Vale Harry Wedge

Harold James (HJ) Wedge
Artist
1957-2012

Photograph © Greg Weight, 1993
Courtesy the artist and National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Australian artnotes November/December 2012

David Corbet's Australian artnotes appear in edited form in Art Monthly Australia

Above: Tony Albert Pay Attention, 2012, exhibited at unDisclosed: 2^nd National Indigenous Art Triennial, NGA Canberra, courtesy the artist and NGA.

This last column for the year is a good time to look both back and forward, so here’s a personal take on 2012 and beyond. 2013 is an election year, and pessimists point to recent savage cuts to arts funding, by the incoming NSW and QLD governments, as a foretaste of the Federal Coalition approach, should they win national government. The record suggests this fear may be overstated – Australia enjoys a remarkable bipartisan consensus around arts funding and no sudden shocks are expected either way. The conventional wisdom is that Labour takes the Arts vote for granted, whereas the Opposition knows they have to court it assiduously but quietly. For arts administrators continuity, index linked, is the name of the game.

Bricks and mortar

In terms of new spaces, the big addition was the new-look MCA Australia, re-booted in April as a de facto national museum. This follows a strong run of building in recent years – Brisbane’s GoMA, the NGA Canberra’s new wing, Hobart’s MONA and the AGNSW’s new Kaldor galleries. MONA, designed by Nona Katsalidis, won the Australian Institute of Architects’ coveted Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Public Architecture 2012. Due for completion in early-mid 2013 are UNSW’s new COFA galleries in Sydney, and stage 1 of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery’s redevelopment. In Sydney ground was broken on the Barangaroo precinct and the ‘hollow hill’ of the northern Headland Park will contain a massive (and so-far vaguely-defined) underground ‘cultural space’. This site has long been championed as an ideal one for a National Indigenous Museum or Cultural Centre, but its underground setting would send all the wrong signals. A stand-alone new building in Barangaroo central appears more likely, situated in a ‘living’ zone of apartments and businesses. This is closer to the National Trust’s alternative vision, which envisaged a cruise ship terminal and a Cultural Centre near the water. It would also be within shouting distance of James Packer’s new 6-star Crown hotel and high-roller casino, if he gets his way, which seems likely. Maybe the penny will drop and Packer, who has made much of his commitment to Indigenous employment, will realise that the way to sweeten the deal is to pay for a new Indigenous Cultural Centre – at say $60 million it would be just a fraction of the 1 billion plus cost of the new hotel. 2015-19 is the completion period for the precinct.

Blockbusters

International blockbusters have had a robust year, particularly at State gallery level, with fierce competition between the capitals to secure the biggest crowd-pullers. The most popular offerings still tend to be pre-20^th century, and there is a trend towards borrowing their contents while overseas museums are undergoing redevelopment. Following the runaway success of the 2010/11 Musée d’Orsay loan-show Masterpieces from Paris, the NGA followed up with Renaissance (from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo) and is now showing Toulouse-Lautrec (until 15 April 2013). The NGV International showed Napoleon: Revolution to Empire; The Mad Square; and currently Radiance: The Neo-Impressionists (until 17 March 2013), and has announced a mid-2013 blockbuster – Monet’s Garden: The Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris (10 May - 25 Aug). AGNSW’s big-ticket loan show in 2012 was Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris and currently Francis Bacon: Five Decades (until 24 Feb 2013). These expensive imports fall under a NSW state government initiative: the Sydney International Art Series (SIAS), and the MCA Australia hosts the other part of this: Anish Kapoor (until 1 April 2013). The MCA has already announced its next SIAS offering: War Is Over! (if you want it): Yoko Ono, curated by Rachel Kent (14 November 2013 – 23 February 2014). Other upcoming MCA highlights are: South of No North - Laurence Aberhart, William Eggleston, Noel McKenna (8 March – 5 May); Jeff Wall Photographs (1 May – 28 July); and Wangechi Mutu (23 May – 11 August). Perth’s AGWA secured a 6-exhibition partnership with New York’s MoMA until 2015, with the first instalment, Picasso to Warhol, on show until 3 December 2012. Next up in 2013 is Picturing New York (16 Jan – 12 May) followed by Van Gogh to Richter (22 June – 2 December). QAG/GoMA’s major 2012 import was Portrait of Spain: Masterpieces from the Prado.

Biennale-land

It has been a very big year for bi/triennials: AGSA’s Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art; the NGA’s undisclosed: National Indigenous Art Triennial; the Biennale of Sydney (BoS); the Tarrawarra Biennial and QAG/GoMA’s Asia Pacific Triennial (APT, 8 Dec – 14 April 2013). In addition there was significant Australian participation in Germany’s Documenta and China’s Shanghai Biennale. Simryn Gill will represent Australia at the 2013 Venice Biennale, curated by Belgian Catherine de Zegher (co-curator of BoS 18), also curator of the 5th Moscow Biennale in 2013, which is expected to include a number of Australian artists. BoS 18 established a new attendance record for an Australian contemporary art exhibition, although APT figures may exceed these by April next year.

Import/Export

Urban Australians have other opportunities to see international contemporary art. Alongside the major National and State institutions, funded entities like ACCA (Melbourne), PICA (Perth), CACSA and AEAF (Adelaide), IMA (Brisbane) and the 4A Centre (Sydney) consistently present interestimg new work. The University galleries augment this, aided by some of the more adventurous Regional galleries. On the export side, apart from biennials, Paris’s Musée du Quai Branly is currently showing Aux Sources de la Peinture Aborigène (Central Desert), curated by Judith Ryan (NGV) and Philipp Batty (Melbourne Museum) until 20 January 2013. BALGO showed in Havana, Cuba and Message Stick: Indigenous Identity in Urban Australia, toured the Pacific and Africa. Lie of the Land: New Australian Landscapes was at the Australian Embassy in Washington DC, and Healy and Cordeiro showed Are we there yet? at the city’s Corcoran Gallery. Two overseas institutions dedicated to Australian Indigenous art continue to present a varied program: The Kluge-Ruhe Collection in Charottesville, Virginia and the privately-benefacted Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art (AAMU) in Utrecht (Netherlands). There was increased participation by Australian commercial galleries at regional art fairs, with Art Hong Kong asserting itself as by far the most important fair in the Asia Pacific region. Michael Reid exhibited in Berlin and Janet Clayton in Beijing.

