Minor (triptych)

Luise Fong won the Premier Award at the Visa Gold Art Award with this work, Minor. The triptych is characteristic of her practice in that it explores diaphanous surfaces, possibly as a kind of overhang from her training as a textile designer. Her paintings of this period were made on doors and thus have a familiar scale in relationship to the body. The doors are covered with blots, stains, and holes, which never let the eye rest and which have a distinctive fluidity, deliberately viewed as feminine in sharp contrast to the hard-edge abstraction of her male predecessors. Fong makes unashamedly beautiful surfaces, in this case in a minor key, sombre and brooding. The musical title legitimises an emotional response in the viewer.