Vicki Varvaressos

Vicki Varvaressos is an Australian contemporary figurative expressionist painter. Sometimes referred to as a "transitional artist", her painting style and subject matter has evolved throughout her career. Her paintings throughout the following decade gave expression to the feminist concerns of the 1970s especially the representation of women in the media. She travelled extensively throughout Europe in 1978. In later years, her subject matter shifted towards reflecting a more personal experience. The first exhibition was well-received by critics, Daniel Thomas listing her among the best of the "New Australian Faces of 1975". By 1978 she was being characterised as "a Sydneysider and heir to that city's tradition of funky, pop influenced art" —funk and pop being particularly identified with the Watters’ stable of artists. However, more commonly her work of this period—consistently figurative—was described as "expressionist". For example the critic Nancy Borlase wrote of her first exhibition that in "raw expressionist paintings … recognisable types, paragons of virtue or nastiness are brought to life in vivid slashes of fauve color, sometimes with devastating accuracy". Of an exhibition in 1978, W. E. Pidgeon would describe the "energetic combinations of brushwork, splashes, drips, broad strokes of cancellation (check) and jangling color schemes" as reflecting "the agitation and dissonances of our febrile age". This “agitation and dissonance” was seemingly meant to represent the type of political protest characteristic of the 70s, with which many Watters artists, including Varvaressos, were identified via the imagery in their work. Later, she would describe this period. "I was very involved in resident action and feminism. It was 1975, it was the time of our 'Bloodless Coup', they call it the dismissal, and that was reflected in the works that I was painting".

By the early 1980s, critics were noticing subtle changes in Varvaressos's paintings, however. Thus Sandra McGrath would describe an exhibition as containing “a group of paintings in which bitter, satiric impressions of political figures (Doug Anthony and Malcolm Fraser) share the wall space with a brilliantly beautiful still-life with pears, a portrait of gallery owner Geoffrey Legge and a splendid double portrait of Thea Proctor and Maggie Preston taking tea”. In 1987, Bruce Adams noted that “her figurative art now focuses on a more severe and emblematic way on its formal ingredients and pictorial construction” and her “critical observation of social ways” had achieved a “more cool and introspective, formally reductive manner”. In 1990, Janine Burke would observe that “it is hard to think of another young Australian artist who handles with such assurance the gap between painterly abstraction and figuration”. In 1992, Geoffrey Legge of Watters Gallery would comment that the content of her work had “slipped from political corruption and patent and covert examples of social manipulation … onto observation of human nature: love, fear, dependency; the many ways we communicate or avoid communicating with one another”. By the 1990s, Varvaressos was alternating exhibitions of entirely of abstract works with ones made up of figurative work, but now done in a minimal way without identifiable characters.

Later work In her work from the past two decades, her paintings evolved from figurative to highly abstracted forms. Her subject matter drew from her own emotional responses to everyday events. Her paintings employ a "murky" colour palette, which adds to the crudeness of her work, and her aesthetic is drawn from the inconsistencies of her life. Her paintings are formed from her head and can only be viewed wholly as an image once completed. “Now that her art has evolved, keeping calm and ‘just’ painting is more of a concern and ‘the content has become much more internal’” - Maitland Regional Art Gallery Cultural Director: Joe Eisenberg OAMVarvaressos is represented in the collections of NGA, NGV, Artbank, AGNSW, Cruthers Collection of Women's Art, University of NSW, Wollongong Art Gallery, University of Tasmania, CBUS Collection, Gold Coast Collection and private collections in the UK, Europe, USA and Australia.

Major exhibitions Retrospectives 2014–2015. Vicki Varvaressos: The Story So Far (paintings 1975–2013), Maitland Regional Art Gallery, Maitland N.S.W. 2018. Vicki Varvaressos: Painting in the Same Language — A Different Vocabulary, Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, Nowra, N.S.W.

Group exhibitions 1981. Australian Perspecta, Art Gallery of N.S.W. 1982. Australian Painting and Sculpture 1956–1981, Art Gallery of N.S.W. 1984. Private Symbol: Social Metaphor, The 5th Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of N.S.W. 1985. Australian Perspecta, Art Gallery of N.S.W. 1987. Art in Architecture: Selections from the New Parliament House Collection, Canberra Contemporary Art Space. 1988. Bicentennial Print Folio, Australian National Gallery, Canberra. 1997. A Face in the Crowd, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. 2002. Portia Geach Memorial Award (winner), S. H. Irvin Gallery, Sydney; Contemporary Australian Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. 2021. Archie 100: A Century of the Archibald Prize, Art Gallery of N.S.W.

Solo exhibitions 1975–2017. Paintings, Drawings, Prints. Watters Gallery, Sydney. 1986–1998, Paintings, Niagara Gallery, Melbourne.