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David Hansen
David Keeling: Looking Forward, Looking Back
A Tasmanian Monograph
Quintus Publishing 2007
224 x 204mm, hardcover, 64 pp
$39.95 rrp

David Keeling is a painter fully grounded in western art’s long history of classicism, the tradition which runs from Botticelli to Poussin, from Puvis de Chavannes to De Chirico. He uses that artistic language – that combination of figuration, narrative and landscape – to describe Australia’s shorter and sadder history of invasion and ecological destruction. From the bleak, denuded hillscapes of the 1990s, with their isolated markers of civilisation – houses, gates, dining tables, curtains – to the more recent, richly-patterned treescapes of the Narawntapu National Park, Keeling’s work uncovers and expresses the beautiful, tragic, surreal poetry of the Tasmanian environment.

Educated at the University of Melbourne, David Hansen worked as Director of the Warrnambool Art Gallery, he Riddoch Art Gallery and the Australian Sculpture Triennial before spending a decade in Tasmania as Senior Curator of Art at the Tasmanian Museum and art Gallery. Over a career spanning twenty five years, Dr Hansen has curated many public gallery exhibitions, most recently the landmark John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque. He is widely published in books, journals, magazines and newspapers and currently holds a Senior Fellowship from the Visual Arts/Crafts Board of the Australia Council.