Private patronage

Along with MONA in Hobart, Sydney’s privately-funded White Rabbit and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) continued to present international contemporary art at the highest level. White Rabbit celebrated its third anniversary with Double Take, a ‘greatest hits’ show, and SCAF presented Janet Laurence After Eden; Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan In-Habit: Project Another Country; and Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture (in conjunction with NPG Canberra). Australia’s longest-established independent art patron, Kaldor Public Art Projects, mounted Project 25: Thomas Demand (The Dailies, MLC Centre, Sydney); Project 26: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla (Stop, Repair, Prepare, State Library of Victoria); and announced Project 27 (13 Rooms, Walsh Bay, Sydney) for early 2013. Melbourne has a new ‘private presenter’ in the form of Matthias Arndt, who will present ‘museum-quality artists in unconventional settings outside the traditional white cube space’. While he continues to run his eponymous Berlin gallery, he is now based in Melbourne and his first show of over 90 works, titled Migration Melbourne, runs at Ormond Hall until 15 December.

The market

The best that can be said about the art market in 2012 is that very few dealers actually went to the wall. Despite some new records, auction results overall were lacklustre, and smaller commercial galleries continue to do it tough. Many will tell you that ‘quality works’ have no problem finding buyers, particularly at the premium end. It is the emergent and early career market (works under $5k) that is having the worst time of it, and this of course impacts on secondary sales. For a decade until 2008/9, young professionals with rapidly appreciating real estate drove this sector, and they just aren’t spending like they used to. The pressure on gallery prices is noticeable – art by early-career Australian artists remains very competitively priced by world standards, and shrewd buyers should do well when the resale market recovers, but don’t hold your breath. Pessimists blame two local factors for the ‘otherwise inexplicable’ doldrums – the Federal Resale Royalty Scheme, and the tightening of rules for self-managed superannuation funds, but there is little evidence to suggest these are significant factors. No-one really knows why people are being so tight-fisted, but the same trend is visible in retail markets generally – a new Zeitgeist of caution and paying down debt. It is fortunate that Australia offers relatively good support to young artists through a combination of city, state and Federal funding mechanisms, because the commercial market doesn’t look like making a strong comeback in 2013.

Arts policy

2012 has been something of a waiting game for policy wonks, with the outcomes of multiple reports and policy reviews still in the pipeline. The most-awaited of many is undoubtedly the Federal Government’s National Cultural Policy, mooted for 2012 but looking increasingly unlikely as the year ticks away. Harold Mitchell delivered some sensible, if hardly revolutionary, recommendations in his Review of Private Sector Support for the Arts. Gabrielle Trainor and Angus James’ Review of the Australia Council for the Arts proposed among 18 key recommendations that Ozco focus on nurturing ‘excellence’, and that arts programs that exist primarily to provide access should be managed and funded by the Federal Arts Department, separating ‘access from excellence’. Unexpectedly, Minister Crean responded by allocating responsibility for all Federal touring programs (Playing Australia, Visions of Australia, Festivals Australia, the Contemporary Music Touring Program, Contemporary Touring Initiative and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy) to Ozco, which will no doubt mean major staffing-up at Ozco’s Sydney HQ. The Federal Government’s Asian Century White Paper has been broadly welcomed, but deemed short on specifics. According to Ozco the paper ‘lays out a series of pathways for Australian arts, artists and cultural institutions to play a pivotal role in building our relationships and networks across our region’, an admirable sentiment, and about as vague as you can get. ACARA has competed the consultation period for the Draft Australian Curriculum: The Arts, with revisions expected in February 2013.

Restless: The Adelaide International

David Corbet's review of Restless appears in edited form in the July 2012 Issue of Art Monthly Australia

Above: Nancy Spero, Maypole: Take No Prisoners II, 2008 (detail), Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, (March 3-May 2, 2011), © 2011 Jerry Hardman-Jones.

Victoria Lynn’s second Adelaide International, titled Restless, left some people feeling a little … well, restless. The disquiet focussed on venues and presentation – I heard it remarked that Restless struggled to achieve thematic ‘momentum’. Some suggested this wasn’t the best work from some very distinguished artists, for example a decade-old video work (Gringo, 2003) by celebrated Belgian/Mexican artist Francis Alÿs. Spread across four widespread venues, none of them ideal, this selection of eighteen international artists had none of the advantages of the Biennale at AGSA (see article), i.e. a contiguous, dedicated space and a generous production budget.

Do such second-hand gripes have a place in any serious critique of contemporary art? Probably not, but in any discussion of ‘critical culture’ the popular response has a place. Exhibitions once the preserve of scholarly journals are now regularly critiqued by the mainstream press – indeed it’s been decades since Carl André’s bricks (Tate Britain) made the front page of Britain’s Daily Mirror (‘Whaddaloadarubbish!’). Which isn’t to say that all contemporary art gets a bad press – British art thrives on a kind of tabloid notoriety (think Tracey Emin), and Australia is gradually getting the hang of it – you only had to witness seniors chortling over Wim Delvoye’s anal kisses at MONA to appreciate this. If once it was old masters or impressionists who could reliably drum up the crowds, we now live in the age of the contemporary crowd-pleaser, Christian Marclay’s hugely popular The Clock (MCA Sydney) being an excellent example. Attendance figures are pored over as never before, and state tourism bodies fall over each other to compete for contemporary kudos – I recently heard MONA described as ‘Hobart’s Bridgeclimb’. Viewed in these terms, it’s perhaps not surprising that the International’s quiet seriousness might fail to connect with the public taste for sensation and spectacle. But enough with the popular zeitgeist, let’s get to the art. And to the ideas – the Artist’s Week forums were an important part of the overall visual arts program, of which more below.

