A very special Wallace quality is her ability to make visceral, as well as intellectual connections with the viewer, and not simply through her considerable technical skill as a painter.
Anne Wallace
Born 1970, Kenmore, Queensland
In the best of Anne Wallace's inspired and tantalizing mysteries, there never was the possibility of closure for the viewer. Rather, there was always something you never could quite "get" (even though you always got "something", and sensed – believed – that you could get it all). Nothing of this alluring mechanism has particularly changed in Wallace's work over the years, other than her impressively growing repertoire of subject matter and the sophisticated guile of her mysteries. Slowly contemplating Wallace's Lonely Road, for example, the viewer remains seductively engaged, spellbound, the fecund meanings emerging into partial comprehension. Typically, however, uncertainty prevails.
A very special Wallace quality is her ability to make visceral, as well as intellectual connections with the viewer, and not simply through her considerable technical skill as a painter. Writer's Block, for example, is a conceptually precise metaphor, rich in dark and delicious humour in which the viewer's experience of the "stalking-vulture threat" takes hold of the guts, and unfolds upwards, opening like a third eye to the total body, directly and complete.
Ross Wolfe from his essay in the exhibition catalogue, Kindle & Swag: The Samstag Effect, University of South Australia Art Museum, 2004
1994 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
1994 MA, The Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK
1991 Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts), Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane
