The timed auction ends Thursday April 16th at 8:00pm. Whoever holds the highest bid at the auction closing time wins.
Abby Whiteley Greeff
Synthesis of Memory, 2025
Acrylic and charcoal On canvas, framed in Tasmanian oak.
Height 120 cm x Width 95 cm
Artwork is framed and ready to hang & comes with a certificate of authenticity
Starting Bid: $2,500
"Synthesis of Memory" is an imagined landscape built from fragments of place and recollection. Its palette of iron-red earth and olive greens was inspired by a friend's photographs of Uluru, where the scorched desert tones and resilient trees struck me with their vivid contrasts. I introduced a body of water as a mirror, distorting and blurring the surrounding landscape in the same way memory and dreams shift and reshape over time.
The work began after a plein-air workshop in Wendy Whiteley's Secret Garden on Guringai Country. Although I never met Brett Whiteley, my father, his cousin, often spoke of him with pride, recounting mischievous school days and time in his London studio. After my father's passing from dementia last year, those stories felt newly alive. Sitting in the Whiteley garden, they folded grief, inheritance and place into the act of painting.
This work is not a depiction of the garden, nor of Uluru, but a synthesis of place and imagination, lineage and loss, oil and acrylic, past and present.
Selected for Straitjacket Galleries, Summer Salon exhibition.
Artist Bio: Abby Whiteley Greeff is a multidisciplinary artist based on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. With a decade-long background in interior design, Abby brings a refined understanding of space, composition, and texture to her visual art practice. Her shift to full-time painting emerged from a deeply personal place — the loss of her father to an aggressive form of dementia. In processing this grief, painting became a way to preserve memory and capture fleeting emotional landscapes.
Her practice is guided by intuition and emotional truth, influenced by her creative lineage — Abby is related to renowned Australian artist Brett Whiteley. She works predominantly in oils and acrylics, using layered brushwork and softened tones to evoke a sense of memory, stillness, and transformation. Her paintings often explore nature, family, and the ephemeral moments of connection that shape our lives.
Abby’s work is both personal and universal, capturing the tension between holding on and letting go. With each piece, she seeks to blur the line between reality and recollection — preserving what is felt rather than what is seen. Her compositions invite viewers to slow down, to reflect, and to feel.
Through her art, Abby offers an ongoing exploration of presence, loss, and renewal an invitation to honour beauty in the ordinary and find peace in change.