Samstag hosted the greater part of Restless, and the downstairs space featured the late Nancy Spero’s major opus Maypole/take no prisoners (2007), alongside N.S. Harsha’s Extraction (2012) and Lisa Reihana’s PELT (2010) series. This room was the closest thing to spectacle offered by Restless, and Harsha’s engaing whole-wall painting, of figures falling towards installed piles of stone, rope and sugarcane, was rendered in naïve style and bright, flat colours. The notion of extraction was most readily apparent in the juice leaking stickily from the crushed sugar cane, but the artist talks in more general terms about the human need to ‘extract meaning’. Spero’s majestic maypole, each strand culminating in a 2-D severed head cut from plate aluminium, dominated the room, but would have benefited from a dedicated space, and more dramatic lighting. The 200 heads, graphically rendered in paint and collage, represent the victims of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, and are stylistically evocative of Goya’s Misfortunes of War etchings, and also of Dadang Christanto’s severed heads.

Lisa Reihana’s large photomedia works are described by the curator as “interpretations of imagined beings presented in digitally-rendered utopian landscapes” and the artist invokes the Maori concept of an ‘under/other’ world. The works, depicting alabaster-white women glamorously adorned with animal pelts, explore the vocabulary of idealised fashion images, but the titles (Aquila, Camarillo, Sabino, Pilosus) refer to horses, monkeys and eagles, all powerful totems in many Indigenous mythologies. Reihana is well known for her powerful depictions of Maori figures, and these works expand her themes into an interrogation of hybrid cultural identity. Greek/Cypriot Socratis Sacratous also uses photomedia in his series Architectural Strategy series (2011). These images initially read as abstractions and could, at first glance, have been computer rendered, but are in fact photographs of shards of metal and wood thrown into the air and frozen in time. For the Athens-based artist, these are evocations of social upheaval and civic disorder. They left me emotionally cold, but perhaps that is the point. I do get their liminal allure, and it’s interesting that a Socratous work was the key image for the International’s marketing.

Everything else at Samstag was video, and this may explain the lukewarm response. However it was here that I found the curatorial themes resonating most strongly, with three works of particular note: Anri Sala’s Answer me (2008), Danae Stratou’s The Globalising Wall (2011) and Saskia Olde Wolbers Pareidolia (2011). Albanian/German Sala’s claustrophobic and aurally unsettling piece was shot under an echoing (Bucky Fuller) dome, once a Soviet-era ‘listening station’ in Berlin. In his words “A woman tries to end a relationship, her companion refuses to listen and plays the drums fiercely to silence her. Next to her, the drumsticks resting on a vacant drum play to the echo of his drumming”. Stratou, an Athenian woman, has compiled a grimly compelling, rapid slideshow of stills taken in the shadows of walls in Berlin, Kosovo, Palestine, Kashmir, Korea, Northern Ireland, Mexico and California. Wolbers’ (Netherlands/UK) piece is truly strange in the best sense of the word. Computer-generated plant/bird-like forms are intercut with shots of Japanese interiors, but it is the soundtrack that equally beguiles, drawn from the book Zen in the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel. Alÿs’s work, referred to earlier, features a low-res re-enactment of a dog attack encountered on one of the artist’s marathon walks, in the Mexican province of Hidalgo. Alÿs has said how he “instinctively used the camera … as a shield to protect myself from the dogs’ aggression”. The work sat well within the International’s dystopian undercurrents, but nevertheless struggles in its own terms to be more than a record of a banal incident, quite possibly the artist’s intention.

At the Flinders University City Gallery, the Indigenous USA collective Postcommodity presented an excellent multi-channel work: With salvage and my knife tongue (2011-12), in which American and Australian Indigenous people speak direct and close-up to camera, their utterances digitally comingled and iterated into an absorbing meditation on global indigeneity. ACSA presented three artists: Chosil Kil (South Korea), Rabih Mroué (Lebanon) and Jinoos Taghizadeh (Iran), with selections evidently restricted by space limitations. Kil, a renowned large-scale installation artist, presented a series of smallish ‘three-dimensional’ geometric paintings. Mroué and Taghizadeh showed wall-hung works with strong stylistic similarities – both working in low-res graphic montage, around documentation of the missing and displaced.

Finally to AEAF, and Teresa Margolles – perhaps the component that exemplified the problems faced by a project like Restless. To a critic armed with a knowledge of Margolles’s ouevre, 127 cuerpos (127 bodies, 2006, installation with remnants of autopsy threads), it was a case of ‘De que otra podremos hablar?’ (What else can we talk about?, the title of her 2007 Venice Biennale installation). To the uninitiated it was a grubby string (actually 127 short pieces tied together) suspended across an otherwise empty gallery. Margolles’s refusal to engage in facile spectacle presents an age-old curatorial conundrum – how to present difficult but important conceptual art in an accessible way? A showman like Delvoye makes death kinda fun and shiny, but Margolles presents its aftermath, in an unadorned, if strangely elegiac style. Hers is the language is of the mortuary, and her long-term collective SEMEFO (Forensic Medical Service) implies a no-nonsense investigative role in her country’s frightening culture of narco-slaughter.

Many writers have discussed the apparent disconnect between the contemporary art of North and South, and the critical/curatorial discourses around it. For me this crystallised during Artist’s Week, in keynotes by two extraordinary thinker/curators –  Jan Verwoerd (Netherlands/Germany), and Cuauhtémoc Medina (Mexico) who curated Margolles’s Venice pavilion and is director of Manifesta (Genk, Belgium, from 2 June). Both delivered absorbing presentations, dense with critical allusion and cultural detail, but I had the sense they were speaking of, and from, different worlds. Verwoerd’s methodology of ‘radical empathy’ is a resonant one. In a tour-de-force that began with Adorno (on mimesis) and ended with a joke about a chicken and a frog borrowing library books, he spoke with originality and humour for an art that reconnects us with natural energies, with magic, with psychic wholeness (not his term). Co-convenor Nick Papastergiadis spoke of it as a kind of paean to ‘the sublime’. Medina took us in a different direction, on a journey into the art of ‘the New South’ – urgent, social, political; engaged with dislocation, murder and mayhem, blood and belonging. “Debates about art”, he said in response to a question from Verwoerd “are the business of the North”.

