Guy Maestri is one of Australia’s most championed artists and in 2009 was the winner of one of the most prestigious art accolades in Australia, the Archibald Prize. Building upon Field Studies the artist’s first solo show in Asia last year, Maestri’s new work in The Soundtrack of Our Lives builds upon the sentiment and style of the artist which has become so revered.
   
The new collection of paintings deftly straddles two aesthetic realms. In some the artist departs radically from his well known marks - the intuitive gestural abstractions - and instead creates paintings with a watery translucent surface, created with veils of varnish and deep layers of memory. However, the enduring interests of the artist - namely ecology, human folly and the violated landscape - are still very much the fabric of his work. In the new works the themes lie subtly behind the deceptively cool exterior, Maestri describes the body of work as “a liberation from his own touch.” The subjects and motifs were sourced from hundreds of images found on Google, the embodiment of a world saturated with images.

Other paintings deal with the cycles of nature in a more abstract fashion, representing erosion, germination and sedimentation by mimicking their effects. In these works, the artist’s practice lies somewhere between representation and abstraction – we may recognize the forms, but they are not as we know them. They have entered a new realm of existence, one imagined and developed by Maestri, and by the fluid handling of the line and painted surface.

Born in New South Wales, Maestri is based in Sydney and has shown widely throughout Australia with many successful solo shows. Aside from the 2009 Archibald Prize win for his stirring portrait of Indigenous singer, Geoffrey Gurrumul, he was a finalist for the Dobell Drawing Prize in both 2007 and 2008.