Freehand @ Heide MoMA

Sunday, 6 March 2011

Freehand @ Heide MoMA

The exhibition Freehand at Heidi focuses on contemporary Australian works on paper. The visitor to the exhibition is greeted by the giant Tooth and Claw by ex de Medici. Her watercolours are always remarkable for the high quality of execution and superb draughtsmanship, and this large-scale work on paper is no exception. It depicts two skeletons, one of which is supporting on its shoulder a giant gun, while the other is being crushed by the weight of the second gun. The weapons are surrounded by darting swallows and garlands of carnations. Soviet-style five-pointed stars are interspersed throughout the intricate background design of the watercolour, and they also appear etched on the barrel of one of the guns, alongside the Stars of David. One would have wished to learn more about the intricate and complex narrative of this superb watercolour, but the information provided in the catalogue is rather meagre. While the multi-layered semantics of guns and skeletons are almost self-explanatory, as are carnations, which are symbolic of fallen soldiers, I am rather intrigued by the Jewish and Soviet references, which will remain a mystery for the time being (unless the artist, or someone who is well-versed in her iconography would care to contact me).

As one steps back to admire the large de Medici, one literally stumbles across a long trestle table supporting a work by Greg Creek. It is very similar to what the artist has been producing over the last ten years, and comparable examples had been shown in numerous locations, including Creek’s one-man-show at the ACCA. It represents a collection of seemingly unrelated images, executed by the artist over a period of time, and, knowing Greg Creek, it is quite possible that some of the figures and squiggles may have been ‘contributed’ by chance visitors to his studio. The work includes a beautiful glimpse of the Merri Creek Bridge; a highly competent from architectural and perspective points of view vista of Melbourne; and a silhouette from Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer skilfully disguised as a pink blob at the bottom of the page. Greg Creek’s skills and abilities are self-evident in this picture, but after roughly a decade of seeing “clever” works in unfinished state, one almost wishes to rest the eye on a completed piece.

Three works by Mira Gojak create a very strong statement. I must confess that the first time I saw her non-objective abstract pieces at the Murray White Rooms, I did dismiss them as being somewhat on the decorative side. But the more I see them (and one can’t miss a huge Gojak reproduced on a billboard on the corner of Chapel St and Alexandra Ave), the more I am growing appreciative of Gojak’s varied pigment applications; bold balancing of positive and negative spaces within the composition; and pulsating and rhythmical movements of her spiralling and undulating curves.

Another artist who leaves an unforgettable impression is Sandra Selig, whose works I saw for the first time a few years ago at an exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia. In essence, her pieces consist of spider webs, tinted with spay paint and adhesed to a black background. No doubt quite intricate and labour intensive to produce, they create delicate and evocative designs. While the concept is quite ingenious, given the context of this exhibition, these works did make me ponder, that they owe more to the wonder of nature than to the artist’s hand.

One of the artists who manages to produce works of consistent quality is Del Kathryn Barton, who is profiled quite extensively in this exhibition with a large number of works on display. Her drawings are superbly imaginative and disturbingly visceral, a visual chronicle of the artist’s innermost feelings and fears, and while a number of works continue the artist’s mediation on the female body, there are also cryptic references to the masculine fear of castration.

And of course, one cannot go past the quirky madness that is Gosia Wlodarczak’s work. Depending on the direction of your exhibition perambulations, it is either the first or – as in my case – the last work to be seen in the show. Even though the surface of the work is assiduously covered with calligraphic scribbles, and figurative elements disappear under the ever-increasing layers of over-drawing, it retains the ghostly apparition of a car, which it originally covered, and on which the drawing was executed as a staged performance piece over a three-day period. It is interesting that Wlodarczak’s large-scale drawing is exhibited across the archway from the watercolour by ex de Medici, so the two works can be seen simultaneously from a single viewpoint. While Wlodarczak and de Medici’s works could not have been less alike, they converge at the pure joy elicited by both artists at the very act of drawing and picture making, and covering with markings almost every inch of the available surface.

In spite of the presence of a number of figurative artists mentioned above (including a selection of works by such ‘elder statesmen’ of Australian art as Peter Booth and Ken Whisson), the exhibition seems to be weighted more heavily towards abstraction as represented in works by Mario Fusinato, Dom de Clario, Robert McPherson, Eugene Carchesio, Aida Tomescu, and numerous others. Apart from a couple of artists, Freehand seems to overlook contemporary practitioners of traditional figuration, the likes of which one would have encountered, say, in the A.M.E. Bale Scholarship exhibition or on the walls of the Australian Galleries. However, I do accept that this is a strictly curatorial choice, which perhaps eschewed a well-rounded and all-inclusive survey of contemporary drawing in favour of representing recent developments and trends in present-day Australian art. In this the exhibition has fully succeeded by bringing together a representative selection of artists who draw in a variety of media, styles, and genres, and demonstrate in their works a thought-provoking plurality of artistic (self-)expression.