It seems evident that much of the art of the ‘old’ North is largely self-referential, suffering terminal mannerism and loss of relevance, and spends its time navel-gazing at its own decline. It is engaged in a kind of search for a lost authenticity, and looks for it increasingly in the work of Southern artists. The South just doesn’t get the agonizing. It has emerged, vigorous and vocal, from centuries of colonialism and cultural marginalisation, with its own language of global assertiveness. Straddling this cultural faultline, in the shadow of the wall if you will, is the problematic work presented in Restless. Australia may be miraculously immune, but out there much of the planet is in social turmoil. Like all evils, injustice and oppression have their banalities, and some of their more dispiriting cultural manifestations can feel like a blow upon a bruise. We may not be temperamentally inclined to confront Diaspora and despair as subjects for contemporary art, but in its quiet way Restless brought these things to us. It’s not a relaxed or comfortable feeling, and it’s not supposed to be.

Australian Art Notes: March

These artnotes appear in edited form In Art Monthly Australia 

Above: Tim Silver Untitled installation 2012, featured in the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Parallel Collisions, Art Gallery of South Australia. © Courtesy the artist. Photo courtesy © Jamie North.

Festival circuit

The Adelaide Festival visual arts program was well received, tribute to the prominence accorded the non-performing arts by outgoing artistic director Paul Grabowsky. With 3 major components, the Biennial of Australian Art, the Adelaide International (titled Restless), and Deadly at Tandanya, and three different curatorial teams, this is effectively a ‘whole-of-city’ affair across 6 venues. A substantial Artist’s Week program complemented the exhibitions – see the next issue of AMA for detailed reviews.

Grabowsky, a celebrated pianist and composer in his own right, surprised many by introducing the International to complement the long-running national Biennial, and his appointment of one curator (Victoria Lynn) to do two Internationals in a row was also a first – a scenario that curators dream of but seldom experience. This year marks the start of the Adelaide Festival as an annual event, however the Biennial is likely to remain so. Hopes are high that the incoming director, UK-born David Sefton, who also has strong music programming credentials, will continue to place significant emphasis on the visual arts program. If he does, Adelaide stands a fair chance of achieving parity with Australia’s two ‘international’ events – Brisbane’s APT and Sydney’s Biennale (see below). In Grabowsky’s words, to “get back to where it used to be, as the premier arts festival event in Australia”. Karen Bryant has been announced as the new Chief Executive of the Adelaide Festival, taking over from Kate Gould, who leaves the Festival after ten years.

As we go to press, Sydney’s answer to Adelaide’s March Madness is in full swing – i.e. Art Month Sydney (AMS), and again there is grumbling that as a city-wide ‘event’ it is underwhelming. Essentially AMS functions as an umbrella for the existing activities of commercial galleries, with a couple of institutional participants. Critics suggest that AMS’s current approach of ‘indiscriminately’ attracting large numbers of new visitors to galleries is not really what’s needed, inflates the wine bill for not much return, that more emphasis should be placed on cultivating potential ‘serious’ collectors. It is often said that a decent Sydney Art Fair would give the whole thing a proper focus. Given the sprawling and decentralised Sydney scene, and a duration of one month, AMS struggles to achieve critical mass in the public mind, despite an extensive program of talks and activities.

Museum of Contemporary Art… Australia!

Sydney’s MCA has long been a de facto national institution, punching well above its weight on far less money than the big institutions. With the addition of the word Australia to its title, that status is enhanced, and will also help distinguish it from the Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego et al MCAs around the world. The MCAA opens its new wing on 29 March, years in the planning and fundraising, with a major exhibitions program, resplendent in the new spaces. The big drawcard is Christian Marclay’s groundbreaking 24 hour video work, The Clock, which comprises several thousand short extracts from cinema history, each suggesting a particular time of day or referencing a specific moment, often through the appearance of a watch or clock-face. Marclay has stitched these extracts together to form a continuous visual sequence synchronised with the real time of your visit.

Collection Volume 1, selected by MCA Curator Glenn Barkley, presents a narrative of contemporary Australian art over two floors. This new exhibition will reflect the changes and currents of Australian contemporary art and cultural life over the past 20 years Marking Time – an international exhibition selected by MCA Senior Curator Rachel Kent will present major works by eleven artists from Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, Japan, and the United States in the Museum’s spacious new top floor galleries.

Local Positioning Systems is a program of live art in many different guises and in several locations in this season of performance, participatory and site-specific art, curated by Performance Space and presented in partnership with the MCA.

www.mca.com.au

Biennial / Triennial-land

At the NGA Canberra, the second National Indigenous Art Triennial (NIAT), unDisclosed, runs from 11 May – 22 July. Curated by Carly Lane, the exhibition includes Tony Albert, Vernon Ah Kee, Bob Burruwal, Michael Cook, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Nici Cumpston, Fiona Foley, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, Gunybi Ganambarr, Julie Gough, Lindsay Harris, Jonathan Jones, Danie Mellor, Naata Nungurrayi, Maria Josette Orsto, Daniel Walbidi, Christian Bumbarra Thompson, Alick Tipoti, Lena Yarinkura and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu. The second NIAT was postponed last year for budgetary reasons. More than 260,000 visitors saw the first NIAT (Culture Warriors, 2007) which toured widely, finally closing in Washington DC in early 2010.

Back in Sydney, the line-up for the 18^th Biennale has been announced, and co-directors Gerald MacMaster and Catherine de Zegher have assembled a 100-stong range of participants under the banner of All Our Relations. It’s good to see a large number of women artists, and diverse geographical representation, featuring many names that, whilst well-known in their own regions, are not household names or ‘art stars’. Once again Cockatoo Island, the MCA and AGNSW are the main venues.

In Brisbane, the 7^th Asia Pacific Triennial (APT7) will run from 8 December – 7 April 2013. Participants are being progressively announced, and will feature more than 140 artists from 25 countries across the region. A key element of APT7 will be The Premier of Queensland’s Sculpture Commission, The World Turns by Michael Parekowhai, marking the fifth anniversary of the opening of GOMA in December 2011 and twenty years of APT. Late last year the commission was the subject of controversy when Aboriginal artist Fiona Foley criticised GOMA for “spending $1 million… commissioning Maori artist Michael Parekowhai to reference Aboriginal culture". GOMA responded that the intention for the sculpture commission was always to secure an international artist, and Arts Minister Rachel Nolan said the commission was unanimously chosen by a committee of experts, which included representatives from the Indigenous community.

qag.qld.gov.au/collection/sculpture_commission

Salary caps (headhunting redux)

Well, it’s official - Tony Ellwood will be the next director of the NGV, starting in August, after the July launch of his QAG swansong Portrait of Spain: Masterpieces from the Prado. There also seems to be a new national benchmark for major gallery directors – $445k to be precise – established during the recent bidding war to secure Michael Brand for AGNSW (see National Artnotes March). The NGV's current director Gerard Vaughan is on about $320k. The next question is: who will get the vacated position in Brisbane? Ellwood had only recently renewed his contract, and is considered a hard act to follow. AGSA director Nick Mitzevich is being tipped as a hot contender, however (outgoing) Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said that an international search would begin. No doubt they’ll have to offer more than Ellwood’s current $385k, more like… do I hear $450k?

