'Podgaric' from the 2006-2009 Spomenik series by Jan Kempenaers

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Graziela Guardino next month. Join us for opening drinks on Wednesday the 19th July.

“ Graziela’s work starts from the deconstruction of linen, re-signifying the support and materiality of both the painting and textile works. In this sense, the artist takes the opposite path expected for the construction of the two works: instead of adding layers, she removes them.

Her experimentation with colour, form, material, and composition transform the idea of weaving from a two-dimensional element to an architectural component that challenges the limits, not only of the support, but also of space. Her lines seem to always be unconsciously testing the boundaries between the object and the work of art.

It is in this unraveling of the wefts that the artist's work reveals itself. Guardino's woven paintings-sculptures are the result of experimentations and studies of materials forming a unique visual language of minimalist abstraction. They are based on deconstruction to expand new possibilities of reading about reconnection, the feminine, and ancestry.

Graziela does not renounce the knowledge of the mystic process associated with textile work. In contrast, she freely incorporates her inquiries, regarding this support and the interpretations, into the contemporary art world, in the sense that it still succinctly conjures up in our imaginary. Unaware of its subordinate condition, it produced systematic abstract composition long before suprematism, a knowledge that inscribes concrete and conceptual intangible symbols. Graziela retraces our way of thinking about this construction, from ancestral to contemporary”.

Carolina Lauriano, Curator

Pictured is Divide Light If You Dare, 2021, acrylic on Belgian linen.

Home’s co-director Madeleine Preston has been awarded the Ragdale in schools Fellowship to attend a residency at Ragdale. Ragdale is a non-profit artists’ community located on architect Howard Van Doren Shaw’s country estate in Lake Forest, IL, 30 miles north of Chicago.
 
Ragdale annually hosts approximately 200 visual artists, writers, composers, and interdisciplinary artists at all stages of their careers, making it one of the largest interdisciplinary artist communities in the US. Ragdale offers a retreat setting where at any given time, a dozen creative individuals experience uninterrupted time for dedicated work, in a supportive environment, family-style dinners, and dynamic artist exchanges within a backdrop of 50 acres of idyllic prairie.

Home@735 Gallery’s regular group shows came to a halt at the start of the pandemic in March 2020. In late 2020 we staged a number of low-key exhibitions featuring the work of artists Joe Wilson and Chanelle Collier, Chelsea Lehmann, Peter Hill, Zorica Purlija, Samuel Massey and Monika Scarrabelotti.

We are planning to restart our regular group exhibitions in early 2022 – subject to the public health situation at the time. Looking forward to seeing you back at Home!

Many thanks to Gordon & Michael for inviting Madeleine and I into their home to view their fabulous art collection. Collected over a twenty-year period, the Elliott Eyes Collection features a diverse collection of works by prominent Australian and International artists. Great to get an insight into how the individual pieces were acquired and stories about the artists who created them.

The collection is open to the public with bookings essential. You can check out the details at their website at https://www.theelliotteyescollection.com/  Highly recommended!

Home’s Madeleine Preston will be exhibiting new work titled ‘Emerald City’ in ‘Turn of Events’ an exhibition by Blackartprojects. Also showing will be Jeremy Blincoe and Ellie Chalmers-Robinson. The exhibition will be staged at 71 Balmain – located at 71 Balmain Street Cremorne VIC (entry via Green Street). The show opens on April 22nd and runs till May the 4th.  

The individual works that comprise Emerald City began in exploring images from museum collections and auction sites. I wanted to create work that spoke about ceramic history but also of the act of creation and clays specificity. The installation images (on my website) show the forms displayed on ceramic staples including buckets, batts, turning wheels, and slip casting molds.

The colour palette is drawn from the greens, honey yellows and browns of Australian domestic ware of the 1930s and 1940s. When I first left home thrift stores were full of examples. They were a cheap alternative for many student households, and I have an affection for them as something lost from my youth. The work was glaze fired and then sandblasted to create fragile aged patinas that belied their youth allowing them to function as objects and as portraits of time passing. 

Pictured are (left) Downside, 2020, Glazed Sandblasted Raku, metal, and Flag, 2020, Glazed Sandblasted Raku, metal, & concrete.  

Home’s is pleased to announce our upcoming show opening in March will feature photography by Sydney based photomedia artist, Zorica Prulija. The exhibition will highlight a series of portraits of Zorica’s daughter and muse, Yumi.

Zorica has been a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize, Canberra, three years consecutively, twice in Sydney’s HeadOn Portrait Prize, a finalist in the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize Melbourne, Duo Magazine Percival Photographic Portrait Prize, The Kuala Lumpur Photographic Portrait Award, Mama Art Foundation Photography Prize in Albury, the Josephine Urlick Award in Queensland and the Olive Cotton Award for Portraiture in Murwillumbah NSW.

In 2020 she completed a Masters of Art in Photomedia at UNSW School of Art & Design in Paddington.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting new works by Samuel Massey in our 2021 program.

“…my art practice has come to be focused on the search for an authentic process. Many artists I admire have a distinctive style. By style, I refer to the relationship between their subjects and techniques. I believe artists that sustain distinctive practices find an honest way to paint. They find a method that reflects their temperament and enables the expression of their interests and influences. Regarding my paintings I would summarise my temperament as impatient yet persistent. My ever-lengthening list of influences has ensured the steady deepening of my respect for the materiality of oil paint. This respect leads to persistently searching for a technical mastery that aligns with my impatient temperament. I want to make better paintings with increasing ease. Paradoxically, it seems the way to do this is to continue raising my expectations of myself and continuing to broaden my technical experience. I am seeking a perfect, formulaic method and then critiquing it to the point of constant amendment. This technical pursuit leans into my preference for ambiguous subjects as it requires I bend subjects to fit the technical expectations I set myself. In this way the painting becomes the director of its own story…”

Pictured is The Gates, 2019, oil on aluminium.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Dr Peter Hill during February. Join us for the artist talk on Saturday the 6th of February from 2-4pm.

Glasgow-born Australian artist Dr Peter Hill has been creating what he calls “Superfictions” since 1989, when he first used fictional press releases to create New York’s Museum of Contemporary Ideas on Manhattan’s Park Avenue. This was supposedly the largest new museum in the world. Within the fiction, it attempted to break many of the rules of curation and museum display. 

Since then, Hill has created not just the artworks but the fictional identities and CVs of over 50 contemporary artists, as well as Museum Directors, Philanthropists, Art Critics, Collectors, Gallerists, and - in his ongoing art-world fantasy The Art Fair Murders - serial killers.

At a populist level this project can be likened to the idea of the hoax or April Fool’s prank. At a more serious, specialist, level it deals with aspects of “falsificationism” from the philosophy of science (Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Margaret Masterman) asking “how can we tell from mainly visual clues, whether any given statement is true or false?" Or can we only approach the truth, as in Popper’s conundrum of sighting white swans and black swans. One of Hill’s fictitious art collectives AAA (Art Against Astrology) interrogates these questions through

their on-going artwork The Museum of Doubt. The arrival of Donald Trump and the proliferation of Fake News has helped illuminate notions of doubt and certainty, and for the past four years Peter Hill has been on a world lecture tour called Fake News and Superfictions - brought to a premature end in 2020 by the arrival of COVID-19.

For this exhibition at HOME@735, Dr Peter Hill introduces the work of his latest creation Stickleback (born 1951). Like Banksy and Madonna, Stickleback is one of several artist-celebrities known by a single name, or mononym. Normally working from studios in Berlin, Shanghai, and London, Stickleback found himself stranded in COVID-lockdown in Hobart, Tasmania (where he was working on a still-under-wraps major project). Based at a luxury mansion in Sandy Bay, this veteran artist has produced 35 Provocative Text-On-Canvas Paintings that comment on the extremes of contemporary life (Trump, Johnson, Sturgeon, Morrison, Gillard) alongside esoteric statements made by a range of artists, past and present (Marcel Broodthaers, Werner Herzog, Donald Judd, Dorothea Tanning, Uccello, and Ennio Morricone).     

Stickleback’s 1m x 1m paintings – already dubbed The Tasmania Suite - take their inspiration from 2020’s protest banners and placards, newspaper headlines, religious texts, art-historical quotations, and a range of contemporary and historical artists including: Tracey Emin, Jorg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Linda Marrinon, Joseph Kosuth, and Colin McCahon. Stickleback’s work has been exhibited at the documenta, the Venice Biennale, the Sydney Biennale, and the Geelong Art Prize. He is also a character in Peter Hill’s on-going Superfiction (supposedly a novel and a film) The After-Sex Cigarette.

This exhibition at HOME@735 expands Hill’s ideas from The Art Fair Murders, with scenography that suggests an international art fair held in an “Art Hotel” in Cologne, during the run of the city’s main art fair in the nearby Kunstmesse. The setting is reminiscent of Spring 1883 held in Melbourne’s Windsor Hotel during the city’s art fair season. A selection of the 1m x 1m canvases made by Stickleback during 2020 lockdown will be exhibited at HOME@735 throughout February 2021. This selection will change on a weekly basis, mimicking the way many galleries at art fairs (especially during the 1980s) would quickly replace paintings or sculptures when sold in order to maximise their opportunities for sales. One of the intentions of Hill’s project is to contrast the politics of museum display with that of international art fair practices. His ambition is to eventually sell “readymade” art fair installations to museums and private collectors - using signage, carpeting, and language as signifiers. Within this framing device artworks will change regularly, often selected from storage by museum visitors.

Fragments of this project have previously been installed in The Sydney Biennale (MCA); AGNSW (Project Space); ACCA, Melbourne; Auckland City Gallery; and Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. 

Home is pleased to be exhibiting works by Monika Scarrabelotti in our 2021 program.

Monika Scarrabelotti is a Sydney based artist who makes gestural figurative sculptures that engage with the human condition.  Seeking to create works that are emotionally raw, her sculptures traverse the sensual and voyeuristic, engaging the spectator in an intimate response.  Scarrabelotti completed a BFA and MFA at National Art School, and has a continued connection with art education through teaching sculpture at the Tom Bass Sculpture Studio and NAS.  Scarrabelotti exhibits regularly and has a growing number of artworks in Australian private collections. 

Pictured is Icarus, 2020, Plaster, sisal, steel.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting a suite of new paintings by Chelsea Lehmann in October.

Chelsea Lehmann has exhibited extensively in Australia for the past two decades and has been the recipient of several awards, grants, local and International residencies.

Her most recent exhibitions include Persona (Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney, 2020); June (MARS Gallery, Melbourne, 2019); Bad Mannerism (Galerie pompom, Sydney, 2018) and The Articulate Surface (UNSW Galleries, Sydney, 2018).

She is a lecturer in Drawing at the National Art School and completed a PhD at UNSW Art & Design in 2019.

"The immediate appeal of Chelsea Lehmann's work is the fluid, supple and sneakily perverse quality of her paintings, at once referential to artists of the past, but also to the presentation of the female form in our age of pervasive online pornography — a neat double act that lends this most traditional subject of figuration an undeniable and contemporary feminist edge." – Andrew Frost, Art Collector Magazine, April-June 2020.

Pictured is Broken Embrace, 2020, oil on board.

The Forresters’ upcoming single release is a cover of the acoustic track ‘Never Too Far’ by the late and great Tm Hardin. The track will be released on itunes, Spotify and all online store and streaming services this Friday the 25th of September. 

Photo by Laurent Perren. Design by Madeleine Preston. 

“…complemented by Jess Ciampa on vibraphone and Charlie Owen on dobro, this evocative example of folk-leaning rock was mixed by US producer, Mitch Easter. The Forresters’ excursion into this folk classic is a sincere interpretation of a wonderful track by an underrated songwriter first recorded in 1973…”

Home is thrilled to be exhibiting new works from the studio of Joe Wilson and Chanelle Collier in September. The work including flags, collapsed chair, painted record covers, and solvent transfers on canvas; drawn from multiple branches of their current practice. 

The Flags are a series of works refashioned from 1960’s vintage French tents. The material subs in for painted canvas, with colours associated to an infamous summer of love, and global civil uprising. 

The collapsed chair, Unrest, looks at the chair as a system representative of an individual. Building and breaking become a means of abstraction. The function of the chair is lost by making it both painting, and sculpture. The push and pull between surface and structure is an inconsistent commitment to the object, and the mechanism of its reception. 

This will be the first in a series of monthly online exhibition at Home. You can view the exhibition by appointment.

Pictured is Unrest (Pink), 2020, collapsed wooden chair, acrylic paint. 

Home’s co-director Madeleine Preston was interviewed about her lockdown lectures and her students creative responses to lockdown at the National Art School.   

Written by Lissa Christopher, the article was published in the Sydney Morning Herald during the week. 

Home is pleased to be exhibiting a suite of new paintings by Mirra Whale in our ‘Pairings’ exhibition this Saturday the 7th. 

Join us for opening drinks from 3-5pm during Art Month’s Greensquare/Waterloo Art Afternoon. 

Pictured is Tea Party 1, 2020, oil on linen.

New work by Home’s co-director Madeleine Preston.

Feminist Fight Club - Installation View, 2020, Ceramic, muslin, chair, rattan, wood, hair, ribbon, dimensions variable.

Feminist Fight Club addresses the gendered nature of materials and art practices, specifically the systemic art historical bias that assigns gender to materials and has resulted in some materials including textiles and ceramics relegation to less valued art objects.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting a suite of works by Brendan Vivian Smith in our 2020 program. 

“…Smith literally rescues these wooden off-cuts from rubbish skips, repurposing them as artworks, which operate simultaneously as painting and sculpture. The use of quotidian materials is informed by Smith’s admiration for the Italian arte povera movement, with the furniture designer Enzo Mari being another significant influence…”   from an essay by Hamish Sawyer

Home is pleased to be exhibiting a suite of works by Zara June Williams in our 2020 program. 

Zara June Williams completed a Masters of Fine Arts at the National Art School and was granted the Lift Off Award to support her artistic pursuits in the year 2019. She recently undertook a three month residency at Pilotenkueche in Leipzig, Germany, where she is continuing to live and work.

“…at its essence her involvement with painting is an attempt to gain insight into the cyclical nature of the mind, to test and observe the relationship between chaos and control. Her work shows how we oscillate between states of being, both conscious and unconscious, when we engage deeply with materiality…”

Pictured is Tributary (Deviate), 2019, Acrylic on board

Home is thrilled to be showing work by Sarah Goffman in our 2020 program.

Pictured is Table Peace, 2017, PET found plastics, resin, enamel paint, permanent marker, silicone, dimensions variable, Sarah’s response to an Andre Kertesz photograph from our 2017 Invitational exhibition. 

Thanks to Vanessa Berry for her essay ‘Internal Logic’. The essay is included in Home’s ‘Colour & Form’ catalogue that is now available from the gallery.

Internal Logic

Colour and Form at Home@735

At the end of the hallway at the entrance to the gallery hangs a screenprint by Sydney Ball. Canto XXI is a radiant orange square, which frames a circle of a softer orange, which further frames a stripe of ultramarine. The colours are arresting, their incandescence constrained by the stillness of the precise, geometric forms. It is a distillation of planetary energy, perhaps, or a pattern underlying a mathematical process: one of the gifts of abstraction being the openness of interpretation it bestows on the viewer.

Ball's Cantos series, initially produced in New York in the 1960s, are landmark works of abstract painting. They were named after an epic poem by Ezra Pound, which the poet worked on for more than fifty years. It is fitting for them to be a reference point for these works by Ball, for Ball's Cantos also set the trajectory of his life's work: his preoccupation with colour and form.

The two screenprints from the Cantos, produced by Ball in 2003, are something of a lynchpin for the Colour and Form exhibition. The exhibition combines works from Australian abstract artists of the 1960s - Sydney Ball, Michael Johnson, and John Peart - with contemporary artists working with abstraction in painting and sculpture. The three 1960s artists introduce a range of forms of abstraction, from the formal geometry of Ball's Cantos, to the textured and organic shapes and colours of John Peart's 1962 acrylic work Untitled #982, and the dynamism of Michael Johnson's Collins Street #4 and its dashes and drips of colour.

In counterpoint to the historical precedent of representational painting that preceded it, abstract art offers no "window on the world". It is an opaque viewing experience, an opportunity to look at the materiality of the artwork rather than through it. Nonetheless, abstraction suggests an internal logic: within the boundaries of the work viewers navigate form and colour in sensory and associative ways.

Jonny Niesche's Personal Cosmos builds on the immersive, floating effect of a colour field painting, using the reflective and shimmering surfaces of mirrors and voile. The viewer is reflected in the work, shadowed within the pink cosmos, visually becoming a part of it and moving within it. Niesche's sculptural work Cadence loop #10 shares this shimmering quality. The zigzag strip of steel has been painted an iridescent purple-blue which changes in hue as you move past it, and the light angles differently on its surface.

Other works invite a different method of navigation. Sean Meilak's sculpture series Arrangements, six collections of geometric and architectural shapes, plays with scale so the viewer, too, feels a telescopic shift in perspective. These could be models of ruins or monuments. Or they could be the elements of a visual alphabet, and each arrangement a phrase or a sentence: Meilak's process is to cast the elements individually, and to compose the arrangements during installation. Each arrangement has the sense of a light touch, of elements drawn together in the moment.

