Rhys Lee @ Karen Woodbury Gallery

Wednesday, 22 June 2011

Rhys Lee @ Karen Woodbury Gallery

Rhys Lee invited a number of his friends, including artists Heidi Yardley, Chris Pennings, Matthew Hinkley, Daniel Price, Robert McHaffie, and ceramicist Pia Murphy, to collaborate on an exhibition at the Karen Woodbury Gallery. The result is a vibrant display of paintings, works on paper, and ceramics produced by every artist in the show either in collaboration with Rhys Lee or individually. It is fascinating to seek out elements of each artist in the collaborative pieces; works on paper with Heidi Yardley (especially Owl and Irma) and the ceramics with Pia Murphy are among the most felicitous collaborations in the exhibition.

Although I have the deepest admiration for Rhys Lee, I have to confess I always had an ambivalent relationship with his works. He has well developed and formulated thoughts and ideas, a wild imagination, and a desire to express it through visual medium. Perhaps the most outstanding exhibition I have seen of his to date was a show of small black and white drawings at Helen Gory. It was also perhaps the most honest exhibition by the artist I have seen. Reduced to black and white, he was able to express his angst best; and works on paper are by far his best metier.

However, when it comes to canvas, he just somehow loses it. The awkwardness of his figures seems amateurish rather than intentionally abstracted; the constant and relentless mixing of colours results in muddiness rather than complex and sophisticated layering. Manila 1 and Manila 2 illustrate this point. Both paintings are based on the same stencil-like skull and monkey drawing. Manila 1 is more simple compositionally, layered with fewer colours, and is more successful by comparison with Manila 2, where constant mixing of pigments results in the overall muddy gamut. In Winged Figure, done in collaboration with Heidi Yardley, the attention is drawn immediately to the face of the girl with a snout by Yardley. The surrounding colours are by Lee, and while two thirds of the canvas feature complex layers of pinks, reds, blues, and purples, the addition of greens and blacks results in a muddy, brown cacophony towards the lower third of the picture.

As usual, Rhys is best on paper, and Reclining Figure and Baboon are cases in point. More minimal and immediate, compositionally simplified, they are infinitely sharper than his canvasses, and deliver his ideas with greater psychological force and conceptual aplomb. It is as if the medium of paper, which absorbs pigments faster than canvas, require from Lee rapid thinking and immediate decision making as to the form, composition, and colour palette, and simply does not allow the artist as many mistakes as a more complex and protracted medium of painting on canvas.

But to finish this entry on a positive note, Rhys Lee increasingly excels in 3D objects. I have been struck by his sculptures from the moment I saw them at Helen Gory and Tim Olsen a few years ago. His fashioning of clay somehow preserves the same raw emotion and dark sublimation in sculpture as it does on paper; and his glazes are – frankly – superb, especially in Masks (though my attraction to these pieces is probably subconsciously informed by similar works by Stacha Halpern from the 1960s). Blue Tongue and Vampire are especially interesting for their direct correlation to the works on paper, but perhaps the most outstanding exhibit is Skeletons, an installation of one hundred Mexican-totem-pole-inspired pieces and, in spite of repeated compositional elements of skulls and bones, each statuette is unique and individual. Beautifully executed, featuring lusciously thick glazes of various shades of blue (with brown and orange underglazing), they are at once haunting and engaging, standing to attention like a rather macabre set of chess pieces or the ghostly soldiers of William Longstaff’s The Menin Gate.

www.kwgallery.com

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but full or partial use is welcome with proper acknowledgement. Where applicable, images are courtesy of the artists and their galleries.]

Some Recent Exhibitions (June 2010)

Tuesday, 3 August 2010

Dear Diary,

I forgot to scribble about some recent exhibitions I had seen.

John Buckley presented new works by Emma van Leest and Christian Lock in June.

Christian Lock’s paintings are elegant, minimal, abstract meditations with subtle colour variations interspersed with deliciously thick blobs of paint reminiscent of Jules Olitski’s 1960s experimentations. While the gallery sheet indicated that each painting is supposed to have shown the artist’s environmental concerns, these were not evident in the paintings. Normally, I rebel against the works which I perceive as being purely decorative. However, I found the calm and contemplative beauty of Lock’s creations disarming. [Price Guide: $4,000-$6,000]

Emma van Leest continues working with silhouette cut-outs. Her mastery and craftsmanship in this medium are superb and faultless. The works are evocative of vignette-like 18^th and 19^th-century silhouettes, by which van Leest is clearly inspired. The artist’s recent overseas trips have resulted in the appearance of Eastern motives within her work. However, executed on larger than usual scale, I feel the works have lost some of their earlier charm and intimacy.

Everything in van Leest’s works is whimsical, peaceful, and playful. One cannot detect the tiniest bit of conflict or drama within them. Let me elaborate. In 2004, Lisa Roet took an inspiration from traditional stained glass windows in order to narrate the story of Ham, the first chimp in space in 20^th-Century comic-book style. In 2008, Mark Hilton adapted most remarkably the style of 17^th-century Indian Mughal miniature painting in order to depict the then recent outbreaks of violence against women in Sydney. In comparison to the above, van Leest’s works neither add nor contemporise the traditional art of silhouette cut-outs, and thus appear escapist and indulgent by comparison. [Price Guide: $7,700]

Also in June, Lara Merrett presented a strong body of work at Karen Woodbury’s. I suspect I am not the only one who, upon seeing her paintings, was moved to exclaim: “Dale Frank!” At first glance, there is indeed a sense of commonality between the two artists, as both use large, sweeping, vibrant pools of paint. However, the differences become apparent upon a closer examination. Merrett predominantly uses acrylics, which result in a flatter, less glossy appearance of her works. Furthermore, if Frank’s paintings are the result of poured and manipulated liquid pigments, to the best of my observations, Merrett combines pouring as well as actual brush application. These are further embellished by finely executed dot and spider web motives which sporadically appear throughout the paintings and are not immediately apparent. While I would declare such works as Side by Side, In Your Face, and Last One Out as superb, there are still a few muddy passages within her paintings. However, given the artist’s youth, I am certain that these less than auspicious pigment combinations will be further resolved as her career progresses. [Price Guide: $14,000-$18,000]

I could not buy into the enthusiastic reception, which surrounded the latest body of photographic works by Jill Orr at her recent Vision exhibition at Jenny Port’s in June. As I was gazing at a group photo of school children, whose faces were covered with white clay, one name was screaming back at me… Marlene Dumas (while individual photographs of the same children are strongly reminiscent of Warren Brenninger’s works). Orr, in my opinion, remains one of the most outstanding and remarkable performance artists in Australia, and I am still haunted by the visions of her Bleeding Trees, Exhume the Grave, and the most recent Faith in Faithless Land images. Hence, I felt slightly disappointed by Vision in the context of the artist’s previous highly-imaginative and original performances and photographic exhibitions. [Price Guide: $2,500]

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

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]