Support Report

The much-anticipated report of the Review of Private Sector Support for the Arts, chaired by Harold Mitchell AC, has been released. The report's key recommendations include transferring the Cultural Gift Program and Register of Cultural Organisation programs to the Australian Taxation Office;

amalgamating the Australian Business Arts Foundation (AbaF) and Artsupport into a new organisation; introducing a matched (by government) funding program; introducing a taxation incentive for testamentary gifts to arts organisations; and a program of recognition for significant donors through letters from the Prime Minister and the Minister. Initial response to the report across arts industries has been positive, with some worries expressed that small and medium-sized arts organisations may not reap the benefits.

www.arts.gov.au


Russel Drysdale Centenary

In addition to the AWM’s Russell Drysdale at war exhibition (until early 2013), The National Trust’s S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney has assembled an impressive touring show, Russell Drysdale: The Drawings, curated by Lou Klepac, with over 60 drawings from across the artist’s life, which will travel to Carrick Hill, Adelaide and Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery during 2012. Albury Art Gallery (NSW) also features Drawing on Drysdale (until 13 May). Although Drysdale was born in England (7 February 1912), he had strong links with the Albury region, famously expressed in his paintings of soldiers at the Albury Train Station during World War II. A move is now afoot to create ‘Drysdale Plaza’ in front of the station, and NSW Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian says she is happy to hear from supporters.

Vale, Ian Abdulla

Ian Abdulla
Painter
1947-2011

Vale Makinti Napanangka

Makinti Napanangka
Painter
c1925 - 2011

Biennale of Sydney: a few standouts from preview day

Newell Harry

Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay

Cai Guo-Qiang
Cockatoo Island

Brook Andrew

Cockatoo Island

Janet Laurence

Botanical Gardens

Janet Laurence

Botanical Gardens

Fiona Hall

Botanical Gardens

Choi Jeong Hwa
Sydney Opera House

More to come soon.

Sydney: a ketchup edition

Apologies for the break nos chers lecteurs, even bloggers have to have holidays. Normally we try not be retrospective, but unavoidably this is something of a rear-view take on some Sydney exhibitions that caught our eye from late 2009 into 2010. We'll try to be more current in future.

MCA SYDNEY: SPRING/SUMMER 09/10

• Olafur Eliasson Take Your Time 
• Fiona Foley Forbidden
• Making it New: Focus on Australian Contemporary Art
• Primavera 2009
• Almanac, the Gift of Ann Lewis AO
• Louis Bufardeci & Zon Ito
• Avoiding Myth and Message: Australian Artists and the Literary World

It has been a strong season for the MCA, with a good blend of local and international offerings, and none of them too obvious.


Above: © Olafur Eliasson. 360° room for all colours (2002) courtesy the artist and SFMoMA.

Eliasson (Denmark/Iceland) is of course approaching art megastar status, and it's the sort of international contemporary one-person survey show (initiated by San Francisco MoMA in 2007 and already seen at NY MoMA and MCA Chicago in 2008) at which the MCA excels - a youngish artist of great international interest, but not yet a household name. It is one of the few Australian institutions to do this, with some credit also to AGNSW, GOMA and NGV.

Eliasson  is famously anal, demanding and precise, and it has to be said that the production/installation values of this show are fabulous. This particular body of work, dating from the early to mid noughties, is all about precision and the 'science' of light, yet it delivers quite playful results, sometimes merely interesting, at times poetic and transporting. The absolute standout piece for us is one of the less 'optical' ones, Beauty (1993), achieved by projecting dim white light through a fine mist of falling water in a darkened space. While obviously an installation challenge for the electricians, the work is very simple in execution and effect – a wraith-like 'entity' dances just above floor level, a hallucinatory will-o-the-wisp. This piece is one of the few in this exhibition that gives the clue to Eliasson's wider preoccupations with natural phenomena, and that is a pity, because at his best he is an artist that can deliver an almost theatrical magic and, like Andy Goldsworthy, a simple wonder at the beauty of the elements.

At Primavera, Michaela Glaeve's Cloud Field (2007), explored similar territory, though with less vivid effect, possibly because the space, with a fine mist rising from jets at floor level, was brightly lit. Christine Eid's installation Your Place (2006) featuring taxi-top lights with various Anglo and Middle-Eastern names was another memorable piece. Whatever one may think of individual Primavera selections (09 was curated by Jeff Khan), they are always worth seeing and a good MCA tradition.

As is the (biennial) Focus on Contemporary Australian Art (FOCAA) series, of which this was the fourth installment, curated in-house by the recently appointed Glenn Barkly. Unlike Primavera, which features only artists under 35,  FOCAA has a mix of old and new, emergent and venerable. Featured in Making it New were Alison Alder, Micky Allan, Jon Campbell, Lou Hubbard, Matthew Hunt, Bob Jenyns, Linda Marrinon, Archie Moore, Tom Moore, Marrnyula Mununggurr, Raquel Ormella, Alwin Reamillo, Khaled Sabsabi, Neil Taylor, Ken Thaiday Snr, Ruth Waller, Toni Warburton and Ken Whisson. This was a very strong show, with our standouts being Neil Taylor, Bob Jenyns and Micky Allen.

Fiona Foley's recently-closed mid-career retrospective Forbidden was also very solid, but somehow failed to be more than that. She is an artist working across a wide repertoire of contemporary media, and it's appropriate for a survey show to cover the gamut, but therein lies the problem - it fails to satisfy in the way that a more concentrated or themed body of work may do. She undoubtedly has many exciting years ahead of her. A fine independently-published book is available.