Intuition was also an important part of the process for Celia Gullett's painting Geometric Abstraction XXI. Gullett uses layers of oil paint to build up a luminous surface, inspired by medieval works on wood. Her use of colour is often intuitive, developing as the work progresses and one colour leads to another. Here she uses a geometric motif of simple, slightly-overlapping shapes. At the overlapping edges the colours change, and the forms seem to embody the shape of a quiet thought. 

Abstract forms heighten contemplation and can suggest a way of thinking as much as a discrete thought. This way of thinking can be playful and indeterminate. In Tomislav Nikolic's I don't intend to understand, fields of delicate pastel tones resolve into lines of darker colour within the bright blue of the painted frame. This balance of nebulousness and resolution hints at a thought-state where ideas float, sometimes coalescing, other times drifting. This thought-state contrasts with those suggested by more defined geometry, such as Belle Blau's Whole Unto Itself, where strong lines create clear boundaries within the space of the canvas, as they open it up into an illusory depth.  

Another work of tight geometric composition is Ron Adams' Lucky Strike for Nicola. Adams' work takes shape from influences and relationships: in this case the box of matches that is emblematic of his friendship with the artist Nicola Smith. The rows of pale stripes with black tips are interrupted by one varying segment of red, the one unspent match. The red glows with potential, tempting the eye in the same way one's fingers would reach for the last remaining good match in the box.

The influences that shape abstract work often remain only as the lightness of resonances but can provide a rewarding insight into the works' intentions. In Smoker Series - After Guston, Madeleine Preston uses shapes from, and the lung-like pink and black colour palette, of Phillip Guston's Nixon-era paintings. This establishes a visual connection between two eras of American politics: the Watergate crisis of the 1970s, and the contemporary American political situation of the Trump administration.

The resin sculptures of Kate Rohde also engage with the idea of corruption, taking influence from Adolf Loos' argument, in the 1913 essay "Ornament and Crime", that excess in design can have a corruptive influence on society. Rohde's florid bowls and vases have a gleaming, scampering vitality. Each vessel seems to burst forth with ornamentation, a challenge to the neat boundaries of the object.  

For all their variations in style, artists who work with abstraction use colour and form to play on our associations, transposing our thoughts and perceptions. Sometimes this is an immersive and quiet experience, and other times an exuberant one, and often our engagement is one of transcendence. The works in Colour and Form carry us into their internal worlds, as they are drawn into connection, across the decades.

Vanessa Berry

This essay written by Sharne Wolff is included in our catalogue for our ‘Colour & Form’ exhibition. The catalogue is now available from the gallery.

Pictured is untitled #982, 1965, acrylic, felt tip on paper by John Peart. photo by docqment

COLOUR AND FORM  - HOME GALLERY, MARCH 2018

Sharne Wolff

On Wednesday 21st August 1968, Melbourne’s ‘The Age’ newspaper ran a small article tucked to one side of page two. Headlined, On Moon in 1969 ‘possible’. The brief snippet from Washington reported the growing probability of a manned Lunar landing by Apollo spacecraft the following year. The same day, splashed across the front page, an ostensibly more important domestic announcement heralded the opening of the new St Kilda Road premises of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV).[i]

Amidst much heady fanfare and the palpable optimism of the era, the inaugural exhibition named The Field welcomed crowds at the new NGV. The aptly titled display included works by forty young Australian artists – most of whom had been introduced to American ‘post-painterly abstraction’ by virtue of their overseas travels or via imported exhibitions. By means of The Field, this new generation of artists entered the mainstream with a selection of colour field and hard edge paintings, shaped canvases and sculptures.

Fifty years on The Field is still regarded by many as a ground-breaking show. Its lasting relevance is visible in Colour and Form – which forefronts the work of three of The Field’s original group of painters. Work by Michael Johnson, Sydney Ball and John Peart – the latter two artists having died in recent years– are accompanied by a larger party of next generation colourists namely, Ron Adams, Belle Blau, Angela Brennan, Celia Gullett, Saskia Leek, Sean Meilak, Jonny Niesche, Tomislav Nikolic, Madeleine Preston, Kate Rohde and Louise Tuckwell.

In the cosy confines of Home Gallery’s living room and hallways, Colour and Form’s intention mirrors that of The Field to, “make possible a considered judgement of the work of these artists seen in the company of their fellows and of stylistic principles they share”.[ii]. Curator Anthony Bautovich has juxtaposed the work of emerging artists with that of the three original artists, and grouped together unlikely old and new forms in shared spaces. Historical and mid-career painting and mixed-media works from Peart (1965) and Johnson (1987) respectively, are brought together with Ball’s duo of new-millennia screenprints from the 2003 Canto series (first developed in the mid-1960s), and over twenty recently-made paintings, sculptures and ceramic assemblages.

While five decades separate Colour and Form’s oldest and newest examples, the exhibition demonstrates the Australian artists ongoing regard for the international style originally evidenced in The Field. It modestly nods agreement with the proposition that art’s interest in unravelling the mysteries and potential of colour has never waned. At the same time, Colour and Form proposes contemporary means of exploiting and interpreting the genre.

Encouraging the idea of the movement’s continuum from its American beginnings Bautovich is interested in the parallels between Sydney Ball and American artist, Frank Stella. Favouring Stella’s reductionist style that represented a rejection of abstract expressionism – and drawn from the Canto series based on Ezra Pound’s epic series of poems of the same name, Ball’s Canto IX and Canto XXI are examples of this idea. While formally confined by the geometry of their respective circles, they shimmer with intense colour and a paradoxical sense of the shape’s symbolic infinity.

From the next generation of artists in Colour and Form, we can recognise homage to these pioneering artists being fuelled by the influence of contemporary culture. The transcendental effect of colour in Jonny Niesche’s immersive Personal Cosmos signals the work’s affinity with Mark Rothko’s painting of the 1940s and 50s. Rothko publicly insisted that he was attempting to find “a pictorial equivalent for man’s new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.”.[iii] On closer view – as Rothko himself preferred – the medium of Personal Cosmos is revealed as voile and acrylic mirror. This added dimension delivers a twist and endows the painting with savvy power to reflect the viewer in certain light, including when taking a selfie. Meanwhile Niesche’s zig zag adventures with Cadence Loop #10 (cyan to magenta) – constructed from steel and ‘flip flop’ auto paint that encourages angled viewing – suggest his ability to refresh and extend Rothko’s original concept as well as conserving it.

While it may seem obvious, it is worth noting that each of the artists in Colour and Form share a common and profound interest in colour and form, though each has their unique way exploring these elements in their art. Ranging from Adams’ pop-inspired painting and Preston’s politically-associated assemblages to Rohde’s exotic neo rococo sculptures, Colour and Form epitomises the expansion of the genre and the experimental attitude of the group as a whole.

Later this year The Field will be restaged in its entirety at the NGV. Though only a few will personally remember the heady optimism of Melbourne in 1968, it seems the possibilities for colour and form are increasingly timeless.

[i] The Age, 21 August 1968, 1–2, Melbourne, Google News Archive, 20 March 2018.

[ii] Finemore, Brian. and Stringer, John. The Field, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1969, 3.

[iii] Anfam, David, Ed. Abstract Expressionism. Royal Academy of Arts, 2016, 113.

The catalogue for Home’s ‘Colour & Form’ exhibition has finally been produced. The exhibition staged during Art Month in 2018 featured a stellar line-up of practitioners of non-objective and hard edge abstraction in two and three-dimensional forms.

Now available from the gallery, the artworks featured in the catalogue are supported by essays from writers Vanessa Berry and Sharne Wolff.

“…for all their variations in style, artists who work with abstraction use colour and form to play on our associations, transposing our thoughts and perceptions. Sometimes this is an immersive and quiet experience, and other times an exuberant one, and often our engagement is one of transcendence. The works in Colour and Form carry us into their internal worlds, as they are drawn into connection, across the decades…” taken from the essay ‘Internal Logic’ by Vanessa Berry  

Pictured from left is Sydney Ball, Canto XXI, 2003, screenprint Tomislav Nikolic, I don’t intend to understand, 2015, acrylic, marble dust, 13.5ct white gold leaf on linen and wood and Angela Brennan, Potami, 2014, earthenware.

Sydney Ball is represented by Sullivan & Strumpf, Sydney.

Tomislav Nikolic painting exhibited courtesy of art consultant Kate Smith.

Tomislav Nikolic is represented by Fox Jensen Gallery.

Angela Brennan is represented by Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne.

Home’s Xmas Show kicks off tomorrow. We will be open Saturdays & Sundays from 2-5pm or by appointment up until Christmas.

Come along to see a stellar line-up of artworks by Clara Adolphs, Sydney Ball, Glenn Barkley, Stephen Bird, Rupert Bunny, Guy Boyd, Dora Chapman, Nick Collerson, Adam Cullen, Lynda Draper, Patrick Hartigan, Dale Hickey, David Hockney, Michael Johnson, Mason Kimber, Elwyn Lynn, Ali McCann, Sarah Mosca, Sidney Nolan, Nadia Odlum, Madeleine Preston, Garry Shead, Vanessa Stockard, Clare Thackway, Tony Tuckson and Mirra Whale.

Pictured is Sydney Ball, Canto XI, 2003, screenprint, P/P and Madeleine Preston, Last Year at Marienbad, 2018, glazed and underglazed earthenware.

Home’s ‘The Portrait’ exhibition closes next Sunday the 4th. 

Come along to see work by artists Tamara Dean, Chris Dolman, Lynda Draper, Cherine Fahd, Heath Franco, Bill Henson, Deborah Kelly, Katrin Koenning, Dean Manning, Sally McInerney, Sanné Mestrom, Xue Mo, Geoffrey Proud, Zorica Purlija, Nick Stathopoulos and Brett Whiteley 

Pictured is an opening night shot - works from left to right - Cherine Fahd, Apókryphos 1-1405, 2018/2019, Archival pigment print, Bill Henson, Untitled, Diptych, 1983-1984, C Type print and Nick Stathopoulos, Deng, 2016, acrylic and oil on linen. 

Bill Henson artwork appears courtesy of Badger & Fox Gallery. Nick Stathopoulos is represented by Maunsell Wickes Gallery. Photo by Steve McLaren.

“…there is an unwritten contract that grief is private, unphotographable. Even in the family album it is kept hidden. Family albums celebrate our moments of togetherness; birthdays, holidays and weddings as well as ordinary moments of domestic life. But what of death? What of images of grief and loss?

Apoìkryphos is a response to rare photographs from my family archive. In this series, I offer a forensic examination of mourning and the physical ways in which emotions are visualised, experienced and witnessed. Using image and text I have reproduced 24 photographs taken in 1975 of my Grandfather’s funeral and burial. Using a numerical system of annotations and footnotes, I forensically yet intimately guide you through the mysteries of the event portrayed, offering a visual and literary response to the photographs and to the unknown status of the photographer..."

Pictured is Apókryphos 6-1405, 2019 from Cherine Fahd’s compelling Apókryphos series.

Home will be open today from 2-5pm.

Home’s Co-Director Madeleine Preston is exhibiting this work with blackartprojects at Sydney Contemporary. Jacob’s Ladder, 2018, underglazed porcelain, copper (pictured) will be showing in the Art Money booth. Photo by docqment

“Jacobs Ladder was made in response to my experiences during a residency at the Cité in Paris. The work responds directly to the way particular museums use culture in the service of ideas of empire. The Quai Branly museum in Paris has an enormous collection that originates in what the museum calls ‘economic exchanges as the result of the first colonial expansion.’ 

What struck me most was that a large part if not most of the collection would have been amassed through theft and ‘economic exchanges’ that favoured the buyer – if an ‘exchange’ occurred at all. The Quai Branly like the British Museum is a study in European imperialism. I wanted to make work about how museums are ciphers for violent histories that use aesthetics and display to reinforce dominant narratives.” 

This wonderful work by Tamara Dean is currently showing in Home’s ‘The Portrait’ exhibition.

Pictured is Luca and Aki, 2016, Pure pigment print on cotton.

“There is an arresting beauty in androgyny.

Androgyny challenges our cultural conceptions of femininity and masculinity. The questions that often arise - "Are you a boy or a girl?" or "are you a man or a woman?" - suggest that gender stereotypes, learned behaviour and cultural prejudices can influence the way we perceive and in turn relate to people.

For me androgyny can be perceived as a universal face of humanity…”

Tamara Dean has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. Her works are held in Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra ACT, Francis J. Greenburger Collection, New York, Artbank, Art Gallery of South Australia, The Mordant Family Collection, Australia, Tweed River Gallery, Neil Balnaves Collection, Australia, ArtOmi Collection, New York and Gold Coast City Art Gallery.

Tamara Dean appears courtesy of Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Deborah Kelly in our ‘The Portrait’ exhibition opening this Wednesday.

Taken from Kelly’s 2018 ‘Seven Eves’ series, this body of work recasts the despised figure of the first woman as ancient hope for female learning, as a counterclaim to the malevolent mythologies underpinning Catholic misogyny.

Damning revelations of clergymen's sexual abuse provide context for this extended meditation on the character of the ‘first sinner’ and her ongoing resonances through human history. She is the original female; the disobedient woman; the emasculating witch; the threat to clerical authority; she through whom man fell: all these women are valorised here in faithful revision of masculinist orthodoxy.

As a biblical character, Eve is alone in a world full of men. Her longing for knowledge is the first and worst sin, the fall of our species whose shame is punished still.

Using images excised from discarded books of western art history, this work suggests insurgent female solidarities, the glories of our mitochondrial ancestress, women’s defiance of religious oppression; and repudiation of the virgin/whore binary informing the deathgrip of the patriarchs.

Pictured is Eve x Eve (Shazzam) from Seven Eves, 2018, Collage, Japanese metallic and Sennelier honey-based watercolours, ink on handmade cotton paper.

Deborah Kelly appears courtesy of Wagner Gallery, Paddington

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Bill Henson in our ‘The Portrait’ exhibition on Wednesday. Join us for opening drinks from 6-8pm.

Bill Henson is a visionary explorer of twilight zones, between nature and civilization, youth and adulthood, male and female. His photographs are painterly tableaux that continue the traditions of romantic literature and painting. The use of chiaroscuro is common throughout his works, through underexposure and adjustment in printing. His photographs' use of bokeh is intended to give them a painterly atmosphere. The faces of the subjects are often blurred or partly shadowed and do not directly face the viewer.

Pictured is Bill Henson, Untitled, Diptych, 1983-1984, C Type print. This artwork appears courtesy of Badger & Fox Gallery.

This compelling work from Cherine Fahd’s Apókryphos series will be showing in Home’s ‘The Portrait’ exhibition opening next Wednesday. 

Cherine Fahd is an artist, academic and writer working in the field of photography. Fahd holds a doctorate (PhD) from Monash University, Melbourne and is the Director of Photography at the University of Technology Sydney.

An extensive exhibition history has seen her work shown in major public institutions in Australia and internationally, with photographic work represented in public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, Museum of Photographic Arts San Diego and the Haifa Museum of Art, Israel.

Fahd is the recipient of numerous grants from the Australia Council for the Arts (2018, 2016, 2014, 2007, 2004, 2002, 1999) along with art awards and residencies such as the NSW Women & Arts Fellowship from Arts NSW (2005), Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation for the Arts Photography Award (2004), National Photography Prize (2010) and the Moya Dyring Studio from the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2003).

Recently, Fahd was awarded the Asialink Creative Exchange (2018) to Varanasi, India. Her work on grief and mourning, Apókryphos (2019), was selected for The National 2019: New Australian Art and awarded a residency at The Clothing Store, both through Carriageworks.

Fahd has published two books, A Portrait is a Puzzle (2017) and Apókryphos (2019), both with M.33 Melbourne, publisher of contemporary Australian photography. Since 2017 she has also contributed to news media through The Conversation and subsequently to Fairfax, ABC news, and SBS, as well as publishing in scholarly journals such as Journal Visual Arts Practice and Journal of Photography and Culture. 

“…there is an unwritten contract that grief is private, unphotographable. Even in the family album it is kept hidden. Family albums celebrate our moments of togetherness; birthdays, holidays and weddings as well as ordinary moments of domestic life. But what of death? What of images of grief and loss? 

Apókryphos is a response to rare photographs from my family archive. In this series, I offer a forensic examination of mourning and the physical ways in which emotions are visualised, experienced and witnessed. Using image and text I have reproduced 24 photographs taken in 1975 of my Grandfather’s funeral and burial. Using a numerical system of annotations and footnotes, I forensically yet intimately guide you through the mysteries of the event portrayed, offering a visual and literary response to the photographs and to the unknown status of the photographer..."

Pictured is Apókryphos 1-1405, 2018/2019, Archival pigment print

This imposing painting by Nick Stathopoulos will be featuring in our ‘The Portrait’ exhibition next Wednesday. Join us for opening drinks from 6-8pm.

Nick Stathopoulos is the son of Greek migrants and grew up in Western Sydney. A self-taught artist, he has become known for his hyper-realistic style, particularly his paintings of his childhood toy collection.

