About

Irene Wellm currently lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. In 2001 she completed a Master of Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts. During he thirty-year career she has had numerous solo and group exhibitions across Australia, and internationally in the United Kingdom, Korea and Germany. Since 2001 when she won the Emerging Artist award at the Darebin LaTrobe Acquisitive Art Prize, she has been a consistent finalist in a number of art prizes - most recently the 2014 Geelong Contemporary Art Prize. Internationally she represented Australia as one of three artists in the UBS Art Award 2000, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. In 2012 she was awarded the New Works Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, to do research and a nine month residency in Leipzig, Germany. More recently, a second Leipzig residency in 2014 culminated a third return trip to exhibit there, supported by the Australia Council Visual Arts Travel Fund.

The artist's work is held in the collections of ArtBank, the Ballarat Regional Gallery, the City of Darebin Art Collection, La Trobe University, and Stockwell Downs; and in private collections in Australia, Germany, Switzerland and the U.S.A.

I have always liked the idea of storytelling, and in the Jungian way, I am interested in how pictures, like stories, myths and fairy tales, can function as maps or guides to the unconscious mind.

Wellm approaches painting as a question. Drawing on the history of her own painting and on the histories of Painting, her creative process is an ongoing narrative. These paintings ask us to think about what we bring to the work, and how we produce and discover meaning for ourselves.
- Martina Copley, independent curator.

Irene Wellm's work is characterized by a surreal and understated darkness. Her emblematic, large-scaled gouache paintings on paper depict figures that blend between recognizable human forms and other animalistic entities extracted from popular folklore and Greek mythology to form collage-like painted tableaux.

Wellm's new series of monochromatic paintings have evolved from her interest in shedding light on a deeper experience with reality through her inner psyche - her 'second self' - and plays a key role in linking the various suspended narratives she reveals to us through the strangeness of our own dream time and the apparitions that occupy those worlds. 

- James Bowen, Fort Delta Gallery, Melbourne