The Bufardeci/Ito collaboration was a worthy offering, and the Ann Lewis bequest is a very fine collection indeed, but very special mention is due for Avoiding Myth and Message: Australian Artists and the Literary World, featuring mainly work from the collection. For anyone curious about text in contemporary art this was a fascinating exhibition for which the catalogue is still available. 

Martin Sharp, Sydney Artist

Museum of Sydney


Until 14 February, 2010

This exhibition closes soon. it feels like an age since LF attended the packed opening in late October. And quite an event it was, with the OzMag generation out in force. For quizzical bystanders that weren’t around in Sydney or London during those heady days, it was a who’s who of the era, resplendent in a flurry of silver manes, white goatees and embroidered waistcoats.

Before Mambo there was Martin Sharp. Much has been written about the show, hung salon style in that single large shoebox on the first floor, the walls painted cobalt blue for the duration. Even if you’re not a fan of Sharp’s oeuvre (and this writer is not especially), the massed Tiny Tims, Luna Parks, Harbor Bridges and Eternities achieve definite critical mass in a riot of primary colour. It’s vaguely chronological, and some of his very early work is included, offering a useful if eccentric survey of one of Australia’s most distinctive painter/designer/savants. If you ain’t seen it you should have, shame on you!

Martin Mischkulnig  Smalltown

Museum of Sydney


Until 14 February, 2010

Also closing soon is this excellent photography show, the subject of a handsome book with a text by Tim Winton. Highly reminiscent of Trent Parke’s Welcome to Nowhere series (2006), this is fine stuff.

The exhibition is described ‘a dialogue between photographer Martin Mischkulnig and author Tim Winton, travelling through out-of-the-way parts of Australia’, and Winton says ‘The wild landscapes of Australia are routinely described as desolate and forbidding… [yet] for all the talk of hostility and harshness, there is nothing so bleak and forbidding in country Australia as the places humans have built there…"


The same images were also featured at the Evan Hughes Gallery in October/November 2009. The book is excellent, so if you missed the show, get that.

Sydney: Clinton Nain

Clinton Nain
re-dress
GRANTPIRRIE GALLERY, Redfern
until 19 September 2009

Left: © Clinton Nain Pay 5, 2009, Acrylic and bitumen on canvas

This exhibition closes on Saturday, Nain's first Sydney show for 2 years. It has slipped under Sydney's art radar somewhat, possibly because it doesn't feature his better known motifs of weeping hearts, mission dresses and potholed roads. One of Nain's great strengths as a painter is that he is constantly exploring new expressions of his familiar themes, and refuses to just keep doing what has sold well in the past, which must be tempting, especially with his work of the last decade doing well in the secondary market.

To those that are familar with the artist's many themes, this exhibition is an exciting progression from his explorations of written language seen in his shows AEIOU (2006), and Resistance to Resilience (2008) at Nellie Castan Gallery in Melbourne. Bitumen and white acrylic on canvas are the media, and here scrawled and iterated words have decayed and merged to the point abstraction. The impact of the whole room hung with these works is quite extraordinary - go see.

Sydney: Taking a line for a walk

I WALK THE LINE: NEW AUSTRALIAN DRAWING
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
17 March - 24 May 2009

Despite the frequently heard assertion that 'art schools don't teach drawing these days (hrrumph)', a worldwide resurgence in drawing is undoubtedly being led by a younger generation of artists. One factor may be that it isn't an expensive medium to work in, and Phaidon's impressive 'VITAMIN D' compilation published in 2006, showed an astonishing breadth of practice globally, which is evident in microcosm in Australia. The 29 artists chosen range from young and emergent to moderately well known, and are drawn from all over the country, with a number of NZ artists now resident in Australia.

Purists of the old school (the same ones who claim drawing isn't being taught?) may well shudder at the inclusion of video, performance and sculpture under a very broad definition of drawing, but this adds to the strength and depth of the show. It's about time we had a significant survey of drawing and curator Christine Morrow has done a fine job.

It's hard to name names in such a strong and varied show, but personal faves include Michelle Ussher, Laith McGregor, Patrick Hartigan, Elvis Richardson and the late Cassandra Laing. Among the more established figures are Maria Kontis, James Morrison, Gordon Hookey and Vernon Ah Kee.

The only negative thing that can be said about this exhibition is that we wish there was a lot more of it. It might have been interesting, space permitting, to contrast the 'young and not so young turks' with more venerable figures (such as Godwin Bradbeer) and perhaps included a couple of printmakers. These are small gripes however, go see.

Best of 2008

The vote is in!
By request, and in no particular order, our standout exhibitions and other things from around the planet in 2008.

Top 5 Exhibitions (International)
- Louise Bourgeois (Tate, Pompidou, Guggenheim NY, MOCA LA)
- Juan Muñoz Retrospective (Tate, Guggenheim Bilbao)
- Wolfgang Tillmans - 'Lighter' (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin)
- R. Buckminster Fuller - 'Starting with the Universe' (Whitney, NY)
- WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (MOCA LA and P.S.1 NY)
and... The Whitney Biennale

Top 5 Exhibitions (Australia)
- Biennale of Sydney
- Tim Hawkinson - 'Mapping the Marvellous' (MCA Sydney)
- Gordon Bennett Retrospective (NGV Melbourne, GOMA Brisbane, AGWA Perth)
- Ai Weiwei (SCAF Sydney and CRG, Campbelltown)
- Optimism (GOMA Brisbane)
- and not forgetting: Bill Viola: The Tristan Project (AGNSW and St Saviour's Church, Redfern) and 'Lines in the Sand' at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, Sydney.

Top 5 commercial gallery shows (International)
- Cy Twombly 'Three Notes From Salalah' (Gagosian, Rome)
- Jake and Dinos Chapman (White Cube UK)
- Richard Serra (Gagosian UK and USA)
- Damien Hirst’s Sotheby’s auction
- Antoni Tapiès (Lelong Paris)

Top 5 commercial gallery shows (Australia)
- Stuart Ringholt (Anna Schwartz, Melbourne)
- Mitch Cairns (MOP, Sydney)
- Newell Harry (Oxley, Sydney)
- Guy Maestri (Tim Olsen, Sydney)
- Patricia Piccinini (Oxley, Sydney)

Top 5 English language movies
- Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sydney Lumet, USA)
- In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, UK)
- Burn After Reading (Coen Bros USA)
- The Visitor (Tom McCarthy, USA)
- Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, UK)

and La cânard award goes to:
- Australia (the movie) - for the movie most likely to acquire bad taste camp classic status

Top 5 English language novels
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Díaz)
- The Believers (Zoë Heller)
- Netherland (Joseph O'Neill)
- Breath (Tim Winton)
- What is the What? (Dave Eggers)

Heureuse nouvelle année, nos lecteurs.