A graduate of Macquarie University, he has worked as an artist for over 30 years in film, television, animation, and book publishing.
Nick is a five-time Archibald finalist. His 2016 entry of Sudanese refugee lawyer Deng Adut was voted ‘People’s Choice’ to great critical acclaim and media attention. He has also been a two-time finalist in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize.

Pictured is Deng, 2016, acrylic and oil on linen

Nick Stathopoulos is represented by Maunsell Wickes Gallery.

Bumper, Chicka, Tom Terrific, Lord Ted, Gibbo, Wuzza, Chook, Singo.

Everyone had a soft spot for the Newtown Jets.

By day they were garbos, cops, tradies & teachers.

Come the weekend they were giants.

We sat on grassy banks under the manual scoreboard with Frank Hyde in our ear.

After a trifecta of wooden spoons and financial woes they were ejected from the

competition in 1983 but far from forgotten. (words by Dean Manning)

Home will be exhibiting this wonderful painting by Dean Manning in our ‘The Portrait’ exhibition opening next Wednesday the 28th.
Dean Manning came to painting late after a long career as a composer/musician with rock groups Leonardo’s Bride and Holidays On Ice. He now regularly exhibits his paintings and animated films. 

He has been a finalist in the Sulman and Blake prizes and his portrait of comic actor, writer and director Lawrence Leung was a finalist in the 2016 Archibald Prize. His work is held in the collections of Artbank and Deakin University.

Pictured is I Got Sunburnt Waiting for The Jets, 2017, oil on wood.

This stunning work by Zorica Purlija will be showing in Home’s ‘The Portrait’ exhibition opening on Wednesday the 28th of August.

Currently working towards her Masters of Art in Photomedia at UNSW Art & Design, Zorica has been a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize three years consecutively, twice in Sydney’s HeadOn Portrait Prize, a finalist in the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize Melbourne, Duo Magazine Percival Photographic Portrait Prize, The Kuala Lumpur Photographic Portrait Award, Mama Art Foundation Photography Prize in Albury, Josephine Urlick Award in Queensland and the Olive Cotton Award for Portraiture.

Pictured is Complicated, 2018, Baryta fine art photo rag.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Brett Whiteley in our ‘The Portrait’ exhibition opening on Wednesday the 28th of August from 6-8pm.

Brett Whiteley (1939 – 1992) is one of Australia’s most celebrated artists. He won the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes several times, and his artistic career was bolstered by his celebrity status in Australia and abroad.

Whiteley started working as a commercial artist in 1956, began life-drawing classes at the Julian Ashton Art School and joined John Santry’s sketch club where he became friends with Australian landscape painter Lloyd Rees, who was a strong influence. On weekends Whiteley painted around the towns of Bathurst, Hill End and Sofala, producing works such as Sofala 1958. In 1959 he was awarded the Italian Government Travelling Art Scholarship, which was judged by Australian artist Russell Drysdale at the Art Gallery of NSW. Whiteley remained in Europe for the next decade, exhibiting his work regularly in group exhibitions in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin, establishing an international reputation. He also lived in the USA, staying at New York’s Chelsea Hotel where he socialized with celebrities such as musicians Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan.

Returning to Sydney in 1969, Whiteley moved to Lavender Bay and became involved in the Yellow House artists’ collective in Kings Cross. His work became highly collectable, in particular his Matisse influenced large-scale interiors and landscapes. In 1976 he won both the Archibald Prize for portraiture and the Sulman Prize for genre painting. The following year, he was awarded the Wynne Prize for landscape. He won all three prizes in 1978 (the first artist to do so) and the Wynne a third time in 1984. In 1991 he was awarded an Order of Australia. 

Brett Whiteley died in Thirroul on the New South Wales south coast in 1992. His last studio and home in Sydney’s Surry Hills is now a museum managed by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Located at 2 Raper Street in Surry Hills, the studio is open to the public Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, 10am-4pm.

Pictured is Self Portrait, One of a Dozen Glimpses’, 1983, etching and aquatint.

This work appears courtesy of The Badger & Fox Gallery © Wendy Whiteley

“…White supremacists aren’t patriots, they are traitors – Americans must unite against hatred and bigotry…” Senator John McCain (12th August 2017)

The words of the late US Senator John McCain relate to the events, images and ramifications of the Charlottesville riots that took place two years ago.

Nationalism is often the last refuge to those who have, or believe they have, no other options available to them. This last resort whether real or imagined can sometimes have tragic consequences. The gruesome scenes of the Charlottesville riots on August 12th 2017 and President Trump’s response ‘condoning’ the actions of white supremacists have had a significant influence on the rise of the right globally.

Far-right groups had gathered in Charlottesville to protest the decision to bring down a monument of Confederate General Robert E Lee. Protests came in the form of extreme references to Nazi ideology. Disturbing scenes of torch carrying white supremacists chanting ‘Blood and Soil’ and the death of a peaceful protestor, Heather Heyer, run down by an enraged white supremacist, were amplified by President Trump’s response.

The US President did not denounce the actions of white supremacists, instead condemning hatred, bigotry, and violence ‘on many sides’. While he later went on to state he condemned neo-Nazis and white nationalists, his statement, in which he also referred to "very fine people on both sides", was seen as implying a moral equivalence between white supremacists and those protesting against them. The President’s words were interpreted as a sign that he was sympathetic to white supremacist ideology. It has been argued that Trump’s failure to condemn the actions of white supremacists has led to a ‘validation’ of right-wing groups. 

Trumps’ legitimization follows the pattern of an increase in racism in all parts of the world. Right-wing groups have been emboldened and are more openly demonstrating their hatred and bigotry. The preconditions for potential disaster are materializing. There are unnerving signs that present-day Europe is inching towards a repeat of past events. Rising support for far-right political parties, the slide towards authoritarianism in Poland and Hungary, and the multitude of displaced Muslim refugees moving throughout Europe adopts a familiar pattern to the catastrophe that took hold in Germany the late 1930’s. 

Here in Australia there is a growing unease with the shift towards, and unthinking acceptance of right-wing ideology. Advocacy of the far-right by the US President has aided this dark movement - Nationalism is being cultivated and beginning to take root.

Home is thrilled to be exhibiting work by Nick Stathopoulos in our ‘The Portrait’ show opening on Wednesday the 28th of August.

Nick Stathopoulos is the son of Greek migrants, and grew up in Western Sydney. A self-taught artist, he has become known for his hyper-realistic style, particularly his paintings of his childhood toy collection.

A graduate of Macquarie University, he has worked as an artist for over 30 years in film, television, animation, and book publishing. His work now focuses on his solo shows and private commissions.

Nick is a five-time Archibald finalist. His 2016 entry of Sudanese refugee lawyer Deng Adut was voted ‘People’s Choice’ to great critical acclaim and media attention. He has also been a two-time finalist in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize. His portrait ‘Ugly – portrait of Robert Hoge’ won the People’s Choice Award in the 2014 Salon des Refusés, and that painting was a finalist in the 2015 BP Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in London. He was also a finalist in the 2016 Shirley Hannan Portrait Prize in Bega, NSW.

Robert Hoge is an Australian writer and friend of the artist. Hoge was born with a facial tumour and limited mobility; his autobiographical memoir Ugly traces the challenges he overcame while growing up and the many surgical procedures he endured. Stathopoulos says of the portrait: ‘I wanted to capture his intelligence, his defiance, his quiet dignity, and his suffering.’

Home is thrilled to be exhibiting work by Katrin Koenning in our ‘The Portrait’ exhibition opening on Wednesday the 28th of August. 

Katrin Koenning is an artist and photographic educator from the former German rustbelt of the Ruhrgebiet, now based in Melbourne, Australia. In 2016 her first book, Astres Noirs (Chose Commune), co-authored with her friend and fellow artist Sarker Protick, received the Australian Photobook of the Year Award and was shortlisted for both Prix Nadar and the Paris Photo/Aperture First Book Award. Her work is regularly exhibited in Australian and international solo and group exhibitions, and has been featured in festivals, biennials and fairs such as Paris Photo (solo), Daegu Photo Biennial, Peckham24, Noorderlicht, Format Festival, Chobi Mela Festival, Athens Photo Festival and many others. 

Koenning is the recipient of numerous accolades such as the Daylight Photo Award, the Conscientious Photo Award and the Emerging Documentary Photographer of the year. She is a former editor of the Australian PhotoJournalist Magazine, and her images have been published in The New Yorker, ASX, The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, California Sunday Magazine and many others. Katrin regularly teaches intensive conceptual and documentary-based workshops in photographic practice and thinking, working closely with institutions and festivals such as Angkor Photo Festival (Siem Reap, Cambodia), The Lighthouse (Calcutta, India), Myanmar Deitta (Yangong, Myanmar), Photo Kathmandu (Kathmandu, Nepal), Photobook NZ, The Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne, Australia), Perth Centre for Photography and the Australian Centre for Photography. She has been a photographic educator since 2008, teaching documentary storytelling at the University of Queensland and Photography Studies College Melbourne. Katrin is represented by Reading Room Melbourne and East Wing Gallery.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Heath Franco in our ‘The Portrait’ exhibition opening on Wednesday the 28th of August.

Franco's practice is primarily concerned with video, although the process of production and exhibition also incorporates photography, performance, costume, sound, digital media, sculpture and installation. He creates screen-based installation works that are structured with respect to flow and rhythm rather than plot narrative and that in turn attract and repulse through a mix of hyper aesthetic, catchy jingles and absurd, at times grotesque, performances. Repetition is a consistent feature of works produced in recent years, along with a psychotropic sensibility and the artist's presence as sole performer within the works.

Conceptually, Franco's practice is informed by explorations into Western popular culture, domesticity and notions of ‘home’, the chaos of existence, and contemplation on the nature, the artificial and possibilities of alternate, hidden realities.

Pictured is a video still from PORTRAIT, 2010-15, HD video. Image courtesy of the artist.

Tamara Dean’s solo exhibition - ’Endangered’ - opens tonight at Martin Browne Contemporary in Paddington. Pictured is Endangered 10c, 2019, Pure pigment print on cotton rag paper.

Home is thrilled to be exhibiting a work by Tamara Dean in our ‘The Portrait’ exhibition opening on Wednesday the 28th of August. Tamara Dean is represented by Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney.

One of the many marble stone sculptures exhibited at The Met. Pictured is Marble head of an athlete, Roman, Antonine period, ca. A.D. 138-92. Copy of a Greek bronze statue of ca. 450-425 B.C.

From the fabulous Whitney Museum American Art Collection - Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), Orange Mood, 1966, acrylic on canvas.

Gallery crawl today – mostly along W24th St. Impressive exhibitions including heavyweights Gagosian and Zwirner. The show that really knocked me out was staged at Yossi Milo Gallery - 245 Tenth Avenue (between 24th & 25th St).

The show titled ‘African Spirits’ – a group exhibition featuring stunning portrait photography by Pieter Hugo – including (pictured) Mimi Afrika, Wheatland Farm, Graaff Reinet, 2013, From the series Kin, Digital C-Print

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), Apropos of Little Sister, 1911, oil on canvas on show at The Guggenheim

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Sydney based artist Chris Dolman in our ‘The Portrait’ exhibition opening in late August.

“…Chris Dolman makes paintings and objects imbued with incongruent and self-deprecating humour. Drawing from personal experience, art history and popular culture, his work often hovers between existentially driven narrative and slapstick one-liner. Dolman’s areas of interest include failure doubt and anxiety, pathos,loneliness and loss, all of which he explores through his practice with an equal mix of sincerity and irony…”

Dolman was the recipient of the Wallara Travelling Scholarship (2009), awarded the 2017 Art Gallery of NSW Dyason Bequest, ArtStart and New Work from the Australia Council for the Arts and Artist Support from Arts NSW. Dolman has undertaken international residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Villa Belleville Paris, and Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium.

National residencies include: Hill End, Bundanon Trust, BigCi NSW, Ceramic Design Studio, Parramatta Artists Studios, and Artspace Sydney.

Pictured is an installation shot of Chris Dolman’s 2019 ‘Falling from a Broken Ladder’ exhibition at Galerie pompom.

Chris Dolman is represented by Galerie pompom, Sydney.

Many thanks to arts writer Eleanor Zurowski for her engaging take on the ‘Memory Betrays Everybody’ exhibition. Also, a big thanks to Naomi Riddle and Hannah Jenkins at Running Dog for publishing the piece. 

Please click on the link and have a read – it’s highly recommended.

http://rundog.art/memory-betrays-everybody-anthony-bautovich/

Many thanks to arts writer Jane O’Sullivan for her excellent essay on the ‘Memory Betrays Everybody’ exhibition.

Lighting the way home

Memory betrays everybody, especially those who we knew best. It is an ally of oblivion, it is an ally of death. –Joseph Brodsky

I visit on one of those crisp Autumn days when it feels like the sky is about to shatter. It's been hot for too long, but the weather has finally turned and my body hums with it. This is what it should be like, this is what I remember. It’s a physical relief. Perhaps home is just the familiarity of knowing how things work, or what comes next. It's a strange way to walk into an exhibition about exile.

Memory Betrays Everybody brings together the ex-Yugoslav artist and writer Dragana Jurišić, who now lives in Dublin, with the Croatian-born and Sydney-based installation and multimedia artist Biljana Jančić. It’s dark inside, and the first thing to break the gloom is a long table spread with documents; photographs and texts that are spot-lit like artefacts in a museum display case. At the far left there is a thick paperback book, Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Published in 1937, West’s book is a kind of extended travelogue through Yugoslavia and a portrait of Europe on the brink of war. Jurišić took a copy of this book with her when she was finally able to return to the home she had left as a teenager. She loosely followed West’s path, effectively chasing a ghost through a country that no longer existed.

As she went, Jurišić took photographs and wrote notes, later piecing her experiences into the acclaimed photographic book YU: The Lost Country. Excerpts from this project are presented in Memory Betrays Everybody. One photograph on the table shows the notes Jurišić wrote in the margins of her book. Still so many burnt houses. Fuck.

Another photograph focuses on an old man holding a dandelion. There's an oblique sadness to the image that gains shape in her notes. The man is grieving for a young child killed by passing car. He has been waiting hours for someone to come and collect the body.

Perhaps one of the most disturbing images is of a puddle of blood on top of a boulder. Jurišić’s notes, placed alongside the photograph, explain it as part of a history of animal sacrifice in the region. She seems to consider it largely in terms of cultural attitudes to hope and violence, but it also reads as a visual metaphor for a land recovering from war. The blood has yet to seep into the cracks.

While they’re documentary, these images are also part of a meditation on photography, memory and power. Behind the table, playing on a large screen, Jurišić talks frankly about her experiences losing her home, her country and her national identity when Yugoslavia broke apart in 1991. She says that her father was an ardent amateur photographer and when their house was burned down, thousands of his negatives were destroyed. She became, she says, "one of those refugees with no photographs, with no past".

The impact of this moment speaks to the way that photographs can dominate or even override our own memories, at times seeming more solid than the unreliability of our own minds. For Jurišić, taking her camera back to her former home seems to have given her a sense of distance and control. She says it was like disowning a home that had displaced her.

In a curtained alcove to the side, Jurišić lays out her memories of what happened when she was a teenager. TV monitors hover in the shadows, stacked on top of each other. Some are in colour, some black and white. They play the same footage of a woman, out in the cold. The wind blows her hair and the fur of her hood across her face. The words of the voiceover are like strobe lights, illuminating small, sudden moments from the past.

I remember grabbing onto her until all my nails broke.

She says that about her mother.

I remember the soles of my red converse shoes melting.

She says that about returning to her home after it was burnt down.

I remember walking out.

These memories are voiced in a spare, matter of fact way, one flash after another. As they accumulate, the experience with the work takes on a fragmented, dreamlike quality. This is also mirrored in the dramatic installation of the exhibition, with screens and objects appearing to float in the shadows. Biljana Jančić's large-scale photographs, which are exhibited in the central exhibition space, seem at home in this world of light and dark, even though they engage with very different ideas.

Rather than looking at the lived experience of exile and diaspora, Jančić’s practice considers displacement in visual and spatial terms. Past site-specific projects have seen her inserting sculptural elements into exhibition spaces, or placing coloured tape and light projections on the floor and walls. These interventions engage with and disrupt the way we see these spaces. Her projects often prompt questions about borders and demarcations, and highlight how unquestioningly we occupy and move within our physical environments. In Jančić's work, space is not just an empty void to be filled, but something already shaped and imprinted by architecture, culture and history.  

In Memory Betrays Everybody, Jančić presents three abstracted photographs from her 2018 series Concrete (variations). The grand scale of these works is at odds with their everyday origins: a box of tissues, lit up by the sun. Jančić has photographed them so that the tissues appear to be alternately reaching up like candle flames or buckling like the tin walls of a fire-damaged shed.

Texture is hard to discern. The surfaces are reduced to planes and facets, and the folds in the tissue are sometimes only captured in the palest of greys. These white shapes are set against flat, black backgrounds, letting Jančić play with ideas of negative space and form, pressure and resistance. There is a tension to these images. The forms feel both monumental and too fragile to last much longer. They are just soft tissue, after all.

