After four years of crafting his largest body of work yet, Townsville artist Danish Quapoor is putting the finishing touches on good grief before it opens at Pinnacles Gallery this Friday.
The artist first proposed the exhibition to Townsville City Galleries in 2020 and has been working towards debuting the works ever since.
“I have been developing this body of work over the last four years, so I am pleased to be reaching the point where I can share it fully with audiences,” Quapoor said.
“I have lived in Gurambilbarra/Townsville since mid-2019, so my relationship to this place and the arts community here has developed simultaneously.
“My work is interdisciplinary, contemplative and stylistically abstract. I largely work across mediums with repetitive, time-consuming processes like piercing, stippling, coiling and fine-lined illustration. I find a great sense of calm and catharsis in quietly working up imagery and forms from these minute details.
“I have had a strong vision for the exhibition since I proposed it to Townsville City Galleries in 2020, and I’m pleased to have been able to make artwork worthy of my vision and to bring the exhibition design I envisaged to fruition.
“I am thrilled to be exhibiting in the large Pinnacles Gallery space, and to be briefly making it my own. My work is typically quite small, partly because of how time-consuming it can be, so increasing the quantity and scale was also a great challenge.”
The artist has worked with Council’s Townsville City Galleries team to reimagine the Pinnacles Gallery space for good grief.
“The blue-grey walls will be a strong but complementary setting for my predominantly pastel-coloured works, including illustrative paintings on stretched paper, ceramics, textiles, blown glass, an animation and wall drawings,” he said.
“A central, white-walled shrine will also heighten the experience for the more binary, black and white works. I hope that these seemingly opposing mediums and aesthetics will be quite reflective of the exhibition themes, drawing on the binary and shades of grey within concepts of loss, memory, memorialisation, frustration, gender roles and sexuality.”
A Townsville City Council spokesperson said Council was proud to be supporting local artists like Quapoor exhibit their work in Townsville.
“Townsville residents and visitors absolutely love the arts, whether they’re visual, performing, or musical. We live in a creative city that is always eager to take part in new art experiences, and I know there will be many intrigued visitors to good grief when it opens at Pinnacles Gallery,” the spokesperson said.
“Council is continuously working to bolster the city’s liveability and now Townsville has been voted as one of Australia’s top travel towns for 2024 by readers of The New Daily.
“Our cultural activities have been highlighted as the top reasons to visit the capital of Northern Australia, and with exhibitions like good grief available for free in the city there’s no better time to get out and enjoy everything Townsville has to offer.”
good grief will launch on Friday at Pinnacles Gallery. A free floor talk by Danish Quapoor will start at 10:30am this Saturday in the gallery.
