Ballarat artist Geoff Wallis presents his recent series of paintings in the exhibition, Made You Look!

Informed by his extensive knowledge of art history and contemporary art issues and ideas, the subject of Wallis’ paintings is art itself.

For Wallis, text is used as a kind of meta-commentary, to invite or provoke direct responses from his audience about interpretation and value judgement and broader issues surrounding authenticity, reality, and purity as they pertain to art.

Beyond its semantic role, text also plays an important syntactical or formal part in the paintings’ aesthetic - one in which chance, process and facture all figure prominently.

Geoff Wallis was formerly an academic, lecturing in Art History at Federation University, Ballarat, and has curated significant exhibitions and written extensively on art and artists.

This exhibition was opened by Ola Wallis, the artist’s granddaughter, and the artist, on Fri 1 Dec 2023.