In a political climate that seems to be gathering around the old monoliths–nationalism, idols, monuments–the work presented in Memory Betrays Everybody takes on added significance. On the main screen, Jurišić talks about what being an exile has meant for her, and how it has reshaped her whole way of being. She is alert and watchful, "constantly observant," she says. Perhaps, among all the things she has lost, is the ability to ever be completely at ease

Home is thrilled to be exhibiting work by Sanné Mestrom in our ‘The Portrait’ exhibition opening in late August.

Sanné Mestrom’s practice draws on 20th century iconic modernist works to explore the psychological, emotional and cultural significance attached to them. She explores how value is accorded to these objects, how they are always tied to their cultural and art historical contexts and how they may become substitutes for particular values or beliefs. Through replication, appropriation and disruption her work filters historical mythologies through her own systems of reference, questioning notions of lineage, originality and influence, further altered through her experience of ‘making’.

Mestrom holds a PhD in Fine Art (2008) and a Graduate Certificate in Public Art (2011), both from RMIT University. She was a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary in 2010-11, and has also held residencies in Mexico City, 2010, and Seoul, South Korea, 2001.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Sanné Mestrom: Black Paintings, Mcclelland Sculpture Park+Gallery (2018); Corrections, Gippsland Art Gallery, Australia (2018); Weeping Women, Ian Potter Public Sculpture Commission, Monash University Museum of Art (2014); The Internal Logic, West Space, Melbourne and La Trobe Regional Gallery, Gippsland, Victoria, (2013); and The Reclining Nude, Studio 12, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2012). Mestrom presented major new large-scale works at Encounters, Art Basel Hong Kong (2017) curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor.

Selected group exhibitions include TarraWarra Biennial: From Will to Form, TarraWarra Museum of Art (2018); Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2016); Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award, Shepparton Art Museum, Victoria (2015); NEW13, ACCA, Melbourne (2013); Future Primitive, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2013); Pretty Air & Useful Things, MUMA, Albury (2013); Ode to Form, West Space, Melbourne (2012); Figure & Ground, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne (2011); OCTOPUS 11 The Matter of Air, Gertrude Contemporary (2011); An ideal for living, Linden Gallery, Melbourne (2008); and Standing on the shoulders of Giants (with Kate Newby), Münster, Germany, 2007.

Mestrom was winner of the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize in 2017. She is the recipient of an Australia Council Grant, City of Melbourne Grant, several Arts Victoria Creation Grants, winner of the Art & Australia Emerging Artist Award (2013), John Fries Memorial Prize (2011), a NAVA Janet Holmes Artist Grant, the Siemens Post Graduate Fine Art Scholarship Award and an Australian Post Graduate Award for her PhD research.

Mestrom is a Senior Lecturer, Visual Arts (Sculpture) at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. 

Pictured is Untitled (Self Portrait, Underground), 2017, bronze, concrete and steel.

Sanné Mestrom is represented by Sullivan & Strumpf, Sydney.

Home is thrilled to be exhibiting work by Sydney artist Cherine Fahd in our ‘The Portrait’ exhibition. Opening in late August the show will also feature works by artists including Bill Henson, Sanné Mestrom, Heath Franco, Tamara Dean and Lynda Draper.

“…there is an unwritten contract that grief is private, unphotographable. Even in the family album it is kept hidden. Family albums celebrate our moments of togetherness; birthdays, holidays and weddings as well as ordinary moments of domestic life. But what of death? What of images of grief and loss?..”

Apókryphos is a response to rare photographs from my family archive. In this series, I offer a forensic examination of mourning and the physical ways in which emotions are visualised, experienced and witnessed. Using image and text I have reproduced 24 photographs taken in 1975 of my Grandfather’s funeral and burial. Using a numerical system of annotations and footnotes, I forensically yet intimately guide you through the mysteries of the event portrayed, offering a visual and literary response to the photographs and to the unknown status of the photographer.

Pictured is one of the works from Apókryphos - part of The National 2019 at Carriageworks.

‘Memory Betrays Everybody’ opens tonight at Black Box at UNSW Art & Design

The show features the work of Dublin based photographer and writer Dragana Jurišić and Sydney based artist Biljana Jančić.

Join me for drinks from 5-8pm – hope to see you here!

The show will be open Friday and Saturday from 11-5pm.

Installing at Black Box - UNSW Art & Design today.

Join me for opening drinks from 5-8pm on Thursday night. ‘Memory Betrays Everybody’ features the work of Dragana Jurišic & Biljana Jančic.

The show runs from Tuesday the 28th to Saturday the 1st of June.

“…our collective memory is shaped by the ideology of the day. The politics of memory enables a regime to record its rendition of the past. History is determined by this shared remembrance…”

Built in 1973, the monument at Mitrovica known as ‘Monument to the Mining Heroes’ was designed by renowned architect and academic, Bogdan Bogdanović.

Standing in the form of some lost Roman addition to Stonehenge, Bogdanović’s huge concrete monument in the town of Mitrovića is a homage to those lost if the fighting during WWII.

Mitrovića is one of many monuments scattered across the former Yugoslavia commissioned by President Josip Broz Tito to convey a sense of confidence and strength in the new Socialist Republic. Designed and built in the ‘60s and ‘70s by leading architects and sculptors, these memorials are located at sites of battles and concentration camps commemorating the victims of fascism in WWII.

The aesthetic beauty of these brutalist structures challenges their innate and commemorative intention. Devoid of signs of ideologies, war heroes or religions, these abstract forms were symbols of a modern and unified future.

The original intention for the creation of the monuments has resulted in their demise. As the Balkans War took hold in the early ‘90s and Yugoslavia fell apart, the monuments became touchstones for the inherent hatred, bigotry and fanaticism from the past - Nationalism destroyed Yugoslavia.

Nationalism is often the last refuge to those who have, or believe they have, no other options available to them. This last resort whether real or imagined can sometimes have tragic consequences. The gruesome scenes of the Charlottesville riots on August 12th 2017 and President Trump’s response to white supremacists’ actions had far-reaching ramifications around the globe.

Far-right groups had gathered in Charlottesville to protest the decision to bring down a monument of Confederate General Robert E Lee. Protests came in the form of extreme references to Nazi ideology. Disturbing scenes of torch carrying white supremacists chanting ‘Blood and Soil’ and the death of a peaceful protestor, run down by an enraged white supremacist, were amplified by President Trump’s response ‘condoning’ the actions of far-right groups.

The commemorative sculptures scattered across the former Yugoslavia, including Mitrovića, are reminders of the evils of fascism. The preconditions for potential disaster are materializing across Europe. Rising support for far-right political parties including Alternative for Germany, the slide towards authoritarianism in Poland and Hungary, and the multitude of displaced Muslim refugees moving throughout Europe adopts a familiar pattern to the catastrophe that took hold in Germany the late 1930’s.

There are unnerving signs that present-day Europe is inching towards a repeat of past events. Advocacy of the far-right by the US President has aided this dark movement. Here in Australia, there has been a significant and unnerving move towards the right.

Nationalism is being cultivated and beginning to take root.

I’m thrilled to be presenting work by Sydney artist Biljana Jančić in ‘Memory Betrays Everybody’, opening at the Black Box at UNSW Art & Design next week. Join us for opening drinks on Thursday the 30thof May from 5-8pm. 

The key theme in Biljana Jančić’s work is displacement. She works primarily with large-scale spatial interventions. These works respond directly to architecture and socio-historical contexts of spaces. Jančićregularly exhibits work in a wide range of independent and institutional contemporary art spaces.  

In ‘Memory Betrays Everybody’, Biljana Jančić’s work Concrete (Variations 1-5) takes everyday objects and transforms them through photography. What is known at the moment the photo is taken is remade over time by the image. Images like memory can betray reality.

Concrete (variations 1-5) began as an observation of a tissue box sitting on the dining table. A single tissue had been illuminated by the afternoon sun in such a way that it almost appeared as if it was made of concrete. This gave the tissues a symbolic value, as tiny, ephemeral monuments to the fragility and revery of domestic space. In this project the tissue dispenser became a random form generator that revealed endless architectonic variations.

Pictured is ‘Concrete (variations 1-5)’, 2018,Digital prints on vinyl - from the NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship finalists exhibition at Artspace. Photo by Zan Wimberley

“Memory betrays everybody, especially those whom we know best. It is an ally of oblivion, it is an ally of death. It is a fishnet with a very small catch, and with the water gone. You can’t use it to reconstruct anybody, even on paper.” - Joseph Brodsky 

With its title taken from a Joseph Brodsky poem, the exhibition ‘Memory Betrays Everybody’ will be staged at The Black Box at UNSW Art & Design. Featuring the work of Dublin based photographer and writer Dragana Jurišić and Sydney artist Biljana Jančić, the exhibition will present videos, projections, photography and installation. Grab a pair of wireless headphones at the entrance and be swept away by the audio visuals of Dragana Jurišić’s work, ‘I Remember’. Join me for opening drinks on Thursday the 30th of May from 5-8pm. The show runs from Tuesday the 28th May to Saturday the 1st of June. 

Image shot in Skopje, Macedonia taken from the book YU: The Lost Country by Dragana Jurišić

“…by a small village along the coast, a 10-year-old boy is killed by a

passing car. Waiting for someone to take him away.

Three hours later, we’re still waiting. Family howling in a house by the road. And the father ... If pain had a sound. I did not know at first if they were people or wolves. The older onlookers wince; they know that sound well. It comes with the territory, it seems.

Younger people laugh nervously... They will not remember the inappropriateness of their behaviour when their time comes to experience pain like that. There’s a dandelion by the road. I take a picture. Don’t know what else to do. More screams. The old man standing in front of me bends over and picks up the flower.

Gently, he blows. 

starigrad | Croatia

Image and text taken from YU: The Lost Country by Dragana Jurišić

I’m curating the exhibition ‘Memory Betrays Everybody’ at the Black Box at UNSW Art & Design. The exhibition will feature the work of two artists – ex-Yugoslav Dublin based photographer and writer Dragana Jurišić and Sydney based artist Biljana Jančić.

The show runs from Tuesday the 28th of May to Saturday the 1st of June – please join me for opening drinks on Thursday the 30th from 5-8pm.

Dragana Jurisic's YU: The Lost Country guides the viewer through a pilgrimage, unfolding before them a myriad of lives and emotions onto the map of where Yugoslavia once lay. Through-out the series of photographs documenting new life and the remnants of past atrocities in the former conglomerate, Jurišić rhythmically inserts with almost Wes Anderson-like technicolour shots of her travel reading, where sprawling diary notes live in the margins telling of the encounters which shook, infuriated and moved her. Often filled with anger, these contrast against the awesome range of emotions captured in her photography, where domesticity, townsfolk, dereliction and grandeur sit side by side. The quest for her past runs throughout, borne from the jarring assertion that "Yugoslavia', "Is there any such country?", "No but that's where I'm from." - Jack Gibson for LeCool, September 2014.

I’m looking forward to working with artist Biljana Jančic again. Biljana will be presenting projections and installation in the exhibition ‘Memory Betrays Everybody’ opening at the Black Box at the UNSW Art & Design in late May. 

The key theme in Biljana Jančić’s work is displacement. She works primarily with large-scale spatial interventions. These works respond directly to architecture and socio-historical contexts of spaces. Jančić regularly exhibits work in a wide range of independent and institutional contemporary art spaces.  

“…the purpose of my large-scale architectural interventions is to investigate the way in which subjects and objects inscribe, delineate or territorialise sites. The works I produce operate as punctures that highlight, amplify or distort existing architectural features. These interventions can be seen as parallel to interferences in virtual spaces, where phenomena such as glitches and other ‘errors’ create an awareness of the fragility that belies the structures that organise our lives. I think of my works as interruptions that create moments of pause and reflection on the complexities and tensions that drive our experience in the world…”

Pictured is Biljana’s work Splinter, 2016, aluminium tape and painters' tape from the Monumentalism exhibition at Kudos Gallery in November 2016

I’m curating the exhibition ‘Memory Betrays Everybody’ at the Black Box at the UNSW Art & Design opening in the last week of May. Comprising video, projections, prints and installation, ‘Memory Betrays Everybody’ will feature the work of Dublin based photographer and writer Dragana Jurišić and Sydney based artist, Biljana Jančić. 

Ove the next month I will be presenting elements from the exhibition and information regarding both of the exhibiting artists.  

Dragana Jurišić was born in Slavonski Brod, Croatia (then Yugoslavia). She is currently based in Dublin, Ireland. After the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, an entire country disappeared and nearly 1.5 million Yugoslavs vanished into thin air. Today, in the countries that came into being after Yugoslavia’s disintegration, there is total denial of that former identity. Her book YU: The Lost Country looks at the effects of exile and displacement on memory and identity from the eyes of an exile. Now, more than twenty years after the war, she feels at the safe distance to recall and question her own memories of both the place and the events she personally experienced. 

Image and text taken from the book - YU: The Lost Country by Dragana Jurišić. 

Home is thrilled to be exhibiting work by Dean Manning in our ‘The Portrait’ exhibition opening in late August. 

Dean Manning came to painting late after a long career as a composer/musician with rock groups Leonardo’s Bride and Holidays On Ice. He now regularly exhibits his paintings and animated films. He has been a finalist in the Sulman and Blake prizes, his work is held in the collections of Artbank and Deakin University.

 
His portrait of comic actor, writer and director Lawrence Leung was a finalist in the 2016 Archibald Prize. 

Pictured is Maximum Lawrence, 2016, oil on wood.

“…Nationalism is often the last refuge to those who have, or believe they have, no other options available to them. This last resort whether real or imagined can sometimes have tragic consequences…” 

The commemorative sculpture known as the ‘Monument to the Revolution of the People of Moslavina’ was designed by Dušan Džamonja and completed in 1967. 

Located in the town of Podgarić, the 20-metre wide monument was built to commemorate the rebellion and uprising against the Ustaše occupying forces in the central Croatian region of Moslavina during WWII.

Pictured is Podgarić from the 2010 Spomenik series by Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers. 

I’m thrilled to be curating an exhibition at the Black Box at the UNSW Art & Design. Opening in the last week of May, the exhibition titled ‘Memory Betrays Everybody’ will present the work of two artists – ex-Yugoslav Dublin based photographer and writer Dragana Jurišić and Sydney based artist Biljana Jančić.

Dragana Jurišić’s work for this exhibition will be focused on her acclaimed photographic book – YU: The Lost Country published in 2015. YU: The Lost Country is a book of photographs and texts depicting Jurišić’s journey across the former Yugoslavia retracing the steps of Anglo-Irish writer Rebecca West in her book, ‘Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’ written in 1937.

Initially intended as “a snap book”, Rebecca West’s book ‘Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’ spiraled into half a million words. The book is portrait not just of Yugoslavia, but also of Europe on the brink of the Second World War, and widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.

In response, Jurišić’s book examines how Yugoslavia fell apart in 1991. Today, in the countries that came into being after Yugoslavia's disintegration, there is a total denial of the Yugoslav identity.

The key theme in Biljana Jančić’s work is displacement. She works primarily with large-scale spatial interventions. These works respond directly to architecture and socio-historical contexts of spaces. Jančić regularly exhibits work in a wide range of independent and institutional contemporary art spaces.  

Recent solo shows include Surface Tension (2017), UTS Gallery, Sydney, The Cloud (2015) in collaboration with Alex Munt, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney. Her projects have been curated into exhibitions including Watching Windows (2017), by André Hemer and Andrew Clifford, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, West  Auckland, NZ, 2018 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship at Artspace curated by Alexie Glass Kantor, Michelle Newton & Lola Pinder: Primavera 2016: Young Australian Artists, by Emily Cormack, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, TarraWarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation, by Helen Hughes and Victoria Lynn TarraWarra Museum of Art, An Imprecise Science (2015) by Alexie Glass-Kantor with Talia Linz, Artspace, Sydney and I Want to Change the World (2014), by Nicholas Tsoutas and Fan Lin, GAFA Art Museum, Guangzhou.

Jančić studied at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney, completing a PhD in 2013. In 2016 she was the recipient of the alumni prize The Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Travel Award.

I’ve written an essay on the subject of stolen artefacts in museums and issues of repatriation. The essay focuses on the Parthenon or Elgin Marbles, which have been held and exhibited by The British Museum for over 200 years.

The Elgin Marbles

Museums across the globe have been engaged in a significant evolution over the last fifty years. During this time a major shift has taken place, leading to the reshaping of the traditional art institution. There are many contributing factors affecting change in the way museums operate. These include changes to funding models; challenges associated with collections containing stolen artefacts; shifting demographics; contentious corporate sponsorship and the proliferation of technology and the internet. Other factors that have impacted on the direction of museums and galleries include the need to expand their revenue base and designing protocols to increase visitor numbers. The influence of technology and commerce has resulted in museums and galleries restructuring their traditional model to align with the public’s expectations. Engaging in public interactivity, broadening the interpretation of the conventional exhibition and utilising the collections held by museums are all factors being used to connect with the community and improve museum’s bottom line. With this increase in public profile comes greater attention and scrutiny. One of the contentious issues facing the art sector concerns artefacts and artworks acquired during times of war and colonisation held in museum collections. This essay will discuss circumstances surrounding the acquisition of cultural artefacts currently controlled by museums, and the difficulties facing those seeking to repatriate these objects back to their country of origin.

