Art Life Review, October 2006,
'Time Being' at United Galleries.
www.artlife.blogspot.com.au

Time Being is the name of Marisa Purcell's show at United Galleries, a brand new gallery at 179 Palmer Street in East Sydney. [We don't know if United Galleries have anything to do with United Cellars, the company that uses the flip side of Purcell's room sheet to advertise Chardonnay, Riesling and Cab Sav, but when we visited the gallery itself we couldn't get close to some of the work because of all the boxes of booze around the place. The gallery is long, thin, has loads of natural light and is so violently air conditioned it's like a deep freeze in there]. The last show of Purcell's we saw was at Kudos Gallery where she was testing out some of her ideas in intimate scale. Her combinations of figuration and abstraction with images of nature and more obscure items were a compelling suggestion that she may have a lot more to discover on her journey. For Time Being she is painting big - up to 182x267 centimeters - and has become more painterly, letting her oil paint wash and drip while letting some of the more definite figuration drift in favour of a dreamy abstraction. We were attracted the works that let the large areas of background colour breathe and the smaller works which had a more definitive, deliberate feel, but there's something in the unresolved manner in which the larger works hang together that suggest Purcell is an artist still exploring the range of what she's doing, and that's always exciting.