Denise G. Green

Born in Melbourne, Australia in 1946, Denise Green moved to New York City in 1969 after studies at L’École des Beaux-Arts and La Sorbonne in Paris. While studying with Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell at Hunter College she established roots in the Western modernist tradition. Drawing from her early years in Australia and travels in India she also incorporated an Eastern and Aboriginal aesthetic into her work.

Her first major exhibitions, Young American Artists at the Guggenheim Museum and New Image Painting at the Whitney Museum in 1978, launched her into the New York art world. Green has had more than 130 one-person shows, 30 of which were solo museum exhibitions. Since 1999, nine museum retrospectives of her work have toured to venues including MoMA P.S.1 in New York, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, and the Museum Kurhaus Kleve in Germany. Her paintings are in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, and the Albertina Museum in Vienna.

Green’s book An Artist’s Odyssey, was co-published by the University of Minnesota Press and Macmillan Art Publishers in 2012. Her first book, Metonymy in Contemporary Art: A New Paradigm, in which she developed a new approach to art criticism and creativity inspired by Australian Aboriginal and Indian thought, was released by the same publishers in 2005. Her other writings about art have appeared in Art Press in Paris, Art Monthly Australia, Art and Australia, Arts Magazine in New York, and Asian Art News. In 2007 she was awarded the Order of Australia, one of the country’s highest honors.

Courtesy of the Artist