Secret Thief Painting

"In my recent practice I create large-scale works on paper, painting with gouache. The works are usually figurative, patched and pasted together using collage techniques during initial digital explorations. The subjects are male, female, animal, and sometimes a mixture of all these. Eventually they are scaled up and painted almost life-size in monochrome, which serves well to unite the complexity of the image. I use the idea of the cut-out and the childhood game of paper dolls to communicate a multi-layered expression of the self in flux. The framework behind these ideas comes from my interest in the life’s work of psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961), and from fairy tales and mythology. The paintings are ambiguous, using playful and surreal concepts along with realist technique to create symbolic maps of the personal psyche." Irene Wellm resides in Melbourne, Australia where in 2001 she completed a Master of Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout a thirty-year career in Australia, and internationally in the United Kingdom, Korea and Germany. In 2001 when she won the Emerging Artist award at the Darebin LaTrobe Acquisitive Art Prize. She has been a consistent finalist in a number of art prizes - most recently the 2014 Geelong Contemporary Art Prize. Internationally she represented Australia as one of three artists in the UBS Art Award 2000, at Whitechapel Gallery, London. In 2012 she was awarded the New Works Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts to complete a research residency in Leipzig, Germany. A second Leipzig residency in 2014 culminated in an exhibition there, supported by the Australia Council Visual Arts Travel Fund. In Australia Irene's work is held in the collections of ArtBank, the Ballarat Regional Gallery, the City of Darebin Art Collection, La Trobe University, and Stockwell Downs; and in private collections in Australia, Germany, Switzerland and the U.S.A.