Snapshot of Exhibitions in Albert Street, Richmond

Saturday, 21 March 2010

Dear Diary,

I have immediately responded to the joint display of paintings by Dale Hickey and sculptures by Peter D. Cole at John Buckley Gallery. It is nothing short of curatorial genius, as these interdisciplinary works speak to each other in terms of colour, shapes, and compositions.

I love Leslie Dumbrell as a person and respect her as an artist. I have always held a candle to her art as the most important exponent of Op Art in Australia, and continue to posit her as Australia’s answer to Bridget Riley. Her paintings, also on view at John Buckley Gallery, are beautifully and meticulously executed; her works on paper provide an insight to her creative genius. However, those who have followed her artistic career might agree that this exhibition lacks the visual intensity and optical excitement of the previous decades.

I was pleased to see that Simon Obarzanek at Karen Woodbury’s gave up his earlier quest of becoming an Australian version of Thomas Ruff. His closely cropped and tightly framed photographs feature people who appear to have been violently and forcibly pushed or thrown to the ground. In addition to excellent camera work and handling of the medium, the works are filled with the transcendent physical and emotional intensity deserving of this remarkable photographic artist.

I was glad to have caught a glimpse of photographs by Jenny Bolis at Anita Traverso Gallery across the road. As Anita explained to me, this modest display was arranged to accompany the launch of Bolin’s book of photography. However, even this modest presentation showed the depths and strengths of this photographic artist, some of whose works are imbued with a quality of a film noir still, and others are indicative of Bolis’s masterful abilities (and her delight) in capturing fleeting light effects and studying the deepest recesses of shadows.

I was rather underwhelmed by the exhibition of abstract paintings by Michael Mark at Jenny Port Gallery. An over-enthusiastic arts writer (either from The Age or Herald Sun) ventured to compare them to Rothko, and the artist and the dealer must be beside themselves with joy for having at their fingertips a journalist with such shallow perception and limited reference points. To me they look like interior decorator’s versions of Charlie Sheard’s much deeper abstract colour explorations.

I can never forgo the excellence in execution, and in the line-up of current exhibitions at Albert Street galleries, two artists clearly stand out in this regard.

Drawings by Mark Hislop at Sophie Gannon Gallery have inspired in me the same sort of incredulous admiration as do drawings by David Warren. They defy one’s comprehension that something so beautiful and complex can be achieved by a humble medium of pencil. His works are hyper-realist head and shoulder portraits, though every person is pictured from behind. Another photo-realist figurative artist, Michael Zavros, who also exhibits with Sophie Gannon, has obliterated faces in his portrait drawings to strip his models of individuality and turn them into generic clothes horses (and yes, I do realise the pun, given Zavros’s equine obsessions). Hislop, on the other hand, preserves the hidden individualism of his sitters by the minute portrayal of their hairstyles and the tops of their garments. Despite their apparent voyeurism, the works are imbued with a sense of intimacy.

Another outstanding works from the point of view of technical superiority are those by Alice Wormald, exhibited diagonally opposite at Shifted. Her watercolours of animals are meticulously crafted and strikingly superb. Now, the watercolour is one of the hardest, least forgiving mediums. Unlike pencils or charcoals which can be rubbed out, or thickly opaque gouaches, acrylics, and oils that can be painted over, the thin and transparent nature of watercolours means that every mistake, every wrong brushstroke is visible and immediately apparent. Hence my sense of wonder about this young artist, who has confidently filled sheets after sheets of paper with the most detailed and meticulous watercolour studies of dogs, birds, and marsupials. Her (almost) taxonomic approach is akin to the faunal interest, which is prevalent in contemporary Australian (and international) art as evident in the works by Sam Leach, Natalie Ryan, Katie Rohde, Fiona Foley, and many others. It will be interesting to see how this young and gifted artist will progress on her creative journey.

[© Eugene Barilo v. Reisberg 2010. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]