Geoff Wilson: Interrogated Landscape recognises the lifetime achievement of an exceptional artist whose long career has, until now, remained largely uncelebrated in the public eye.  

This overdue exhibition and accompanying scholarly publication, produced by the Samstag Museum of Art, surveys a most remarkable life in art. Featuring over seventy works, including paintings, works on paper and sketchbooks, Interrogated Landscape captures Geoff Wilson’s movement from watercolours in the 1940s into his semi-abstraction period in the 1960s and then his masterful modernist compositions up to 2013.

A senior artist deserving of national attention, the relative critical neglect of Geoff Wilson is one of the intriguing puzzles in recent South Australian cultural history. To some extent he has brought this upon himself. Genuinely modest, never pushing himself forward, he has instead given generously to many over seven decades living and working in Adelaide – as painter, teacher, mentor and friend. Asking nothing in return, beyond an authentic curiosity to see others flourish, the posterity of his own accomplishments always seemed, to him, of lesser moment.

Geoff Wilson: Interrogated Landscape has been thoughtfully researched and curated by Barry Pearce, the celebrated former head curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The project not only illuminates Geoff Wilson’s legacy and place alongside that of other distinguished Adelaide modernists, but it pays timely homage to a significant Australian artist and his inspired subject – the South Australian landscape.

Geoff Wilson: Interrogated Landscape is a Samstag Museum of Art exhibition supported by Arts SA and Gordon Darling Foundation.