Half Light at AGNSW

Half Light
Portraits from Black Australia
until 22 February 2009
Rudy Komon gallery, Upper Level



Above: Destiny Deacon Where's Mickey? 2003 light jet print from Polaroid. Private collection, Sydney © Destiny Deacon. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney.

LF joined the benefactors, pre-Xmas bash, for a viewing and talk by curator Hettie Perkins. Many of the artists were there, and La Perkins let them do the talking, which worked well for the most part. Richard Bell gave a fine harangue, to broad Aboriginal grins and a few rather fixed smiles from the white folks present, but it was all good clean fun – very much a family affair.

This all-photography show is solid, if unsurprising – much of it is well-known and has been exhibited many times before. LF's standout was Tony Albert's 'Polaroid' series (actually hi-res digital we think), and of course the late Michael Riley's studio portraits, seen not long ago in the 'Sights Unseen' retrospective. Tracey Moffatt is notably absent as an artist, which is a pity, but everyone else is there, so it's a useful catch-up survey all told.

The Art of Light

Jonathan Jones untitled (the tyranny of distance)
Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), Sydney
14 ⁄ 08 ⁄ 2008 – 11 ⁄ 10 ⁄ 2008

NEON , curated by Tania Doropoulos
Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney
30 August - 25 October 2008

Robert Irwin Light and Space
White Cube Mason's Yard, London
17 Sep—19 Oct 2008

Newell Harry Fish or Cut Bait?
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
21 Aug–13 Sep 2008

Glenn Ligon: Some Changes
Touring 2006-2008
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus
Musée dArt Moderne Grand-Duc, Luxembourg

Above © Estate of Dan Flavin, Site-specific installation, 1996, Courtesy the Menil Collection

Above: © Jonathan Jones, untitled (the tyranny of distance), 2008 . aluminium, tarpaulin, fluorescent tubes and fittings. 6 walls, each 3.4 x 1.9 x 8.27 m, courtesy the artist, Gallery Barry Keldoulis and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney

Above: © Jonathan Jones Lightscapes installation view, foyer, Westpac banking Corporation. Courtesy the artist, Westpac and Gallery Barry Keldoulis.

Above: © Robert Irwin Light and Space (Detail), 2007. 115 fluorescent lights, courtesy the artist, White Cube and Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Photo: Philipp Scholz Ritterman

Above: NEON – installation view, courtesy the artists and Anna Schwartz Gallery

Above: © Newell Harry, Fish or Cut Bait?Installation view, showing Beginnings and Endings / Endings and Beginnings neon work across far corner, and Ovid/Void: Rousing the Rubble (for David) to the right, courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

Above: © Glenn Ligon Warm Broad Glow, 2005
neon and paint, 24 × 190 in, courtesy the artist and Fogg Museum, Harvard.

Neon and flouroscent tubes are more popular now than ever, it seems, and it's increasingly difficult for artists to carve out their own style in a medium that tends to suffer from 'sameyness'. Flouro tubes deliver an aesthetic that was comprehensively explored by the late, great Dan Flavin (1933-1996). The extraordinary retrospective of his work that travelled the world, ending up at LACMA in August 2007, reminded us just how elegantly he used the medium, and leaves us with the feeling that everyone else has been covering the same ground, with added irony.

Jonathan Jones is Australia's flouro and lightbulb king, although it's not all he does. He has a elegant way with 'threading', and this has manifested at times in some rather beautiful knotting and looping of electrical cabling. As an Indigenous man he subtly references traditional motifs, and his more recent flouro projects, including the work currently showing at SCAF and his massive lobby installation at Westpac Bank's Sydney headquarters manifest this kind of geometric patterning, but there is some spookily similar work around, for instance Robert Irwin's show which has just opened at White Cube in London. Which isn't to suggest that either is even aware the other's work, but that there are only so many things you can do with linear tubes.

Neon has a greater flexibility, literally, but the medium itself tends to be unsubtle, and carries all those corny old echoes of Vegas and cheap motels, which tends to impose a 'jokiness'. Imagery is difficult, so most artists end up doing words, the problem being that in formal terms one set of neon words tends to look much like another. In response, these texts have had to become increasingly cryptic - the medium referencing itself with ever greater levels of irony. The current show at Anna Schwartz's magnificent Carriageworks space is a perfect exemplar. Anyone who's anyone has to do a neon sculpture these days, and this show, which holds so much promise curatorially, is really a flashy collection of novelties assembled around a common medium, without much depth. Which isn't to dismiss the quality of some of the works, or the fact that AS has mounted such a technically difficult and expensive show.
Joseph Kosuth's deadpan 'Neon' of 1965 in some ways says it all - spelling out N E O N, in neon. Another much more recent Kosuth piece 'W.F.T. #1 [yellow]' (2008) is also impressive. Kosuth has said of its pregenitor 'The Language of Equilibrium': This project, in yellow neon, has as its basis language itself. It is a work which is a reflection on its own construction… The work engages the cultural and social history of the evolution of language itself, how the history of a word shows its ties to cultures and social realities being quite distinct and disconnected. It is only in the present when a word is used, as it is with a work of art being experienced, that all that which comprises the present finds its location in the process of making meaning. Here, in this work, language becomes both an allegory and an actual result of all of which it should want to speak.

Without 'independently wealthy' entities like AS and SCAF mounting such shows Sydney would be much the poorer - long may they continue. Go see, both have long runs.

Newell Harry has worked with neon quite a bit, and in his just-closed show at Oxley9 incorporated a number of neon elements into an interlinked series of installations. This was much more satisfying than the compilation show at Schwartz. Harry has a strong sense of material as metaphor, and much of his work (from paintings to woven mats) utilises fragments of text and notation, and the neon component acts as a stylistic extension of these concerns, rather than as a stand-alone novelty.

