Geometrics
The composition of these paintings owed not a little to the late Hans Hoffman. The work was strongly influenced and yet within the paintings carefully mapped out limits Cuppaidge’s balancing of color blocks together with the strange color sense gave the viewer a feeling of openness, of landscape obsessed of another kind of light."
Corinne Robins Arts Magazine New York 1975
LYON
1972
Acrylic on canvas
78in (200cm) high x 120in (305cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Collection of National Gallery of Australia
An adventurous colourist, Cuppaidge builds Lyon's power through a complementary palette of reds, blues and greens, a hard-edged landscape charged with 'Australian space' contrary to the vertical architecture of Manhattan.
Half a century later and half a globe away from its material origins, Lyon signposts contemporary art's historical narratives, resisting nationalist and stylistic categories. Cuppaidge, now living in Newcastle [Australia], embodies the tall poppy who flowered abroad and maintained her stature on the soil of both countries.
Una Rey, Virginia Cuppaidge, Know my Name, exh.cat., (National Gallery of Australia: Canberra, 2020) p97
CINCEN
1971
Acrylic on canvas
78in (200cm) high x 120in (305cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Collection of National Gallery of Australia
BELLEGREEN
1972
Acrylic on canvas
78in (200cm) high x 120in (305cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Collection of National Gallery of Australia
“At Gallery A Virginia Cuppaidge opts also for a large scale to express compression and tension in her geometric abstract paintings”.
The intensity of large unbroken rectangles press down on taut thin lines, mixing hard and soft edge color, sometimes dense and uninflected and sometimes scrubbed and changing. These works that for all their apparent simplicity hold within them slowly revealing subtleties.
Ruth Faeber - The Australian Jewish Times, 1976
BIG BLUE
1972
Acrylic on canvas
78in (200cm) high x 120in (305cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Collection of National Gallery of Australia
"She soon discovered that New York is not the easiest place to find your feet. The only phone number she had was that of the Australian born sculptor Clement Meadmore, who she says, "showed me the ropes”. She got a job in Max Hutchinson Gallery, at the time there were only three galleries in SoHo, now there are about 450. By 1973 Cuppaidge’s own work was being exhibited in New York”.
Alan Atwood, Sydney Morning Herald - June 1996
ORANGE RECTANGLE
1972
Acrylic on canvas
78in (200cm) high x 120in (305cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Collection of National Gallery of Australia
One of the paintings in Virginia Cuppaidge’s 1985 exhibition (Bloomfield Gallery, Sydney) was called "From One Country To Another” a title which for the artist summed up the theme of the exhibition. Certainly on a symbolic level, these paintings were about Cuppaidge’s own national cross-over, her acquisition of American citizenship. The artist who moved to New York in 1969 and has lived here ever since, is part of that group of Immigrants who come to New York in search of a kind of aesthetic and intellectual space, who come here to enlarge their cultural horizons and stay on to enrich ours.”
Corinne Robins, 1986 Essay – Stephen Rosenberg Gallery "Virginia’s Cuppaidge’s New World”
From article in Artist Profile Magazine by Lucy Strange 2016 When I start a work I get a taste of a colour, I get a visceral taste in my mouth or body that I want to work with.– it has an organic feel to it. I do a lot of layers of colour, in ‘ The Big Orange’ if they were to dissect that painting, you would find several layers underneath, of slightly different colours. It is never flat colour.
In the collection of Macquarie University, Sydney.
CALIFORNIAN DREAM
1975
Acrylic on canvas
78in (200cm) high x 120in (305cm) wide
© Virginia Cuppaidge
Collection of National Gallery of Australia
“At Gallery A Virginia Cuppaidge opts also for a large scale to express compression and tension in her geometric abstract paintings”.
The intensity of large unbroken rectangles press down on taut thin lines, mixing hard and soft edge color, sometimes dense and uninflected and sometimes scrubbed and changing. These works that for all their apparent simplicity hold within them slowly revealing subtleties.
Ruth Faeber - The Australian Jewish Times, 1976