Philip Wolfhagen is, quintessentially, a painter of the Australian landscape, one whose work has been exclusively absorbed into his private obsession with Tasmania, the terrain of his personal origins. His work is physical, dense in its application, sombre in mood and tonality, the result of a deeply experienced, enduring engagement with an ancient, yet eternally living subject.
While Philip Wolfhagen’s work only came to the attention of Australian critics and collectors in the early 1990s, he is already regarded as one of Australia’s most outstanding landscape painters. His work was represented in the Moët and Chandon Touring Exhibition (1996-97); Australian Perspecta: 'Between Art and Nature’ (1997); 'The Artist’s Garden’, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (1995); and 'Windows on Australia 1’, Australian Embassy, Tokyo (1995). His monumental, six-panel painting, Archipelago , 2003, the result of working 'en plein air’ for 12 days on Deal Island in Bass Strait, won critical and popular acclaim.
Philip Wolfhagen’s 2004 solo exhibition, 'The Inner Edge’, shown at Sherman Galleries, Sydney, and the Academy Gallery, School of Visual and Performing Arts, University of Tasmania, Launceston, included his most abstracted landscape paintings to date. Writing in the catalogue, art critic Peter Timms said:
It is, I think, the real daring of Philip Wolfhagen’s atmospheric essays on the agricultural northern Midlands area, where he lives, that they complicate our emotional and intellectual responses to pastoralism, cutting through the rhetoric of both environmentalists and farmers, while cheerfully snubbing the snow-capped-mountain clichés of the tourist industry . These are paintings not only about the love of nature but the nature of love.
Philip Wolfhagen’s work is held in major public and corporate collections in Australia and in private collections nationally and internationally.
- Writers:
- Murray-Cree, Laura
- Date written:
- 2006
- Last updated:
- 2011
