THE CANBERRA TIMES, Saturday, Sept 21, 1991
WORKING PROCESS DISPLAYED
Bonney Bombach, New Works, aGOG, 71 Leichhardt Street, Kingston, Wed-Sun, 12-5pm until September 26.
Bonney Bombach is a Visual Arts Tutor with the Australian Flying Arts School based in Brisbane. Originally from Melbourne, she lived and worked in London, Rome and Israel after completing a degree in Social Sciences in 1966 at Melbourne University. In 1977 after a Diploma of Art at Preston Institute of Technology (now R.M.I.T University), she began a teaching career as well as exhibiting. This is her first Canberra show.
Her mixed media works on unstretched canvas painted in acrylic with varied additions of natural pigments, charcoal, pastel and oil stick, are hung unframed on the walls. One is very conscious of their material composition and the immediacy of Bombach’s process of working. Her earth colours and textures establish a physical link between the reality of a specific landscape and the spiritual reality, which she explores in her imagery.
Bombach has created the illusion of deep space in which the figurative elements seemingly move, not with any normal logic, but as in dreams, overlapping, receding and surfacing. She travels with the emu in her major canvas ‘Spirit of Place’.
Outstretched hands, footprints, a lizard, a bird, suggestions of landforms can be read. But this is a landscape where memories are stored and can surface on their own.
In her other canvasses, the human presence intermingles with other images of man and Australian animals, which gives us a context, a sense of place.
Minsk, the city in the USSR where thousands of its Jewish population were killed during World War II, has a special significance for Bonney Bombach. In her framed mixed media watercolours, ‘Minsk picture (i)-(iii), family memories surface in images which can suggest destruction, flight and even in the last piece, possible redemption.
Bonney Bombach is a mature artist and many influences have contributed to her development.
SONIA BARRON
