Impasto: Zaide Harker and Bernie Greaves

Thick with texture and charged with feeling, Impasto brings together the works of Zaide Harker and Bernie Greaves, two contemporary painters who wield oil paint with a bold, sculptural intensity. In this dual presentation, gesture becomes language and surface becomes story, as each artist pushes the medium to its expressive limits.

For both Harker and Greaves, impasto is more than a technique. It is a way of seeing, processing and communicating. Paint is not smoothed or restrained; it is piled, sculpted and pushed to the very edges of the canvas, commanding attention and offering a distinctly physical experience of looking.

Zaide Harker, a 2024 National Emerging Art Prize finalist, delivers works that pulse with urgency and lived experience. Their heavily worked canvases speak to themes of identity, imperfection and transformation, shaped in part by the artist’s own diagnosis of Huntington’s Disease and a long history within the disability support community. Here, oil paint becomes something more than pigment and binder. It is movement, resistance, memory. Harker’s impassioned mark-making transforms limitation into power, and fragility into force.

Bernie Greaves, currently based in London, approaches the canvas with a designer’s eye and a painter’s instinct. Drawing from Sydney’s urban and coastal fringe, Greaves’ compositions capture the often-overlooked lyricism of suburbia: terrace houses, telegraph poles, the unmistakable silhouette of a palm tree. His background in architecture is present not in rigid precision but in the bones of the compositions. The joy lies in how he builds upon these forms with lush, layered applications of colour. Each painting is a portal into a world where detail and delight coexist.

Together, these artists celebrate the emotional and material weight of paint itself. Impasto is an exhibition of surface and depth, control and chaos. It is a testament to the enduring power of gesture in contemporary painting.