THEA WEISS
2024
Visible but Intangible
A print exchange portfolio
Sydney Printmakers
Print Council of Australia
Southbank, Australia
Speaking without sound
2023 & 2022
Sydney Printmakers 2023
Gallery Lane Cove
Lane Cove, Australia
Fragility & Wonder I & II
Milburn Art Prize (Finalist)
Brisbane Institute of Art
Wilton, Australia
Contemplating Grace: Sydney Printmakers
Grace Cossington Smith Gallery
Wahroonga, Australia
Carrington Drive after Kuringai Avenue
Jervois Avenue after Kuringai Avenue
2023 & 2021
The Masters of Graphic Arts 11th International Biennial of Drawing and Graphic Arts
Floris Romer Museum of Art
and History
Gyor, Hungry
To The Edges: 60 Years of Sydney Printmakers
Manly Art Gallery & Museum
Manly, Australia
My Mother, My Muse
Gallery Lane Cove
Lane Cove, Australia
2020
Sydney Printmakers
May Space Gallery
Waterloo, Australia
Anne + Sadie 1929
In The Shade II
Sydney Printmakers
Gallery Lane Cove
Lane Cove, Australia
New York Memory I
2019
My Mother, My Muse
Contemporary on Crown
Surry Hills, Australia
Borderless
Sydney Printmakers
Megalo Print Studio + Gallery
Canberra, Australia
Poetry of Ideas in Print
Sydney Printmakers
Artspace on the Concourse
Chatswood, Australia
2018
3%
National Art School Reunion Exhibition
Gaffa Studios
Sydney, Australia
A select group of the 2006 graduates of the National Art School sought to reconnect and reflect on their evolution and to celebrate a continue commitment to their art practice.
In The Shade
Sydney Printmakers
Umbrella Studios
Townsville, Australia
2017
Exhibiting in Paddington's Wadsworth Gallery, Passed/PRESENT is the travelling exhibition by Thea Weiss and Anna Russell. Previously exhibited in Wagga Wagga, Passed/PRESENT explores Wagga Wagga's losses and restorations at a time when sustainability and Aboriginal reconciliation are debated across the country.
The colours and light of the region are captured in paintings, monotypes and drawings. The black water with brilliant reflections on the local Wiradjuri walking track offered a starting point for both artists in theme and colour.
Miniature showcased a number of talented emerging and early career artists working across a variety of media. Participating artists were engaged in the small scale, experimenting with tiny forms and shrunken subjects.
This was Collab’s inaugural show and presents small works by Marine Coutroutsios, Margaret Daszkiewicz, Sinéad Kelly, Manuela Strano, Gunjan Aylawadi, Randal Arvilla, Thea Weiss, Anna Russell, Leah Bullen, Sophie Todd & Laura Jade in a playful re-encounter with the tradition of the ‘miniature'.
2016
Sydney artists Thea Weiss and Anna Russell displayed their paintings, etchings and installations in Wagga Wagga, the largest inland city in NSW.
The work responded to their experiences in Wagga Wagga, which means “meeting place of the crows”, referencing the history of its famous resident, poet and journalist Mary Gilmore, her relationship with her city, the numerous birds – crows, black swans, curlews, cranes - walking the Wiradjuri track and viewing old birthing trees in Wilks Park to its future, the changing nature of the landscape and the many waterways of the Murrumbidgee.
Display at Angel Place Hall, Sydney
Creative Responses to the Holocaust
A film by Sarita Gold
This touching film was shown at the Yom Hashoah memorial service, representing how Thea's art portrays the harrowing tales of Lotte's past.
In a moving and memorable ceremony Sydney-based Thea Weiss has presented an etching portait of Lotte Weiss to the Holocaut Museum in Jerusalem's Yad Vashem. Gathered at the presentation were relations of the Weiss family from Vienna and London as well as family and friends from many parts of Israel of whom many were Wellingtonians.
Full J-Wire article / 4 Jan http://www.jwire.com.au/59038-2/
2015
My Two Lives
New Zealand Portrait Gallery
Wellington, New Zealand
Opened by Mrs Nancy Gilbert, Trustee, US Holocaust Memorial Council and wife of Mr Mark Gilbert, US Ambassador to New Zealand
When Thea began listening to her mother-in-law Lotte’s Holocaust tales, she never imagined she would spend years turning the stories into artworks. The exhibition My Two Lives, inspired by Lotte’s 2003 book of the same name, contrasts the unimaginable horror and losses of her youth, when she was interned in the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp and Teresienstadt, with her valiant post-war efforts to rebuild her life in New Zealand and Australia.
Australian Jewish News article / 16 October - PDF
J Wire article / 2 October - PDF
2014
Palette Show
Waverley-Woollahra Art School
Sydney, Australia
2013
In Bloom
Galleryeight
Sydney, Australia
Galleryeight presents In Bloom, a group show featuring five artists from around Australia, who produce work that enhances our view of the physical world around us. These artists explore the relationship between shape and colour, representation and abstraction, pattern and chaos, human and environmental nature.