Major museums in Europe, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA) hold collections of stolen artefacts and artworks. The British Museum and The Musée du quai Branly in Paris are amongst the most significant transgressors of this well documented and disputed method of acquisition.[1] The argument that European and American museums should return these objects to their country of origin has gradually gathered momentum over the last fifty years. Many of the former colonies throughout Asia and Africa have gained independence and are seeking ways to have their stolen artefacts returned. This is more than just having stolen property returned – the repatriation of these unique objects is crucial to a national and indigenous cultural identity.

Many former colonies and nations affected by war have significant components of their cultural heritage held by foreign museums. These unique cultural collections that constitute major exhibition drawcards are critical to the revenue base of US and European art institutions. One of the foremost institutions benefitting from this position is The British Museum. While holding a vast quantity of misappropriated artefacts, two of the most contentious held in the British Museum collection are the Rosetta Stone from Egypt and The Parthenon Marbles from Greece.

The Parthenon Marbles, also known as The Elgin Marbles[2] are a collection of marble sculptures made by sculptor and architect, Phidias (480-430BC). The collection is comprised of three sets of sculptures; the metopes, the frieze and the pediments. The Marbles were created to adorn the temple of the Parthenon, which was built between 447BC and 432BC and is situated on the Acropolis of Athens.[3]

Between 1801 and 1812, The Marbles were ‘appropriated’ by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin during his tenure as the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. During this period, Greece was under Turkish rule. After gaining control of the Marbles, Elgin transported the sculptures to Britain by boat where they were subsequently acquired by the British Parliament. The Parliament then assigned the sculptures to the British Museum in 1816. The Elgin Marbles have remained on exhibition in the British Museum for over 200 years.  About sixty-five per cent of the Elgin Marbles are located in museums across Europe. The Acropolis Museum in Athens and the British Museum in London both hold about thirty per cent of the collection, while smaller portions of the collection are held by European museums including the Louvre and the Vatican. The British Museum also exhibits pieces from the Parthenon acquired from collections not connected to the Elgin appropriation.

Greece has disputed the British Museum’s ownership of the sculptures, maintaining that Lord Elgin removed them illegally while the country was under Turkish occupation as part of the Ottoman Empire. The first official request for the return of The Marbles by the Greek Government was implemented in 1983 by the Greek Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri. That request was subsequently declined by the British Government in 1984. In August 2013, via the Greek Government, the Assistant Director-General for Culture at UNESCO wrote to the UK Government and the Director of the British Museum proposing a mediation on the repatriation of the Elgin Marbles held in the British Museum. The UK Government and the Trustees of the British Museum replied two years later in 2015, both respectfully declining this proposal. When the current Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras visited Britain in 2015, he was reported to have told UK Prime Minister Theresa May that “The Marbles belong to the world cultural heritage but their natural place is the Parthenon.” [4] The Greek authorities have stepped up the campaign since 2009 when it opened a new museum on the Acropolis hill. The governing bodies saying that the creation of this new museum answered any suggestion that Athens lacked a suitable space to exhibit and preserve the Elgin Marbles.

Considered one of the greatest cultural monuments in the world, The Parthenon is a symbol of Ancient Greece, democracy and Western civilization. Greeks have a strong cultural link to The Parthenon and The Elgin Marbles. Greece has continued its requests for the return of The Marbles, without success. Britain has continually resisted the call for the return of the Elgin Marbles along with treasures from other countries including Australia, Nigeria and Ethiopia. A lack of documented provenance, inappropriate exhibition space and legislation that precludes its museums from permanently disposing of their collections are often cited as reasons for the refusal of the return of these disputed artefacts.

The circumstances relating to acquisition and exhibition of the Elgin Marbles by the British Museum and the complexities in their repatriation are not isolated.[5] The Elgin Marbles are one of scores of cases of alleged misappropriation and withholding of art and artefacts by major institutions.

Although many cases of the misappropriation of stolen artefacts have their origins in the colonial past, the practice of looting and consequent sale of these objects is more prevalent today. As stated in an article written in 2018 by Alex Barker, Research Professor in Anthropology at the University of Missouri,

…looting and spoliation of archaeological sites represent a known crisis in many parts of the world, and it is widely acknowledged that despite what we know about the scale of site destruction, the reality is worse. Available evidence suggests that the scale and severity of looting are increasing. Legal and ethical remedies exist but have not proven adequate to reduce the impact of looting and antiquities trafficking. This reflects, in part, inadequate resources and uneven enforcement, and also the pressures of rising prices for antiquities, growing market demand, severe economic depression, and lawlessness, particularly in conflict zones…”[6]

A large number of these stolen antiquities ultimately find their way directly into private collections. Many more are handled by dealers or middlemen and subsequently sold off to collectors and art institutions. This illegal and fundamentally immoral trade in cultural objects seems unlikely to decrease due their rising values and the increasing demand for these cultural objects. As these objects change hands, it becomes harder to prove their original ownership. The Archaeological Institute 0f America states that up to ninety percent of misappropriated artefacts don’t possess ‘documented provenance’.[7] Although the objects in questions are authentic, this apparent lack of provenance is a fundamental obstacle to the continuing opposition of museums for their restitution.

The term ‘repatriation’ refers to the identification of museum objects and their return to the country of origin. Governing bodies of museums have continued with a deliberate and reticent response to the repatriation of stolen cultural objects. Apart from a few exceptions, the return of stolen artefacts to their rightful place of origin is a difficult and complex issue.

One positive development has been a 2018 report commissioned by the French president, Emmanuel Macron. The report has recommended that artefacts looted from Africa during the colonial era ‘should be returned through permanent restitution’.[8] Written by French art historian Bénédicte Savoy and Senegalese writer and economist Felwine Sarr, the report could have widespread ramifications for the international museum sector. The report states that up to ninety five percent of Africa’s cultural heritage is held outside Africa by major museums. At least seventy thousand objects from sub-Saharan Africa are held in the Quai Branly Museum collection in Paris.

Bénédicte Savoy writes that the aim of the report is to achieve

“a rebalancing of the geography of African heritage in the world, which is currently extremely imbalanced, as European museums have almost everything, and African museums have almost nothing.” To help reinstate parity, the report recommends the restitution of “any objects taken by force or presumed to be acquired through inequitable conditions” during the French colonial period in Africa, from the late nineteenth century until the early 1960s.[9]

Although this report sets out guidelines for the initiation of repatriation of stolen artefacts back to sub-Saharan Africa, the circumstances opposing this restitution are significant.

A detailed description for the ongoing resistance to the repatriation of stolen artefacts is set out in Neil Brodie’s book, Archaeology, cultural heritage and the antiquities trade. In the chapter ‘Protection of Indigenous Culture’ by Paul Rapp, he states,

“…protection, preservation, and repatriation of cultural artefacts are an expanding global concern. The plunder of the National Museum of Iraq last spring fixed world attention on illicit trade in antiquities. International trafficking of stolen art and antiquities is estimated to be the world's third largest criminal activity, just behind drugs and guns…”[10]

These sentiments are supported by Morag Kersel, Associate Professor of Archaeology at DePaul University in Chicago in her 2006 article, ‘From the Ground to the Buyer’ where she writes

“…the illegal antiquities market is frequently compared to other major international criminal enterprises, especially drug trafficking and arms smuggling. Although it shares many characteristics with other illegal markets, there is at least one fundamental difference: by passing through a series of markets or portals, the objects are transformed from illegal to legal; that is, in market parlance, they are laundered. Trafficking in antiquities blurs the lines between illegal and legal markets and between criminal and legitimate participants. Whereas the traffic in drugs is always illegal—meaning that the buyer is as culpable as the seller—in sharp contrast, the ultimate buyer of illegally excavated antiquities can often purchase them openly and legally, seemingly without engaging in illegal activity…”[11]

This transformation of stolen artefacts and antiquities into ‘laundered’ objects are a major underlying motive for the reticence of museums for repatriation. The illegal and immoral ownership of cultural heritage has made way for commercial interests. Museums utilise their collections of objects of questionable provenance to maintain their visitor numbers and provide them with the economic means to sustain their continuing operation. Individuals and groups involved in the theft and trade of these objects are similarly financially invested.

Although rightful ownership will not be acknowledged for a variety of reasons, the origins of these objects are undeniable. An example of unquestionable origin relates to a significant collection of bronze sculptures. In 1897, UK soldiers looted more than four thousand sculptures from the African region in southwest Nigeria. The Nigerian Government has been requesting the return of their bronze sculptures for decades. The British Museum has agreed to ‘loan’ the Royal Museum of Nigeria a number of the bronzes for the opening of the museum in 2021. The British Museum has stressed that this is strictly a loan and expects Nigeria to return the sculptures.[12]

The tables are turned in the 2018 movie, Black Panther, when a group of thieves ‘hijack’ the fictitious ‘Museum of Great Britain’ and its staff to reclaim stolen artefacts from a fictitious African nation. The scene depicts a prescribed level of violence, deception and force in regaining stolen artefacts in this fictional situation. The lawlessness of colonial forces in the past has parallels with some of the contentious issues surrounding the workings of the internet. Although the world has progressed technologically, and appears to be more civilized and sophisticated, the theft and trade in artefacts and the refusal of institutions such as the British Museum to return artefacts would suggest otherwise.

The actions and deeds of Elgin in the early 1800s have continued in similar forms today. Although circumstances have evolved, little has changed in the illegal art trade over the last two centuries. The debate about ownership partnered with rising profits for those involved in the illegal trade are remarkably similar.

The bond an individual or a nation shares with their cultural treasures is at its core, emotional. As Melina Mercouri, the Greek Minister of Culture stated in 1983,

“…this is our history, this is our soul…You must understand this. You must love us. We have fought with you in the second war…they are the symbol and the blood and the soul of the Greek people…we have fought and died for the Parthenon and the Acropolis…when we are born, they talk to us about all this great history that makes Greekness…”

It is hard to challenge this sentiment. If repatriation was determined solely by emotion, the Elgin Marbles would be returned to Greece. However, emotion will not resolve the protracted argument of rightful ownership and repatriation. Although there are some positive signs for the contention of cultural restitution, it hard to see a resolution. Public pressure and social media campaigns have been used effectively to instigate change. A coordinated movement backed by reforms in Government legislation, criminal convictions for illegal appropriation and changing the directors seated on the boards of museums, would see further progress. This would demand a collaborative intent from all parties. Without a major shift in museum policy, the current situation will continue.

Bibliography:

1. Merryman, J.H., 2000, p. 126, Thinking About the Elgin Marbles, Critical Essays on Cultural Property, Art and Law. Kluwer Law International Ltd, UK.

2. Cook, B.F., 1984, p. 54, The Elgin Marbles, book. British Museum Publication Limited.

3. Acropolis Museum, 2019, accessed 19th April 2019, https://www.theacropolismuseum.gr/en

4. The National Herald, 2018, Greece Pushes Talks for Return of Parthenon Marbles, accessed 10th April 2019, https://www.thenationalherald.com/211089/greece-wants-new-talks-with-britain-on-parthenon-sculptures/

5. Prott, L.V., 2009, p. 256, Unesco International Framework For The Protection Of The Cultural Heritage. Brill/Nijhoff.

6. Barker, A., Annual Review of Anthropology, 2018, Vol.47, Looting, the Antiquities Trade and Competing Valuations of the Past.

7. Frazen, C., 2013, Ill-gotten gains: how many museums have stolen objects in their collections?, accessed 8th April 2019, https://www.theverge.com 

8. Brown, K., 2018, In a Groundbreaking Report, Experts Advise French President Macron to Begin the ‘Restitution’ of Looted African Art, accessed 10th April 2019,  
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/french-restitution-policy-macron-1399429

9. Brown, K., 2018, In a Groundbreaking Report, Experts Advise French President Macron to Begin the ‘Restitution’ of Looted African Art, accessed 10th April 2019,  
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/french-restitution-policy-macron-1399429

10. Rapp, P., 2004, p.45, Archaeology, cultural heritage and the antiquities trade, Protection of Indigenous Culture, Spring.

11. Kersel, M., 2006, From the ground to the buyer: A market analysis of the trade in illegal antiquities, accessed 16th April 2019, https://www.researchgate.net

12. Horton, M., 2018, Returning looted artefacts will finally restore heritage to the brilliant cultures that made them, accessed 10th April 2019, https://theconversation.com/au

Home’s co-director Madeleine Preston heads off to the US today for her Sculpture Fellowship Residency at the Vermont Studio Centre.

The Vermont Studio Centre residency includes six distinguished Visiting Artists and Writers per month.

Each Visitor offers a public slide talk or reading, and is available for a private studio visit/writing conference with residents working in their medium/genre.

Pictured is Smoker Series – After Guston 2017, Ceramic

Many thanks to arts writer Jane O’Sullivan for her excellent review of our ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ exhibition.

Her hands are curled with emotion and her eyes are half-closed, as though she's in such turmoil she can barely see the world. David Rosetzky's portrait of choreographer Shelley Lasica is a powerful study of the way emotion is carried in the body. It's also a theatrical opening to an exhibition of 14 artists currently practicing in Melbourne. Some, like Rosetzky, are well-known but not regularly seen in Sydney. Others are earlier in their careers. It is a diverse group, but unexpected connections soon develop.

Hanging near Rosetzky's Shelley is Kirsty Budge's painting How could you do this to me question mark. It's a psychological drama, dominated by a man with outstretched arms who looms over a tired-looking woman pocketed in the corner. Like Rosetzky, Budge is interested in lines of the body and what they say about inner states, but also in lines that emphasise, divide and intervene.

In a very different way, Lynette Smith's video Birds (a fragment) also approaches the topic of isolation, but by using the motif of solitary birds in winter.

Other artists exhibited downstairs dance in and out of abstraction and figuration. Travis MacDonald's painting The idiots study of sound shows sound rising and curling like smoke above the cymbal of a drum set. It's a kind of garage band cover of Roy de Maistre, but focused not on colour but the texture and direction of the brushstrokes. It's paired with a dreamy and menacing oil painting by Nicholas Ives, where details and edges seem to hover just out of focus.

Ali McCann's Polytechnic works are playful explorations of form and colour, with geometric objects placed into constructed landscapes. In one, a bright orange cuisenaire rod stands on its end, mimicking the way a child might ignore the intended lesson of the object and just have fun with it instead.

Also downstairs is Ebony Truscott's still life of a festival wristband with a buckled tealight candle and dog-eared stack of post-it notes. Truscott aims for realism, but her real interest is compulsion. By translating these objects into paint, Truscott heightens our sudden need to pull or flick or squish them. It's like being reminded not to bite your nails.

From there, the exhibition moves upstairs to Emily Ferretti's Curvy Tree, a gentle curve with crenelated branches and a subtle play with volume.

To one side, Guy Benfield's untitled photo presents a wild night in with a plastic tub and a bottle of cheap wine. It's printed on a white fold-up box, like a takeaway pizza, and encased in perspex.

Elvis Richardson also looks at the domestic in her photographs of forgettable interiors. By pairing them, Richardson draws our attention to a common detail, the pictures of women on the walls. These images within images then start to form a kind of double-exposure portrait of the people who once settled in these spaces.

Kenny Pittock also tackles the everyday with humorous sculptures of sugary treats, including a Sunnyboy ice block reworked to give it a little more emotional reality.

At the other end of the hall, there are four engraved glasses by Zilverster, the alchemical collaboration between Irene Hanenbergh and Sharon Goodwin, and a harmonious abstract painting by Rachael McCully-Kerwick.

Nearby, there's an assemblage by Tia Ansell that reads like a moodboard cut from a home renovation magazine. Called Construere, it combines a piece of woven, plaid cloth with the kind of tiling you might find on a kitchen splashback of bathroom floor, putting these domestic materials into an abstract relationship with each other, structured by gridlines. Ansell seems to be building a language that moves between the architectural, archeological and anthropological. But whichever way round, Construere is a fascinating critique of boxed thinking and the shape and texture of contemporary life.

Jane O’Sullivan

Written by Dame Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia is one of the literary masterpieces of the 20th century.

Over 1,100 pages, the book gives an account of Balkan history and ethnography during West's six-week trip to Yugoslavia in 1937. While researching its long and complicated history, West clarified her ideas about Yugoslavia - and about much else besides. The publication of the book in 1941 coincided with the Nazi Invasion of Yugoslavia. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is more than a timeless guide to Yugoslavia - it is a portrait of the author’s soul and of Europe on the brink of war. 

Born Cicely Isabel Fairfield, Rebecca West (1892-1983) was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote across genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Sunday Telegraph and The New Republic. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), A Train of Powder (1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials and The Meaning of Treason, later The New Meaning of Treason, a study of the trial of British fascist, William Joyce and others. Time Magazine called her ‘indisputably the world's number one woman writer’ in 1947. She was made a CBE in 1949 and DBE in 1959. 

