Marina Strocchi
Marina Strocchi studied art in Melbourne (1979-82). She had a two-year sojourn in Europe (mainly Paris), then returned to Melbourne and commenced her social practice as an artist. She found herself in central Australia in January 1992 where she began her first series of landscape paintings. She returned to live at Haasts Bluff in August of that year and during the 1990’s worked with an iconic generation of Aboriginal artists. In 2021, Strocchi returned to Melbourne and now lives and works in the Yarra Valley.
For over 20 years now Strocchi’s own studio practice has been paramount. Her paintings express a sensitivity to landscape with an awareness of “what lies beneath”, her perceptions drawn from sharing an environment and experience with Indigenous artists.
Since a survey exhibition at Araluen Arts Centre (Alice Springs) in 2015, Strocchi’s work has grown in ambition. Still life dominated her Kitchen series (2015-16) before a Kangaroo Valley residency (inland New South Wales) followed in 2018. It is paintings from this experience that comprise Terra Firma, her response to the dramatic landscape of that place. The flatness and verticality that emerges in the Escarpment paintings is dramatic, with abstracted forms from the landscape pressing up against the picture plane. Her work continues to use a limited palette but blocks of colour become sculptural, divided by thick lines.
In 2019 Strocchi was awarded a NT Arts Fellowship residency in Brooklyn, USA which resulted in a series of works exploring her memories of the cityscapes of New York. Most recently Strocchi has shifted her gaze closer to home, depicting the brilliancy of the Victorian agricultural landscape. Her work continues to pay homage to place and serves as an ode to a life spent travelling and looking, painted in Strocchi’s distinctive and unique style.
Strocchi has exhibited in the USA, Europe and all over Australia during the last thirty years. Her work is in many major Australian institutional and private collections, and private collections in Europe and the USA. She has undertaken commissions, won awards and is a many time finalist in significant prizes including the Wynne Prize, the Alice Prize, the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, and the National Works on Paper Award (2020, 2022).
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