Peter Wegner

Excerpt below from Dr Benjamim Thomas’ catalogue essay:

Whether conscious or subliminal, time and memory is ever-present in Wegner’s work. Nothing is static. Nothing stays still for long. Horizon lines are never flat; we are endlessly, involuntarily in motion. A couch lists uneasily so that the whole scene seems to tumble forward, dragging the heavy furniture with it, as it slides precariously towards the viewer. An armchair, like the studio floor, carries all the hallmarks of age and wear, its arms collapsing, the upholstery puckered into folds that draw our gaze towards a misshaped and hollowed cushion, as if only just vacated. A silent witness to countless models who have nestled between its arms.

And that is precisely the intent. For despite the absence of the figure, these works are nonetheless portraits in their right. ‘A chair or couch has a familiarity and history with the person who sits on it. The stories they could tell,’ Wegner muses.^[1] Pairs of Victorian salon chairs are thus positioned as if they themselves are the subject couple. Walking sticks lie at the feet of an well-worn armchair; left by the sitter or humorously suggested as aids for the aged furniture? It is an observation that art critic Robert Nelson noted a decade ago, in relation to the artist’s works in this genre, proposing that these vacant spaces present us with ‘a pictorial oxymoron: a presence built out of absence, a monumental form that consists of emptiness’.^[2]

And in that absence, it is impossible to not see the shadow of Wegner’s long-time professional muse and friend, artist and poet Graeme Doyle. ‘Graeme and I met at art school in 1982’, Wegner recounts of his introduction to Doyle at the former Phillip Institute of Technology. He first asked him to sit for a portrait three years later, and ‘over the years one painting turned into another until now hundreds of paintings and drawings exist of Graeme in our 35-year collaboration and friendship’.^[3] The prolific nature of their friendship resulted in the exhibition, Sitting Still: Portrait Studies of Graeme Doyle at the Castlemaine Regional Art Gallery in 2002, shown again the following year in Melbourne at Australian Galleries, and followed up a more than a decade later at the same gallery with the playfully titled, Still Meeting – Portraits of G.D.

Six years the artist’s senior, Doyle had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar at the age of 18. Across their length of their collaboration, Wegner witnessed the toil of his friend’s physical and mental decline. After an almost life-long struggle with the challenges of his illness, Doyle passed away in July 2021, aged 74. ‘Beyond the Empty Chair’, Wegner’s exhibition at Australian Galleries in June 2025, could be seen as a poignant reflection on their friendship. It is not too far of a challenge to situate ‘Reminisce: Paintings from life’ within the continuing exploration of this narrative, prised wider to reflect on not just the void left by Doyle’s passing but the inevitable implications of the passing of time for us all. These weathered couches and chairs – tired, worn and vacant – these empty rooms and kitchens, where life once hummed, are a stark commentary on ‘the quiet resilience of aging and the power of what is present in absence.’

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[1] ‘Life behind the canvas. Portrait of an artist’, Monash University, alumni profile, November 2021, https://www.monash.edu/alumni/monash-life/2021/peter-wegner-life-behind-the-canvases

[2] Robert Nelson, ‘Peter Wegner’s White on White a fulsome celebration of vacancy’, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 May 2016.

[3] Peter Wegner, Chef’s coat – Graeme Doyle, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Archibald Prize – past works and winners, 2020, https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/2020/30252/