West trained as an actress in London, taking the name ‘Rebecca West’ from the rebellious young heroine in Rosmersholm, written by Henrik Ibsen. She became involved in the suffragette movement. West worked as a journalist for the feminist weekly ‘Freewoman’ and the ‘Clarion’, drumming up support for the suffragette cause. In September 1912, West accused the writer H. G. Wells of being "the Old Maid among novelists" in a provocative review of his novel ‘Marriage’. The review attracted Wells’ attention and an invitation to lunch at his home. The two writers became lovers in late 1913. Their 10-year affair produced a son, Anthony West, and their friendship lasted until Wells’ death in 1946. 

By the time Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia was published - in two volumes totalling half a million words - West was somewhat at a loss to discover why she had been moved “in 1936 to devote five years of my life, at great financial sacrifice and to the utter exhaustion of my mind and body, to take an inventory of a country down to its last vest-button, in a form insane from any ordinary artistic or commercial point of view”. The result, which she feared “hardly anyone will read by reason of its length”, is one of the supreme masterpieces of the 20th century.

The book’s inexhaustible capacity for self-fuelling discussion, for examining the implications of everything that it touches upon, is central to West’s structural and stylistic method. Any conclusions she draws are tied to the process by which they are being teased out.Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is, along with everything else, a great flood of ideas. As with Lawrence,it is impossible to say where sensation stops and cogitation begins. Black Lamb and Grey Falconis a vast, ambitious and complex book which repeatedly stresses the kinship between homely and universal truths.

Home is thrilled to be exhibiting work by Tamara Dean in our ‘The Portrait’ exhibition in August. The work titled ‘Conor’ is from Tamara’s 2015 series, ‘About Face’.

"My best friend once told me I have the best of both worlds, not being able to identify to one sex but flowing in and out of them and knowing my sexuality. 

It is still hard when people are crude or uninformed, however I have learnt that this is not my issue, it’s theirs. This is still something I work on every single day, not taking on other people’s problems, and my androgynous “look” is an asset instead of a burden."  Conor

“There is an arresting beauty in androgyny.

Androgyny challenges our cultural conceptions of femininity and masculinity. The questions that often arise - "Are you a boy or a girl?" or "are you a man or a woman?" - suggest that gender stereotypes, learned behaviour and cultural prejudices can influence the way we perceive and in turn relate to people. 

For me androgyny can be perceived as a universal face of humanity…”

Tamara Dean has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. Her works are held in Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra ACT, Francis J. Greenburger Collection, New York, Artbank, Art Gallery of South Australia, The Mordant Family Collection, Australia, Tweed River Gallery, Neil Balnaves Collection, Australia, ArtOmi Collection, New York and Gold Coast City Art Gallery.

Tamara Dean appears courtesy of Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney.

The Forresters be playing a set at the gallery this Thursday the 14th for the Waterloo/Greensquare night in Art Month.

Joining me will be Matt Galvin (Perry Keyes) on guitar and Brielle Davis (Not Good with Horses) on vocals. Kicking off at 7pm, the set will feature tunes from the soon to be released Forresters EP.

Come along to hear some music and see some great artwork in our ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ exhibition - join us for drinks from 6-8pm. The performance will be filmed as part of The Forresters music video for the track ‘About You’.

Brilliant work by David Rosetzky opening at Home this Thursday. Join us for drinks from 6-8pm.

Pictured is Shelley, 2017, Gelatin silver print.

David Rosetzky appears courtesy of Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

Home is pleased to be exhibiting new ceramic work by Kenny Pittock.

Our Art Month exhibition, ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ will feature a stellar line-up of artists: Tia Ansell, Guy Benfield, Kirsty Budge, Emily Ferretti, Nicholas Ives, Kenny Pittock, Travis MacDonald, Ali McCann, Rachael McCully-Kerwick, Elvis Richardson, David Rosetzky, Lynette Smith, Ebony Truscott and Zilverster (Goodwin & Hanenbergh).

Kenny Pittock (1988) is a Melbourne based artist working primarily with ceramic sculpture and painting. Kenny's work uses a combination of humour, wordplay, and optimism, along with just a dash of anxiety, to respond to contemporary Australian iconography and culture. 

Kenny has been lucky enough to exhibit his work in many great acronyms including ACCA, PICA and MONA FOMA. As well as Australia, Kenny has also had exhibitions in Italy and Singapore. Kenny was the recipient of the 2017 Redlands Emerging artist award, and his work is featured in many collections including Deakin University, ING Bank, and the City of Melbourne State Collection.

Pictured is Three Little Pigs, 2019, Acrylic on ceramic.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Lynette Smith in our ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ exhibition. Lynette’s video work, Birds (a fragment), will be showing in The Booth.

Lynette Smith completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at RMIT University in 1995 and went on to do postgraduate study in linguistics and philosophy at the University of Melbourne in the 2000s. Her practice includes drawing, the moving image, books and text for voice. Lynette has exhibited in public, private and artist-run galleries since 2000 and been invited to residencies in the United States and Lithuania. In 2004-2005 she was on the board of West Space, an artist-run space in Melbourne.

Pictured is an installation shot of Lynette Smith’s A bewilderment exhibition in 2017, from the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne. Photo: Christian Cappuro

Home is pleased to announce we will be exhibiting work by Rachael McCully-Kerwick in our upcoming ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ show. 

Rachael’s work is currently showing in the ‘INHABITANTS’ exhibition at Piermarq Gallery - 76 Paddington Street, Paddington. 

Also showing are works by Hayden Jackson and Brock Q. Piper. The exhibition runs till the 23rd of February and is highly recommended.

Pictured are Sunday, 4pm, 2018 oil and acrylic on canvas (left) Absent Mim and Hollyhocks, 2018 oil and acrylic on canvas.

Rachael McCully-Kerwick appears courtesy of Piermarq.

Home is thrilled to be exhibiting a suite of works by renowned painter Chris Capper in our 08.05.19 exhibition. Many thanks to Damien Minton for loaning us the Chris Capper paintings for the show.

“…Chris Capper’s painting is focussed on the nexus between representational still life painting and the metaphysical aspect of formalist abstraction. Many of the works have gone through manifestations over a number of years, creating a ‘ghosting’ of previous aesthetic decisions…”

Born in Melbourne, Chris studied painting at the Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University) in the early 1970s. He has exhibited regularly in both Perth and Sydney for over thirty years. Now based in Newcastle, Chris Capper was acknowledged with a survey exhibition at the Maitland Regional Art Gallery in 2007. Capper’s works are held in the Alexander Library, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, Macquarie University, Manly Art Gallery, University of Western Australia and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Pictured is Agapanthus and window, 2012-15, oil on canvas

Chris Capper will feature in one of Damien Minton’s 4 exhibitions over 4 weeks at Sheffer Gallery. Opening next Tuesday is ‘My City of Sydney’ featuring the work of Martin Sharp and Toby Zoates - 38 Lander Street, Darlington - hope to see you there!

Home is pleased to be exhibiting painting by Travis MacDonald in our ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ exhibition. Join us for opening drinks on Thursday the 7th of March from 6-8pm. 

“…the personal and universal merge in the work of Travis MacDonald. Paintings based on observation and secondary sources express his interest in how events and objects are memorialised. His recent probing into the formal potential of the trophy as sculptural object serves to further this investigation, for what is a trophy but a memorialisation? Working out of his studio in Melbourne’s inner north, he utilises his collection of photography and his interest in history, music, conspiracy theories and world events to present a memory, blurred, twisted and suggestive of a greater narrative…”

Travis MacDonald was born in Bunnythorpe, New Zealand and currently lives and works in Melbourne. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2011 and has been exhibiting since 2009. He has been awarded the Gary Grossbard Drawing Prize and the Lionel Gell Foundation Drawing Scholarship. Most recently, MacDonald’s work was exhibited in Painting. More Painting at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne and held his first solo exhibition at Niagara Galleries in December 2016. 

Pictured is The idiots study of sound, 2018, oil on linen.

Travis MacDonald appears courtesy of Niagara Galleries, Melbourne. 

Home is pleased to announce we will be exhibiting work by New Zealand born Melbourne based artist Tia Ansell in our upcoming ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ show.

Tia Ansell’s practice focuses on processing, assembling and following materials that exist as architectural structures and patterns. Ansell is a scavenger of sorts, she captures the proliferation of symbolic materials, architecture and iconography and then embeds these moments into her objects that create a duplicate of pre-existing assemblages positioned in the public realm.

Ansell anchors these facets of contemporary life into ancient and codified traditions which play freely with techniques and materials, especially those that resonate with geodesic systems of weaving. Ansell utilises ancient anthropological modes of making and merges them with contemporary systems. She organises her parts that are weaving, painting, tiling and metal work into an assemblage to form a compositional unit arrangement. Her mode of operation involves archaeological methods of formation, collection and preservation.

The objects she creates explicitly depends on its site of origin and its bounds to material consumer culture that reflect the other.

Tia graduated the VCA in 2018 with a BFA (Hons). Exhibitions include ‘Evening side’ at Caves Gallery, Melbourne, 2017; Group exhibitions at Lon Gallery, Melbourne, 2018; Bus Projects, Melbourne, 2018; VCA Graduate Exhibition, Melbourne, 2017 & 2018; Hugo Mitchell Gallery, Adelaide, 2017; Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, 2017 and Kingston Arts Centre, Melbourne, 2017. Tia exhibited with Caves Gallery at the Spring 1883 Art Fair in 2018.

She has been the recipient of numerous art awards and scholarships including Majlis Travelling Scholarship (2017), National Gallery of Victoria Woman’s Association Award (2017), John Vickery Scholarship (2017), Valerie Albiston Scholarship (2017) and the National Gallery of Victoria Prize (2014).

Tia has a solo exhibition at Station Gallery in March with Sam Martin and a group exhibition at Suite Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand in April.

Pictured is Bundle IV, 2018, linen, cotton, silk and wool tapestry with aluminium frame.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Emily Ferretti in our upcoming Art Month exhibition, ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’. 

Emily Ferretti is a painter whose figurative and abstract images derive equally from collected images, memory and the imagination. As a result, her images hover between representation and abstraction. Attuned to contemporary practice, Ferretti’s paintings engage with a history of picture making across genres and traditions. 

Dedicated to a full-time studio practice over the past fifteen years, she has exhibited widely and undertaken studio residences including Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, Cite de Arts International, Paris, and Green Street, New York. 

Emily Ferretti is represented by Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne.

Pictured is Summer, 2018, oil on linen. Photo: Matthew Stanton. 

Home is pleased to be exhibiting painting by internationally acclaimed Chinese-born artist Xue Mo in our ‘The Portrait’ exhibition later this year.

Xue draws her subjects from her homeland of Mongolia and is singularly focused on the female subject, impressed by the ‘noble simplicity, natural beauty, and serene dispositions’ of the young fieldworkers.

Her portraits are more than representations of female beauty. Xue Mo's premise is that the composition of these paintings acts as a focal point for meditation on such concepts as virtue, beauty, serenity, benevolence, and tranquility.

Described as "Renaissance", "Chinese Vermeer" or "Medici- like portraiture", Xue Mo's paintings evoke a timeless elegance and a return to pure painting.

Critic Katherine Wilkinson has written, "…in the 20th Century, many Asian artists have sited, in the human figure, the portrayal and exploration of their own and their society’s identity and history and its changing relationship with other nations and a global culture...Xue considers her work deeply affected by old Chinese culture, its traditional music, calligraphy and early portraiture…"

Xue Mo appears courtesy of Catherine Asquith Art Advisory, Melbourne.

Pictured is Mongolian Girl, 2012, oil on linen.

Xue Mo, Mongolian Girl, 2012, oil on linen - courtesy of Catherine Asquith Art Advisory, Melbourne

Home’s co-Director Madeleine Preston has a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in April. One of the mentors during her residency will be celebrated writer, Eileen Myles.

Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet, subsequently a novelist, public talker and art journalist. A Sagittarius, their twenty books include evolution (poems), Afterglow (a dog memoir), a 2017 re-issue of Cool for You, I Must Be Living Twice/new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. Eileen is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize from the PSA, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2016, Myles received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. In 2019 they'll be teaching at NYU and Naropa University and they live in New York and Marfa, TX.

The Vermont Studio Center residency format includes six distinguished Visiting Artists and Writers per month. Each Visitor offers a public slide talk or reading, and is available for a private studio visit/writing conference with residents working in their medium/genre. Visiting Writers also offer a craft talk for the writing residents. Each Visiting Artist and Writer spends 5 days on campus actively engaging with the VSC community.

Home is pleased to announce we will be exhibiting work by Melbourne based artist, Guy Benfield in our ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ exhibition opening during Art Month.

An artist with a prodigious creative output including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, performance and video, Benfield's interests and activities are united by a commitment to investigating a process of evolutionary change through his art, each new project or piece growing out of a sometimes startlingly organic mutation. His works in video documents and extend performances and studio practice with an emphasis on obscure fictions. 

Throughout his career as an artist, Benfield has explored the connection between the Gutai movement and abstract expressionism through performance, painting, film and video. The Gutai movement, a performance painting group which was a starting point for postwar art in Japan and had a historical connection to abstract expressionism via Pollock (who first exhibited in Japan in 1951), was a great influence for Benfield. Artists such as Yves Klein, Pollock, through to artists like Charlotte Moorman, flip the boundaries of performance, painting and the camera, and are relevant to Benfield’s practice.

Benfield has exhibited internationally with solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Lisbon, New York and Brooklyn. Benfield’s work has been included in many group exhibitions including Le CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France; BRIX Gallerie, Berlin; Artspace Sydney, Australia; the Monkey Town Semiennial, New York and the Shanghai Biennale, China.

Benfield has received grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, Maumaus School for the Arts (Lisbon, Portugal), and Arts Victoria. His work has also been featured in publications such as Frieze, Flash Art, NYARTS Magazine, Art Review and Art World.

Pictured is Commerce and Loss, 2017, oil and oil-stick on canvas – image taken from the Minerva Gallery website. 

Home will be staging an exhibition titled ‘The Portrait’ as part of our 2019 program. The exhibition will examine the complicated question of what constitutes a portrait. There are 3 major portrait awards in Australia – The Archibald, The Moran and the Darling. Each include a strict set of requirements. But does a work painted from life, evoke a person any more than a photograph, an object, or an abstraction of a sitter? People often refer to portraits as - a collaboration between an artist and the sitter or a visual representation of someone. Portraits are variously described as capturing the essence of someone or representing their identity at a certain period in time. Home’s ‘The Portrait’ looks beyond the notion of identity and the painted surface to how an artist working in any medium can express the sense of a person.

Many thanks to Badger & Fox Gallery for loaning us Bill Henson’s Untitled, C Type print (pictured) for the exhibition. This iconic work by one of Australia’s premiere artists will be the centrepiece of the exhibition. The show will feature artworks across a variety of mediums including painting, photography, sculpture and video. 

Home is pleased to be exhibiting works by Ali McCann in our ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ show during Art Month. The show opens on Thursday March the 7th and runs till Sunday the 7th of April. 

 Ali’s upcoming exhibition - Οι νεοί – opens at Gertrude Contemporary on February the 8th. 

 “…situated between abstraction and representation, Ali McCann’s practice engages with the ideas of formalism, materiality, visual perception, and the aesthetics of pedagogy. Found objects, in the form of obsolete teaching aids, unfinished projects, discarded photographs and art materials, serve as departure points forexplorations of colour, light, shape, form, and space. Her still-life arrangements undergo a succession of hybrid photographic processes to form uncanny and seemingly impossible renderings of the object within the picture plane. She draws on diverse sources such as foundational art history publications, outmoded art-and-design text books, 1970s amateur photography magazines, and also from her personal experience as a student and teacher. Her reimagining of educational aesthetics is imbued with a nostalgia for the primary, exploratoryphase of the creative process…” 

Ali McCann lives and works in Melbourne. She completed a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne). She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne) and a Diploma of Education (University of Melbourne). 

Since the early 2000’s she has exhibited in solo and group shows in Melbourne, Sydney and regional Victoria. Recent shows include Οι νεοίat Gertrude Contemporary (upcoming), Masks For Magicians (2018) at Caves, Polytechnic (2018) at Tristian Koenig,An Introduction to Liminal Aesthetics (2017) at c3 Contemporary Art Space and Throwing Off The Hump (2017) at Kings Artist Run. 

Pictured is Polytechnic (Figure 3), 2018, digital C-Type print. 

Home is pleased to announce we will be exhibiting work by David Rosetzky in our ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ show during Art Month.

David Rosetzky is a Melbourne-based artist working across the media of photography, video and installation. Rosetzky's black and white photographs and double exposures often allude to different psychological and emotional states, identity and selfhood. He is known for the elegance and aesthetic rigour of his art, which often draws upon the visual languages of contemporary advertising and cinema. Rosetzky has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Australia and internationally including Performing Drawing, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2019; Versus Rodin: Bodies across space and time, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2017; How to Feel at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2011; True Self: David Rosetzky: Selected Works, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2013; The Third ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, International Centre for Photography, New York, 2009; Viewpoints & Viewing Points: Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2009.

