Summary
Since the mid-1980s, painter Louise Forthun has been rigorous in her consideration of the city - not just Melbourne but many world cities - and she has created a prodigious body of work on the subject. Though grounded in the real, hers are not necessarily representational depictions of a metropolis and its structures, but abstractions that convey an essence as much as detailed substance of the urban space in question.
Using painstakingly cut and placed stencils, Forthun paints her cityscapes from layered and intersecting lines, planes, areas, shards and splinters of pigment and its inverse. The sense of estrangement created by her often fragmented and impressionistic glimpses of the city is heightened by their radical and sometimes shifting point of view, frequently vertiginous in effect.
'Black Construction Site on Yellow Spiral' is one in a series of works that engages with redevelopment in Melbourne's CBD in recent times. Inspired by the building of Melbourne Central, the painting, unlike many of Forthun's urban works, has a tight composition that focuses on a particular locale. Its constellation of parallel lines draws one's eye into pit of the construction site, a focus compounded by the centripetal energy of the spiral. This work is nevertheless an ambiguous space of black on pink on yellow, with the movement of the spiral pointing equally, perhaps, to disorientation and to progress.
