It is with pleasure that The Commercial presents Diena Georgetti — CAMPAIGN for Sydney Contemporary 2022. The exhibition comprises a coordinated effort of new construction paintings by this influential artist that brings together past and distant communities of artists in an offering for here and now and for the future.

Diena Georgetti (b. 1966, Alice Springs, l. Melbourne) has been a significant figure in Australian contemporary art, making paintings that cut through expectation since the outset of her career in the late 1980s. Since then she has marked out an idiom entirely her own and has received critical and institutional recognition at the highest level.

Georgetti’s paintings of recent years are composite pictures, aggregates of fragments from communities of artist predecessors. Sourced from the margins of the internet archive, a long time before translating her compositions from small digital images to paint, she collects, collates, manipulates, rejects, recombines, arranges and alters hundreds of disparate elements bringing two or three into striking and unlikely compositions. Assertive harmonies made from incongruous assertions of humanity are Georgetti's signature. She places these new compositions within unexpected frames equally drawn from histories of style. This reattribution and redistribution is her substantial contribution to now.

The recombination process of collage implicit to the making of Georgetti’s work enables the transporting and transposition of spirit and identity which, for the moment of that painting, she may adopt as her home, her place of commune and intermingling. In making these paintings, she re-heartens and re-inspirits our own moment by crediting contributions beyond her time and place in history and making clear that art is essential, a motivating life force and is binding of communities.

In 2021, the National Gallery of Australia acquired Georgetti’s monumental four-part painting, SUPERSTUDIO, and showcased it as part of their landmark exhibition, Know My Name. Georgetti has been included in numerous significant biennials and major museum group exhibitions. In 2008, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, jointly presented a twenty-year survey exhibition, Diena Georgetti - The Humanity of Abstract Painting 1988-2008. Georgetti was awarded the 2021 Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, the 2019 Sunshine Coast Art Prize and the 2017 Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize, all acquisitive prizes. Her work is held in Art Gallery of Western Australia, Artbank, The Blackstone Group Collection, Caloundra Regional Gallery, the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, the City of Stonnington Art Collection, Geelong Art Gallery, Griffith University Art Museum, the Michael Buxton Collection, Monash University Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Australia, The National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, The Redlands School Collection, The UQ Art Collection, Wesfarmers Collection. Diena Georgetti has been represented by The Commercial since 2015.