 His digital video portrait of Cate Blanchett was commissioned to coincide with the opening of the new National Portrait Gallery, building in Canberra in 2008, and this year he was commissioned by the Portrait Gallery to create a photographic work of Jessica Mauboy for 20/20: Celebrating twenty years with twenty new portrait commissions. 

 Pictured is Milo, 2017, Gelatin silver print

 "…when making this series of images, I was interested in the unforeseen alignments and compositions that were created through a process of chance. I used the technique of double-exposure – an analogue photographic process that superimposes two images together by running the same roll of film through a camera and exposing it twice – thus creating a third, combined or composite image. This process is of particular interest to me – working with ideas relating to the self, memory and identity – as it helps me to create images that are ambiguous, fragmented and in a state of transition, rather than fixed or essential…"

David Rosetzky appears courtesy of Sutton Gallery, Melbourne.

Home is thrilled to be exhibiting work by Zilverster in our ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ show during Art Month.

Zilverster (Goodwin & Hanenbergh) is an ongoing collaborative project between Sharon Goodwin and Irene Hanenbergh, Melbourne-based artists who have garnered strong individual reputations for their imaginative, elaborate and meticulously rendered expanded drawing and painting practices. What began in 2010 as a problem-solving exercise – with one artist offering problematic, unfinished works to the other for advice on resolution – has evolved into a rich shared practice that continues to extend the discursive as well as process potentialities of each artist. While there are many shared interests and concerns between the two artists – (art) history, fantasy, cult iconography, alchemy, supernatural phenomena to name a few – each operates from a distinct temporal and imaginative framework: Goodwin’s contributions are embedded in a medieval, Gothic context while Hanenbergh’s derive from a European Romantic sensibility. Zilverster’s practice continues to develop out from an original series of beautiful, fantastical drawings that remain compelling in their strangeness.

Pictured is an installation shot (detail) of their exhibition Patrino-patrino staged at Sarah Scout Presents in 2018. The exhibition comprised a suite of twenty-one new intricate drawings, a number with carved and engraved custom frames and glass, together with a series of glass objects and furniture.

The starting point for the exhibition is The Table of Moresnet, an iconic work Zilverster created in 2016, and which first extended the duo’s collaborative drawing practice into the spatial/sculptural realm

The Table of Moresnet is named for a small slice of European history – and failed utopia – the land of Neutral Moresnet. Until WWI, the tiny country existed, tucked away in the hills between The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. The small neutral country had been under threat among major European powers until a group of residents came up with an ambitious counteroffensive: they formed Neutral Moresnet into the first Esperanto state and named it Amikejo (‘city of friendship’). A self-declared neutral state, Moresnet/Amikejo was a place where refugees were welcomed and where conscription was abolished. It also had exceptionally low taxes. However, on June 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles settled the dispute that had created the neutral territory a century earlier by awarding Neutral Moresnet, along with Prussian Moresnet and the German municipalities of Eupen and Malmedy, to Belgium, thus permanently ending its status. Today, a small museum (Göhltal Museum) is all that is left of this unique episode in European history, as well as 50 of the 60 border markers that mark the former borders. The Table of Moresnet serves as a memorial for this utopian idea, as well as a diary of its own making. In addition to particular historical moments and excerpts of Esperanto text, the table comprises snippets of conversation between the artists, a record of visitors to the studio and numerous pop-cultural references.

As a functional object, it both highlights and repurposes its own historical context and as a conceptual art work, it brings the past and present into focus, as well as playfully disturbing the traditional distinctions between high and low art forms.

Zilverster appears courtesy of Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne.

Home is pleased to announce we will be exhibiting painting by Melbourne-based artist Nicholas Ives in our ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ show during Art Month.

Nicholas explores within his work realms of the Absurd and the Carnivalesque through a primarily figurative form. His works flow across the borders of portraiture into abstract qualities, encouraging unexpected outcomes and collisions - encounters of the material surface and the imaginings of unknown painterly worlds.

“My works are human-scaled, at times intimate, explorative and personal, with heavy importance on the material and felt aspects the painting process. Time allows the pieces to change and fluctuate. There’s a rapture and absurdity to making these paintings, revealing an ebb and flow of studio process that making drives the work itself. I liken my practice to something that is elusive, adaptive and evolving; operating within the fluid nature of paint…”

Pictured is If you’re lonely eat a sandwich, 2014, oil on linen.

Nicholas Ives appears courtesy of Blackart Projects, Melbourne.

Home is thrilled to be exhibiting work by Melbourne artist Ebony Truscott in our ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ show opening on Thursday the 7th of March during Art Month. 

“…I paint and draw objects from direct observation and can’t shake the fact that my message and medium are utterly merged. My primary material, oil paint, has a character at once heavy and luminious – it’s made, for the most part, by rock, mineral and metal. It is in constant flux, never being fully dry only further polymerized. Linen too, is never truly at rest and expands and contracts according to temperature and humidity. I like that still life, a genre concerned with the merciless passing of time, about stillness and mortality should be associated with such quietly restless materials.  I’m curious about how light strikes, is absorbed and scattered by what are usually variants on basic geometric solids; cones, spheres, bricks, cylinders, for instance. And I wonder about how to suggest non-visual phenomena too – like weight, sound, or density.  All this, I feel an almost forensic pull of inquiry towards. Yet there is something that emerges from the labour of this research, that looks grim, melancholy. I’m not sure about this, it’s a type of expression I suppose. I intend to depict coolly and truthfully but a looming sense of something sad and ambivalent turns up too…” 

Pictured is Bowl brick and paper cone, 2017, oil on linen

Home is thrilled to be exhibiting work by Kirsty Budge in our ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ show opening in March. Our Art Month exhibition will feature a stellar line-up of Melbourne artists. 



“…Kirsty Budge’s work vacillates between abstraction and figuration. Her psychologically charged paintings are populated with humour, humans, hopes and horrors. The works connect personal experiences, thought patterns, observations and environments through intuitive processes. Real and imagined forms are combined on the same picture plane and, through the process of mark-making, each is given equal value in the space of the painting. The structure of each painting emerges through a lengthy process of excavation and application by the artist, resulting in an image that is both a response to and a construction of a personal narrative…”



In 2018, Budge undertook a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, as recipient of an Art Gallery of New South Wales Studio Scholarship and exhibited in NADA New York. 



Pictured is Thank you very much for your kind donation, now give me 20 bucks or I’ll punch your face in, 2017, oil on canvas. 



Kirsty Budge appears courtesy of Daine Singer.

Home will be exhibiting a suite of works by Melbourne artist Louise Gresswell in our April/May exhibition in 2019.

Louise graduated from RMIT in 2017 with a MFA and a BA Textile Design from Chelsea College of Art, London. She has had recent exhibitions at Rubicon and Tristian Koenig in Melbourne and was a finalist in this year’s The Churchie National Emerging Art Prize.

“…central to Gresswell’s work is the materiality of paint and surface as she investigates deeply personal histories and transfers that which is felt from hand to surface. The action of manipulating oil paint, the building up and covering of layers over time becomes a metaphor for the past. Sensory narratives are created through textured and rich surfaces with evidence of touch…the use of cutting, reassembling and suturing evokes vulnerability but also signifies a metaphor for defiance. Through subverting the tradition of painting and embracing imperfection, the paintings speak about wholeness and fragmentation, creating ‘fractured icons’…”

Pictured is Fractured (pink edge), 2018, oil on board.

Home is pleased to announce we will be showing work by Elvis Richardson in our ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ exhibition in March 2019. The show will be our Art Month exhibition and feature works by a great group of Melbourne artists.

Pictured is one of the works from Elvis Richardson’s ‘Settlement’ series she will be exhibiting in the ‘DECADE’ exhibition – celebrating 10 years of Hugo Michell Gallery - opening on the 20th of November.

“…A voyeur of sorts, Elvis Richardson savours the intimacies of others, collecting and curating imagery from public repositories to explore emotionally and politically charged narratives.

Selected via For Sale search criteria results for “2-bedroom house - less than $250,000 - anywhere in Australia”, these flat, low resolution, mostly amateur images are surprisingly powerful. Posted over an 18-month period without comment, they elicited a range of responses from nostalgia for childhood familiarity, humour with a touch of moral judgement; empathy for the embedded tragedy; to tenancy enquiries and critiques of disruption and movement in late neoliberal capitalism.

The images of interiors from Richardson’s series - Settlement - are both personally and socioeconomically reflective. They document the dilemma of the artist; the place of home in our national psyche; and the effect of lives in transition. Usually we settle with an economic transaction, however Richardson disrupts the intent of real estate marketing. Settlement’s deeply layered narratives offer the choice to settle for a vacant lot or resettle it for our own ends…” From the essay ‘everyone works but the vacant lot’ by Melinda Rackham

Elvis Richardson is represented in Sydney by Galerie pompom

Many thanks to artist and writer Rebecca Gallo for her response to our ‘Materiality’ exhibition.

Materiality - Home@735 - 17 October – 18 November 2018

The first thing I notice when I look at art is almost always the materials: the stuff that things are made of. The thingness of things. I look for whether materials are made to disappear in service of an image or a narrative, or whether they tell a story through their own texture and heft, through familiar or strange configurations.  

In Vibrant Matter (2003), Jane Bennett speaks of “the capacity of things … to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.” Her aim is to decentre human agency with the idea that inanimate stuff might have its own agenda. In ‘Materiality’ at Home@735, materials are not entirely subservient to the artists. Rather, materials are active agents, shaping the work rather than being utterly subjugated to human will.

Attuned to the thingness of things, I cross a road of hot black asphalt and traverse the Bourke Street bike lane with its gummy white and green markings. I walk over large black pavers that would be slick and slippery in the wet, and onto Home’s front stoop. Its Victorian wrought-iron gate and old stone step are coated in glossy dark paint, masking a century of redecorations. I cross the threshold into the house, with its bright old floorboards and warm white walls.

The first work I encounter is deep-bitten copper turned green and orange and black. In Kirtika Kain’s hands the material sheds its skin: it intersects with other compounds, altering its colour and texture. It is copper, but no longer copper-coloured. But for the tell-tale traces of screenprinted text with its visible dot matrix, you’d think it had been unearthed from some mineral-rich soil. In Madeleine Preston’s Intolerable Leisure (vessel) (2018), copper is copper, beaten into a cone shape and cradled by white felt. It is a silent trumpet, its narrow end sealed to a point so it will never utter a sound. Felt insulates, silences, protects.

Hand tools – hard, utilitarian objects – are made yielding in Anita Larkin’s Softly Gently, Softly Quietly (2017). A hammer, chisel, scissors, knife and handgun are laid out: devices for work or torture on a cushioned tabletop. The ‘useful’ part of each tool (the hammer’s head, the scissor’s blades) has been replaced by its labour-intensive reproduction in grey needle-felted wool. Larkin has laboured to make versions of labour-saving devices that are functionally redundant. All these tools in warm soft wool should feel comforting – hard things made soft – but they are oddly menacing, suffocating, like muted footfalls. Something strange happens when materials are so directly at odds with the shapes they inhabit. It feels like sabotage.

In a number of works, the usual materials are replaced with strange alternatives. Alasdair McLuckie swaps paint for beads, like so many hand-threaded pixels making up an image. The support is dark wool instead of canvas, and is pinioned to the stretcher with neat hospital corners. I notice the corners of Dani Marti’s work too, where woven nylon rope gives way to a plywood frame. It rests on a table rather than hanging on a wall, asserting itself as object rather than surface. In Marti’s work, prosaic, mass-produced rope is woven with delicacy and care to create a knobbly, knotted plane. Where one might see coils of rope and think only of function, Marti sees form.

Ariella Friend’s sculptures look like pixels from a distance. They could be chunks of buildings extruded from a digital rendering, or fragments extracted from Minecraft. They resolve into irregular conglomerates of square section timber, painted with bands of bright colour. Friend’s titles combine names of native flora with digital terminology; this fits the visual perfectly. In Ken Lambert’s mesmerising video, a digital black cloud roils over and over itself on a white background. It is billowing smoke, crude oil tumbling into water, folded silk ravelling or shaved graphite curling. It is all these things and none of these things. For all the works in ‘Materiality’ whose tangible materials suggest pixels, Lambert’s digital imaging is slick: not a visible pixel in sight.

On first glance Elliot Bryce Foulkes’ Monument II (2014) and Monument V (2018) look like neat geometric abstractions. But instead of crisp, neat painted edges, the colour blocks are sewn cotton. The fabric pulls slightly at the seams, folded hems create small mounds at the joins, and there are slight lapses in registration. This shift in materiality, from paint on canvas to dyed cotton, is gentle but loaded. Along with the unusual pastel colour palette, these materials are a refusal of the masculine authority of hard-edge abstraction in favour of the domestic, the imperfect and the queer.

A glass cabinet is home to Sarah Goffman’s absurd, joyous version of the ‘good’ crystal and crockery. Loot (2018) comprises a clutch of warped, slumped and silver-painted plastic bottles and dishes. It celebrates the absurd and sensual beauty of single-use plastics, with their facets, dimples, ribbing and curves. Like many of the works in ‘Materiality’, Goffman’s Loot reframes the familiar.

Materials that are not exclusively or immediately associated with art can do strange things when allowed agency in artworks. With all their associations and implications, they create meaning, tension and complexity. They can invite or repel, comfort or disconcert us. Most of all, the way materials are used in art can heighten our awareness of the thingness of things, and the agency of objects as we encounter them in the wild.

Rebecca Gallo, October 2018

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Elizabeth Pulie in our ‘Materiality’ exhibition.

Elizabeth Pulie has been exhibiting her work since 1989. A sense of art as decoration and commodity was the focus of her ‘decorative painting project’ between 1989 and 2002, after which she conducted a relational practice, running Front Room gallery, publishing and distributing Lives of the Artists magazine, and establishing the artist’s group Sydney Ladies’ Artist’s Club. Pulie’s theoretical research, writing and presentations extend the idea of ‘the end of art’ to contemporary art discourse and practice. Her current work encompasses material forms such as painting, weaving, political banners, collage and embroidery.

Pictured is #87 (la commedia dell’arte), 2018, acrylic and linen on board.

Elizabeth Pulie appears courtesy of Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

Home’s co-director Madeleine Preston has been awarded a fellowship at The Vermont Studio Center (VSC). The VSC is the largest International residency program in the US, hosting more than 50 visual artists and writers each month from across the country and around the world.

Over the last 30 years, VSC has grown to become the largest International artists' and writers' residency program in the United States. The VSC’s mission is to provide studio residencies in an inclusive, international community, honouring creative work as the communication of spirit through form.

The VSC offer 120+ fellowships per year to artists and writers of outstanding talent. A fellowship covers the full cost of a VSC residency.

Madeleine Preston in her studio - photo by Joy Lai

Visited the NGV to see the stunning ‘Polly Borland: Polverse’ exhibition, key works from five major series by Polly Borland. These works set the scene for MORPH, a new body of work completed this year. 

The artworks in this exhibition are a melange of beauty, ugliness and the complexity of life, taking the viewer on a subliminal visual excursion. 

Borland’s most recent body of work, MORPH, 2018, extends the themes that have underpinned her previous series into more abstract visual language. The figure is less identifiable, evoking the curious images of myth, nightmare and hallucination. 

The exhibition runs till February 19th and is a must see.

The highlight at the 2018 Sydney Contemporary Art Fair will be a new iteration of Patricia Piccinini’s ‘The Field’ – the centrepiece from her ‘Curious Affection’ survey exhibition staged at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) earlier this year.

The Field was comprised of a vast landscape of 3000 transgenicflowers standing tall on metre-long stems. Sensitive to movement, the flowers would move and sway, quietly acknowledging the viewer’s physical presence. A path that lead visitors through TheField was marked by a number of Piccinini’s best known sculptures. 

Born in 1965 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Patricia Piccinini and her family moved to Australia in 1972. She received a degree in Economic History from ANU in 1988, and a BA in Painting from Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne in 1991. 

Much of the inspiration for her work can be traced back to the death of her mother, after a prolonged illness and course of treatment for cancer. Piccinini says “I was 12 when my mother became sick and she died when I was 26. It made me very much aware of medicine. For a long time, I hoped technology could save my family. In the end, it really didn’t. But that doesn’t mean I’m opposed to technology. Where the emotional, rational, and ethical collide: that is the nexus of my work.”

Early in her career, Piccinini would often visit medical museums - drawings preserved specimens. These studies of anatomical anomolies and pathologies influenced her later work, especially her sculpture. Today, Patricia Piccinini is one of Australia’s most acclaimed artists.  

She is best known for her confronting, surreal and strangely beautiful hyper-real sculptures, melding human and animal forms. The sculptures are made from silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing and found objects. Piccinini creates her works in the Melbourne studio she shares with her husband and collaborator, artist Peter Hennessey. 

She works across a wide range of media, including sculpture, video, drawing and installation. Over her three decades of practice, working at the intersection of science, nature, technology and humanity, her work has explored complex ethical and contentious questions including: In the age of biotechnology and CRISPR, what can we create? What should we do? What is our responsibility to our creations? and What is our responsibility to nature?