Thea's journey to Fowlers Gap in outback NSW was the beginning of her discovery of a vast, unspoilt and arid land. The earth colours were of dry, cracked creek beds while the pinks flashed across the sky in magnificent sunsets.
Mapping Memory
Incinerator Art Space Exhibition
Willoughby, Australia
Mapping Memory - Venita Poblocki, Curator, opening the exhibition.
Places and objects can hold personal and collective memories. These sites form important elements of societies past and present; they establish a history and create a present and inform our future. Through shared meaning, they connect us to one another and form the fabric of our society.
In Mapping Memory, nine artists consider where memories are located. They regard the significance of geographical, architectural, spiritual, cultural, material and imaginary sites where these personal and collective memories may reside. The exhibition includes sculpture, painting, etching, prints, site-specific installation, video & sound works by artists Cyrus Tang, Kath Fries, Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe (Makeshift), Thea Weiss, Tim Bruniges & Sarah Mosca, Megan Cope and Nick Fintan.
Mapping Memory, Incinerator Art Space - PDF
the telegraph / 22 June
Patterns and Structures
Xavier Art Space
St Vincent's Hospital
Sydney, Australia
There are patterns everywhere in nature and numbers, waiting to be recognised and deciphered. Gematria, the Jewish tradition built upon the belief that numbers are a path to understanding the pattern, plays an integral part in informing my practice as a Sydney based printmaker and painter.
Thea Weiss exhibitions / Patterns & Structures - PDF
The Australian Jewish News / 21 June
2012
Beginning With Printmaking - Integrative practice and crossing borders
11th Nationwide Academies of Fine Arts Printmaking Biennial
Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts
Guangzhou, China
Identity II
Fowler's Gap
A Group Exhibition
COFAspace, College of Fine Arts
Sydney, Australia
According to the Book of Genesis, "In the beginning, G_d created the heavens and the earth." The beginning of my creative appreciation of the heavens and the earth was the week spent in Fowlers Gap.
The 49 panels refer to the Sabbath's meaning in scripture. Twenty-eight panels have sewn text which relate to each of the seven days of creation. The other panels feature etchings done on zinc and lino and drawings in a variety of medium.
Fire & Ice:
Survival of the Spirit
Sydney Jewish Museum
Sydney, Australia
The exhibition continued the exploration of Thea's mother-in-law, Lotte Weiss' existence as inmate 2065 at Auschwitz concentration camp.
The title refers to the opening lines of American poet Robert Frost's poem: "Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice".
It is said he was inspired by a passage in Dante's Inferno in which a horrific ending awaits the evil tormentors. Surrounded by the fires of hell, their bodies are submerged in caskets of ice.
Whilst her mother-in-law Lotte was digging in the fields with her two sisters, Lilly and Erika, they noticed a terrible smell of burning flesh. They looked up to heaven and saw the black smoke. Lotte's sisters said: "Today is the end of the world" Lotte's survival represents the victory of the human spirit – testimony to its determination to survive the most difficult conditions. Lotte was a blossom not crushed by the Nazis.
The Australian Jewish News / 7 October
An artistic vision of survival - PDF
The Australian Jewish News / 4 November
Messages From The South
Art Museum of National Taiwan University of Arts
New Taipei City, Taiwan
Identity II
2010
Fragile Fragments: Expressions of Memory
Mincberg Gallery, Holocaust Museum Houston
Houston, Texas, USA
"Fragile Fragments: Expressions of Memory" raises an intriguing question: how is the Holocaust memorialized in the visual arts and how will it be remembered by future generations?
The exhibit examines the complex relationship between art and loss as seen from the perspectives of four different female artists – Thea Weiss, Roz Jacobs, Nancy Patz and Ziva Eisenberg. Each of these artists worked directly with a Holocaust survivor to create their body of work highlighted in the exhibition.
Weiss is an Australian artist whose series of paintings entitled "2065 – A Healed Memory" recounts the life of her mother-in-law and Holocaust survivor, Lotte Weiss, the only survivor of a close-knit family of eight Czechoslovakian Jews who were decimated by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
2065: A Healed Memory
Virginia Holocaust Museum
Richmond, Virginia USA
Through the journey of MY TWO LIVES, the experiences of Lotte's life in Auschwitz, Thea found that there has been so much to interpret.
Richmond Magazine
Profiles in Courage
Click Here to download PDF
2009
2065: A Healed Memory
Gross Gallery, Jewish Museum of Australia
Gandel Centre of Judaica
Melbourne, Australia
2008
2065: A Healed Memory
Mary Place Gallery
Sydney, Australia
Opened by
Dr Gene Sherman AM
Chairman & Executive Director Sherman Contempary Art Foundation
Past Shows
National Art School graduate show
Sydney, Australia
2006