[PS: The photography within the gallery – even without flash – is strictly forbidden. I am relying on images of artists’ comparable works found elsewhere on the net.]

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]

Charles Blackman – Recent Drawings

Tuesday, 18 January 2011

Charles Blackman – Recent Drawings

Over the last few weeks I have been photographing and cataloguing an immense collection of recent drawings by Charles Blackman.

The quantity of the drawings easily exceeds a thousand; most had been drawn within the last few years; most are executed uniformly in black marker pen on good quality thick A3 size paper.

Due to Charles Blackman’s health problems, he all but disappeared for a certain while from the primary market exhibition scene, though his reputation continued to be sustained by his earlier works. However, those close to the artist reassure me that he has been “dry” for more than a decade now; his health is steadily improving; and the urge, the impulse to draw sustained the artist not only throughout his most difficult years but also contributed immensely to his present recovery.

Gallery goers may have caught glimpses of Blackman’s recent drawings at the Art House in Sydney and Mossgreen in Melbourne. The subject matter revolves around the artist’s favourite themes of the past. The drawings are populated by numerous images of Alice, schoolgirls, mermaids, butterflies, cats, and rabbits. But there is also a renewed emphasis on the study of the nude, a result of life drawing either at his studio or that of his close friend and fellow artist Judy Cassab.

Others are responses to current events; movies the artist may have seen either at cinema or at home; books he may have read with numerous references to Lewis Carroll, Dickens, Poe and Proust; visual comments on other artists’ works from Matisse to Picasso, Brack, and everyone in-between; whimsical renderings of historical events such as the Trojan War, Battle of Trafalgar, sinking of the Titanic or the Pearl Harbour; others are just humorous sketches with titles like Olga Diving into Volga bound to amuse any viewer.

In spite of his advanced years (the artist will be turning 83 this year) and continuous battle with the Korsakoff syndrome, these drawings show that Blackman retained the surety of the line, knowledge of human and animal forms, ability to render his thoughts and impressions with enviable brevity and laconicity of visual expression.

While looking through these drawings, I asked a colleague: “Given the sheer variety of styles and subject matter even within this group of works as opposed to the entire oeuvre of the artist, how can one tell which Blackmans are real and which ones are fake?” He replied without hesitation: “With Blackman, the line and image are immediate; with the fake ones, they are always contrived…”

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgement.]

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]

Rick Amor Sculpture @ McClelland Gallery

Wednesday, 10 February 2010

Dear Diary,

Another artist whose foray into the third dimension has been recently profiled in an exhibition is Rick Amor, though his engagement with sculpture is more consistent rather than Firth-Smith’s episodic approach.

The exhibition at the McClelland Gallery concentrates on this well known, yet perhaps little examined aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. His sculpture is very much an extension of his paintings, and Amor continues his exploration of landscape and the human condition in his three-dimensional works.

Therefore, we see the proliferation of dark tree trunks, which are of pivotal compositional importance in his landscape paintings; shadowy figure of a running man, which makes a fleeting but memorable appearance in his paintings and drawings; and the figure of a stocky businessman, whose pensive tilt of the head and heavy sloping shoulders seemed to be weighed down by the problems of the entire world as well as by his own psychological dilemmas. The configuration of objects within the exhibition space likewise recreates the motives and narratives of his paintings.

There are also various representations of dogs, which seem to have sprung forth directly from the canvasses, where they appear standing, sleeping, or chasing their tails. Amor’s canine gallery is supplemented by the artist’s exploration of the metamorphosis between man and dog, which emphatically recalls ancient Egyptian artefacts.

The sculptures are executed in black patinated bronze from clay or alabaster moulds. The artist’s finger marks, as he pushed and shaped the malleable medium, have been preserved in the casts. In this sense, the ghost of Auguste Rodin haunts this gallery, though some of his human and canine figures approach the attenuated silhouettes of Alberto Giacometti.

The sculptures are displayed in a darkened room, setting the pensive, meditative mood for the exhibition, which also includes two giant drawings on the scale one normally would not see at Melbourne’s  Niagara Galleries. The Dog and The Runner, both of 1990, correspond semantically to the sculpted three-dimensional figures in the exhibition. They are drawn in charcoal with the enviable sense of verve, energy, and artistic confidence, representing Amor as the undoubted master of the black and white medium.

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