There are strong echoes of Glenn Ligon's approach here, and not just in the use of the medium. Ligon references black identity and cultural conudrums in similar ways, often working with texts, famously in 'Warm Broad Glow' (2005) referencing a passage in Gertrude Stein’s novella Melanctha (“the warm broad glow of negro sunshine”). This work made the cover of Artforum in 2006, coincident with the much-praised touring show Some Changes, which ended its run in Luxembourg in February 2008.

Finally, the definitive exhibition of light art Lichtkunst aus Kunstlicht (Light Art from Artificial Light) was mounted in 2006 at ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Karlsruhe, Germany. The fine catalogue from the show is still available and should be required study, along with the Dan Flavin retrospective, for anyone contemplating making a light sculpture.

A la prochaine.

Melbourne: Clinton Nain at Nellie Castan Gallery

Clinton Nain
Resistance to Resilience, paintings
Nellie Castan Gallery, South Yarra
until 9 Aug 2008

Left: © Clinton Nain, from Resistance to Resilience
Courtesy the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne

After his remarkable 2006 exhibition, aeiou, Clinton Nain is back with a new exhibition of paintings, using the metaphorical mediums of bitumen and 'house paint' (in a colonial palette). His potent and recurrent motifs of hearts, targets, dresses and scrawled notation are ever-present, but Nain is always developing his personal language and excavating new meanings and resonances from his deceptively simple ingredients.

Make sure you see it if in Melbourne.

Sydney: A 'Grafitti-esque' Special Edition

There has been some spookily similar 'grafitti-esque' work showing around Sydney commercial galleries of late. While most of this art is visually seductive and collectable, and the artists no doubt easily distinguishable to the cogniscenti, LF has begun to wonder if some of these artists are in fact the same person. Have they ever all been seen in the same room together? Seriously though, this phenomenon is not just confined to Sydney. Worldwide the 'graffiti aesthetic' is thriving, not just on countless walls, trains and trucks, but multiplying virally through the upmarket gallery scene. Los Angeles in particular seems to go in for this look, but it was Jean Michel Basquiat who perfected it as a contemporary style in New York in the 1980s. RIP JMB, if he only knew how many imitators he's spawned, he'd.... well laugh loudly, no doubt.

David Griggs
All I want is peace in the Middle East, a blow job and a free T-shirt
Kaliman Gallery, Sydney
until 19 July
Images from the exhibition © David Griggs, courtesy the Artist and Kaliman Gallery




















John Citizen
Interiors and Colored People
Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney
until 12 July
Below left: © Gordon Bennett: 'Notes to Basquiat: Cut the Circle' 2001, acrylic on linen 120 x 120cm, photography John O'Brien. Below right: © Gordon Bennett: from 'Interiors and Colored People' series. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis

Gordon Bennett (aka John Citizen) has, with chracteristic irony, commented on this with his 'Notes to Basquiat' series in 2001, and Citizen's current show at GBK is a witty development - a deadpan commentary on contemporary art's blurring into interior decoration. Citizen's modern interiors (evoking Patrick Caulfield and Howard Arkley) use flat colour and thick black lines, empahsising the 2D surface, and featuring in-situ 'tasteful' paintings - 'Aboriginal', abstract or portrait - with larger versions of the portraits alongside, in lurid colour-by-numbers style, featuring happy lifestylers - the 'Coloured People' of the exhibition's title. It's quite a pisstake - jeering at the very punters who are there to buy his work. At the opening the young collector types had an aggrieved look about them, not surprisingly.

It's not news that street art is routinely commodified and brought inside the white cubes, despite Banksy's best efforts to keep it outside. Punters are obviously hot for this look - it's perfect for that new, all-white apartment, lending a splash of colour and a whiff of the street to an antiseptic interior - a bit of safe visual slumming. But the answer to why there's so much of it may also be that it's easy to do, from the artist's point of view. Scrawl a few words, scratch a few cryptic figures, a fragment of label, a badly daubed skull or two, and ... you have it!

Some practitioners are considered hip, and others not. Melburnian David Griggs (currently showing at Kaliman, see above) broadly references Manila street/gang culture, and has become a darling of contemporary curators, rapidly entering the major collections, while Melbournian Philipino Australian Mike Chavez remains relatively obscure. His group show (with Daniel Brinsmead, Doug Bartlett, and Adrian Doyle, see below) has recently closed at Harrison Galleries. Michael Jeffery (currentIy at Richard Martin) has achieved commercial success, but not critical acclaim. Another practitioner, Johnny Romeo, opens at NG Art Gallery this week. Within the genre Mike Chavez stands out, not only for his use of screenprints, but for the strength simplicity of his compositions and of his 'messages'. Critical success is not always a question of originality, and is often the luck of the draw, or having the right gallery. It was ever thus.

Mike Chavez, Daniel Brinsmead, Doug Bartlett, and Adrian Doyle
Harrison Galleries, Sydney
7 - 27 June 2008

Below left: © Mike Chavez: 'Get Rich or Die Tryin', 2008, mixed media on canvas
Below right: © Mike Chavez: '50 Years in Converse', 2008, screenprint, spraypaint & acrylic on linen
Courtesy the artist and Harrison Galleries


















Below left: © Doug Bartlett: 'Wishing and Hoping', 2008, mixed media on canvas
Below right: © Daniel Brinsmead: 'Babylonia', 2008, mixed media on canvas
Courtesy the artists and Harrison Galleries


















Michael Jeffery - Sticks & Stones
Richard Martin Fine Art, Sydney
28 Jun - 9 Jul 2008
Below left: © Michael Jeffery: 'Neil's Big Day Out', acrylic paint skins, and spray enamel on canvas
Below right: © Michael Jeffery: 'RK', acrylic paint skins, and spray enamel on canvas
Courtesy the artist and Richard Martin Fine Art

















Johnny Romeo - 'Galaxy Cattle'
NG Art Gallery, Sydney
8 - 26 July 2008
Below: © Johnny Romeo: 'Foreign Film Tobacco', acrylic and oil on canvas
Courtesy the artist and NG Art Gallery











A toute a l'heure.