beyond their variety and majesty, is also what sets these buildings apart from most constructed in our era: the visibility of their structure’s armature. In each image, a fretwork of arches runs the length of the ceiling, creating a hyperelegant drawing in space that likewise serves to ensure the building’s stability.

It is difficult to choose favorites from a series so conceptually straightforward and well executed, yet the twin clouds of light that appear to hover just inside the central windows depicted in #50405, Chartres Cathedral, 2006/2007, set that work apart. One can’t help but see what is likely to be overexposed film as a hint of spiritual apparition. Likewise, Stephenson’s two-panel photograph of the ceiling at Paris’s Saint-Chappelle is one of few to translate the delirious majesty of encountering its intricate stained-glass windows after passing through its dim, low-ceilinged entrance hall.

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