Piccinini uses her artistic practice as a forum for discussion about how technology impacts upon life. She is interested in how contemporary ideas of nature, the natural and the artificial affect our society. Many of her works have addressed issues regarding biotechnology, gene therapy and ongoing research to map the human genome. 

She represented Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, has a wide international collector base, and her work was central to the exhibition, HyperReal (2017) at the National Gallery of Australia.

In 2016 she was crowned the most ‘visited contemporary artist in the world’ for her exhibition Consciousness, which toured three venues in Brazil and attracted more than 1.4 million visitors. Consciousness was a sensation around the country and Piccinini is now a household name in Brazil. 

Curated byindependent curator and writer Nina Miall, The Field will be re-imagined for Sydney Contemporary in the Elston Room at Carriageworks. This will be the first time this work will be seen outside of a museum and will give viewers the chance to immerse themselves inside the world of one of Australia’s best-known artists.

This new iteration at the Sydney Contemporary aims to encourage conversations around big ethical and moral questions at the frontier of nature, science and humanity.

"What is natural and what is artificial?What does it mean when we change nature?" Piccinini asks. "That is what I'm really interested in. Everything springs from that idea, everything. It touches on so many things – environmental issues, it touches on relationships between ourselves, our body and other animals and our relationship with technology. Ultimately, it is all about how we define nature."

Many thanks to arts writer Emma-Kate Wilson for her review of 22.08.18.

Review of 22.08.18 at Home@735 Gallery

By Emma-Kate Wilson

The artist’s body is covered in a t-shirt like material as she stretches herself between two rocks on Tasmania’s North-East coast, inviting play through a reduction in her senses. She cannot see, rather her moves are responding to touch. I reflected with my friend about this work at the opening. Was Emma Constantine trapped? Metamorphosing out of her cocoon? Perhaps a re-birthing in the Australian landscape for the British artist. Sleepy Bay (2018) entwines with the other artworks, bringing together the themes of site and identity.

Nuan Ho’s Trophy (2018) is hung at the end of a corridor creating the first sense of observation through distorted realism in the Redfern terrace home of Anthony Bautovich and Madeleine Preston. A set of blank, black eyes stares out at the viewer from within a dark, moody painting of a deer’s mounted head. This unconscious intuition of feeling watched radiates throughout the environment of the Home@735 gallery’s exhibition 22.08.18, a show that explores the interplay between structure and façade of architectural spaces with the emotional point of site.

The exploitation of intimacy from household objects is evident throughout half of the first floor with Nuan Ho’s sullen paintings contrasting Tiffany Ng’s kitschy everyday ceramics arranged as a vanity display. Ng has manipulated clay into luxury items, associated with an aspect of her Chinese heritage that she aims to dismantle. Chanel Rouge (2018), and Gucci Gucci (2018) - the names of the artworks giving away their ulterior motive; exploring obsession with designer objects within modern Chinese culture. The identifiable, mundane objects, are reduced to evidence of a shared identity.

As we move through the first level, away from the object-oriented works, we observe Ro Murray and Sean O’Brien’s representations of site, formed from their surroundings. O’Brien’s broad, dark strokes on the paper allow the viewer to bask in the emotional, rather than the physical site of the regional areas of NSW where the works were created. Bursts of colour and soft trembles of pastel contrast the heavy charcoal. The artworks act as a key to a memory, an observation. When compared to Murray’s work, the site is signified through flattened collage made of links and sketches, connecting the geometrical map style to the natural environment. Murray’s methodical artworks: Beside the Park (2018) and Floor Space Ratio (2018) a cross between the aesthetics of art and science, informed from the artist’s architectural background.

Downstairs in the central section of the gallery, Eliza Gosse’s work embodies the literal forms of architecture, and Mia Miladinovic continues this through the representation of the interiors through her un-homely intent. Geometrical paintings like The Grass Is Always Greener When You Water it (2018) from Gosse, mirror the modernist builds of Australia, personifying the architecture to reflect a suburbia identity. The colour is washed out, formed from black and white photographs, making up her own colour scheme of purples, greens and pinks. Gosse has reawakened the memory and engaged nostalgia for the viewers in her melancholic paintings. The obsessive copying of still life gives concepts of identity to places. For Miladinovic, her works: Scintillation (2018) and Light Transfer (2018) are edging towards the eerie feeling of a room abandoned. The ambiguity falls into soft lines; shapes blend into the background. The balance of light creates a sense of movement, by capturing luminosity. The works pull the audience into their aura and create a unique bubble of opportunity to absorb the colour and texture. Time and place are crucial to the paintings, what the sun is doing and the shadows of the structure around the piece.

22.08.18 transcends place and character and offers a view to observe each artists’ personal opinion of how personal identity informs space. What we see in the dialogue of identity and site is revealed through the informality of the space and personality in situ. These perspectives are played out through the composition and awkward intimacy in the directors’ home; amplifying dematerialisation of the object through paintings, collage, ceramics, video works and ready-mades. 

Home's co-director Madeleine Preston has a show opening tomorrow at the Camden Art Centre as part of the fourth London Summer Intensive at the Slade School - if you are in London, please check it out. The participating artists are Liseth Amaya, Kate Bancroft, Takming Chuang, Savannah Galvin, Noora Geagea, Giuseppina Giordano, Vasilis Goumas, Susan Jacobs, Margot Klingender, Donghwan Ko, Eilen Itzel Mena, Momina Muhammad, Abraham Murley, Lillian Olney, Kailyn Perry and Madeleine Preston.

In the fourth London Summer Intensive, artists will have the opportunity to exhibit works and ideas developed during the residency through a preview and showcase of work in progress at Camden Arts Centre’s Artists’ Studio followed by an open studio event at the Slade Research Centre. These events enable wider audiences to see the work and meet the resident artists.

Previous residencies have brought together artists from over 20 different countries providing diverse and exciting working environments. Visiting artists and curators from past programmes have included Faisal Abdu’Allah, Caroline Achaintre, Sacha Craddock, Simon Faithful, Mark Godfrey, Dryden Goodwin, Anne Hardy, Evan Ifekoya, Chantal Joffe, Paul Johnson, Sally O’Reilly, Harold Offeh, and Phoebe Unwin. The previous programmes have also included gallery visits and introductions to spaces such South London Gallery, Gasworks, Focal Point Gallery (Southend-on-Sea) and Wysing Arts Centre (Cambridge).

Home is pleased to announce we will be exhibiting work by Melbourne artist Sarah CrowEST in our ‘Materiality’ show opening in October. 

“…Sarah crowEST has a daily studio practice of painting with occasional forays into screen-printing and stitching. An ongoing project sees crowEST tending to the 100 strap-on paintings circulating around the world that she made between 2012 and 2018. crowEST incrementally builds up the surfaces of her paintings by contrasting strong, precise, rectilinear forms with accidental or indiscriminate mark-making and text. These accumulated marks dwell in the liminal space between happenstance and fate, with creative decisions in the studio perhaps serving as a metaphor for chance and destiny in life. This strategic and yet loose, approach to art making, interwoven with the vagaries of everyday life, allows crowEST to tackle doubt and sustain a constant creative flow…”

Her work is held in City of Port Phillip Art Collection, Ararat Gallery TAMA, Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, University of SA Art Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery, Okayama Prefectural Government, Japan, Stanthorpe Art Gallery, Queensland, The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney and Northern Territory Museum of Arts and Sciences.

Many thanks to arts writer Naomi Riddle for her review of our current exhibition.

2018 Invitational - HOME@735 Gallery

In his seven-point manifesto, In Praise of Small (2016), David Joselit writes that ‘MoMA exhibits something like 1% of their collection at any one time.’[i] Such a figure (calculated by comparing the number of works on view with the number of objects in the collection) highlights that the purchase of artworks by museums and institutions doesn’t necessarily equate with greater accessibility. It also prompts the question as to who determines which objects from such an insurmountable archive should be on display at any given time. And the idea of collector and collection becomes even more muddied when considering the sale of art to private buyers—contemporary and traditional artworks often disappearing from view once purchased.  

Through building the 2018 Invitational exhibition around chosen pieces from the private collection of Sydney consultant and art collector Kate Smith, Home@735 reverses this process. Here the works of Sidney Nolan, Tony Garifalakis, Justin Mortimer and Ricky Swallow are made visible, placed alongside responsive or likeminded pieces by emerging and established artists. There is also the additional aspect of such works being presented in a gallery that is decidedly not a white cube or an institution, but rather one that sits between the public and private—Nolan’s Landscape with Ned Kelly (1982) is hung in a living room, Garifalakis’ Untitled #14 (2014) from the ‘mob rule (family series)’ is placed above stairs, whilst Swallow’s watercolours of the Kelly Gang are positioned along a corridor. The weight and feel of these works shifts in such an in-between domestic space: you’re allowed to get up close to the brushstrokes; you can examine the precise details of Kelly’s armour.

The exhibition itself can be divided into two parts: the downstairs section responding to the Nolan and Swallow works, and upstairs more concerned with figurative portraiture. Mortimer’s painting entitled Donor VI (2014), which depicts a blue-bruised figure lying prostate on a bed, provides the thematic focus for the upper space. Many of the other works are similarly preoccupied with corporeality, where the abject is combined with a sense of gentleness and vulnerability. There is Garifalakis’ disembodied opened mouth with the too-white and too-straight teeth, the sequestered face of Nuan Ho’s Nurse (2017), and the chafed forearms of William Reinsch’s Shame Study (2017). The self-portraits of Vanessa Stockard, Natasha Walsh and Yvette Coppersmith also suggest an open-faced intimacy, whereas Sassy Park’s sculptural piece, Men’s Group (2017), includes a terracotta head on its side—a kind of decapitation of the illustrious Victorian statuette. 

But it is the arrangement of the downstairs gallery which suggests an awareness that the significance of a collected artwork—particular one as iconic and recognisable as Nolan’s—is determined by its relationship to the works placed beside it. Here Jason Phu, Dennis Golding and Deborah Kelly have all produced responsive pieces that directly engage with both Nolan’s ‘master’ status in the Australian canon, and the obsession with Ned Kelly as a go-to-figure of national identity. Phu’s Lao fucking up Ned (2017) sees the bushranger’s head clamped in the jaws of Laozi’s dog, whilst Kelly repurposes Nolan’s commissioned endpapers in Junee Archival (Sausage Party Showdown) (2018), slicing and overlaying the ponderous documents of art history into ironic collage.

Indigenous artist Dennis Golding’s photographic print, Among Others (2018), depicts a small clearing ringed by eucalypts. A series of capes has been affixed to the trunks, with each cape then painted with cultural symbols that mark out territories and sites. Here the photograph becomes a haunted document of visual signs—signs that oppose the primacy of Kelly’s helmet, and expose the colonial narrative underwriting Nolan and Swallow’s series of works.

The considered positioning of the 2018 Invitational is a reminder of the value of small and independent spaces gaining access to ‘canonical’ works, and indeed the idea of the canon itself: such markers of standards (and the collections that house them) cannot be fixed or closed—they must be continually recast.

[i] David Joselit, ‘In Praise of Small’, Common Practice NY (2016), <http://commonpracticeny.org/assets/CPNY_NearContact_2016.pdf>, accessed 19 July 2018 

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Melbourne artist Alasdair McLuckie in our ‘Materiality’ show opening in October. 

“…utilising drawing and craft with a strong formalist aesthetic sensibility, Alasdair McLuckie’s practice adopts meticulous process to explore the mythology, history, and ritual of making…where a broad (folk) narrative traditionally underpinned each project, recent works have shifted to be driven by an exploration of their materiality and the creative process with a specific interest in modernisms place in time and relationship to the past, present and future…”

Alasdair’s works are held in the collections of Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Artbank, The Ergas Collection, Sydney and MONA. He is represented by Murray White Room in Melbourne and Mothers Tankstation Limited, in Dublin. 

Pictured is Making Zulma/Feelings, 2017, Woven Seed Beads on Wool. Photo by Christo Crocker.

Join us for drinks on Wednesday the 25th of July at Galerie Pompom for the opening on ‘Intolerable Leisure’, the solo exhibition by Home’s co-director Madeleine Preston.

Intolerable Leisure is based upon the city of Paris as the artist remembers it. In this iteration of the city its inhabitants and their decadent patrician and migrant histories mingle in the unconscious mind. Encased in memory, the city of Paris heaves with things: patisserie windows offering impossibly sweet glazed cakes and perfect golden breads; a Ferris wheel in a park buzzing with sparrows, avenues of Chestnut trees set in perfect perspective, manicured gardens of headless queens, stone plinths, marble pillars, gilded streetlights. Museum after museum, some with water lilies and great stones, and others with human heads. Such care is taken in all of its display. Each day the arrondissements are swept by hand by some 4,500 sweepers, most of them African or Arab immigrants. The vertes, in their mint green jumpsuits, deftly  sweep with twig brooms of the type once used by peasants here, albeit with the 21st century update of long stemmed plastic bristles.

Uncanny, hungry city. Nowhere else, save Las Vegas or Washington, does such a thin veneer of reality cover every thing. If the museum is not an artefact of our experience but rather an experience of artefacts, whose own particular lives as objects were severed at the moment of separation from their origins—person, family, community, society, culture, nation, world—then Paris is the museum of the West. A place where logical connections are made between disparate things. No other place has swallowed so much of the world and has held it in its mouth for so long. Existence is elsewhere.*

Excerpt from Stella Rosa McDonald’s exhibition essay The City That Swallowed the World

• André Breton, Manifestoes Of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972.

Madeleine Preston is a Sydney based artist and tutor at the National Art School and UNSW Art & Design. She has a Master of Fine Arts from RMIT and is a director of Home@735 Gallery. Preston’s practice includes painting, sculpture and installation. Her recent work has focused on the past and how we choose to both remember and forget. Recent exhibitions include Tanagras Archive: The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie, at Bus Projects, Melbourne; Glazed and Confused at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery; Octopus13: On this day alone at Gertrude Contemporary as part of their annual Octopus series. In 2017-18 she undertook an Art Gallery of NSW Moya Dyring studio residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. In August 2018 Madeleine will undertake a residency at The Slade in London.

Home is thrilled to be exhibiting Donor VI, 2014, oil on canvas by Justin Mortimer in our Invitational Show opening tonight. Many thanks to art consultant Kate Smith for loaning us this wonderful painting for the exhibition. Join us for drinks from 6-8pm. 

“…Justin Mortimer (b.1970) is a British artist whose paintings consistently invite us to question the relationship between subject matter and content, beauty and horror, and between figuration and abstraction. While the imagery is almost exclusively pitiless, the texturing of the paint, the play between light and shade and the passages that lead from photo-realist definition to near-abstract formlessness are so sensitively handled as to make the work at least partially redemptive as well as to indicate a key philosophical dimension: the oblique relationship between evidence and interpretation…Mortimer’s paintings are not reportage or documentation, they are far too allusive and de-specified for that. Instead they represent a powerful and poetic visualisation of contemporary life, in all its grim and magical reality…” - Ben Tufnell

Justin Mortimer graduated from the Slade School of Art in 1992 and lives and works in London. He has won several prestigious awards including the EAST Award (2004), NatWest Art Prize (1996) and the BP National Portrait Award (1991). Recent solo exhibitions include Haunch of Venison, London (2012), Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2011) and Master Piper, London (2010). Recent group exhibitions include How to Tell the Future from the Past, Haunch of Venison, New York (2013), Nightfall, MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Arts, Debrecen, Hungary (2012), MAC Birmingham (2011) and the 2011 Prague Biennial. His work is held in private and public collections including the National Portrait Gallery, London, the National Portrait Gallery, Canada, Royal Society for the Arts, Bank of America, NatWest Bank and the Flash Art Museum of Contemporary Art in Trevi, Italy. 

This text is reproduced with kind permission from Parafin Gallery London.

Self-Portrait, Yellow, 2016-18, oil on linen by Yvette Coppersmith will be showing at Home in our Invitational exhibition opening tomorrow night. Yvette has been a finalist in many portrait competitions including the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, the Portia Geach Memorial Award and the Metro 5 Art Award where she was the inaugural winner in 2003. In 2018, after being a finalist five times, she was awarded the 2018 Archibald Prize for her Self-portrait after George Lambert.

Madeleine Preston’s exhibition ‘Intolerable Leisure’ opens at Galerie pompom on July 25th. 

“…the works in ‘Intolerable Leisure’ are are transformed from liquid to solid in the case of clay, from flat to form after exposure to heat and force in the case of copper and from wool to felt and felted material forms through rubbing, force and water. 

The materials used are a manifestation of Albert Camus’ notions of the plight of the exile and refugee. Refugees and exiles transfer from one state to another as a result of pressures and circumstances beyond their control. 

Although the objects in Intolerable Leisure may appear aesthetically pleasing they speak to a greater sense of isolation and displacement.

One of the feature works in our Invitational show is this 1982 painting by Sidney Nolan. Alongside the Nolan will be responses by Deborah Kelly, Jason Phu and Dennis Golding. Many thanks to art consultant Kate Smith for allowing us to exhibit this work.

Pictured is Sidney Nolan, Landscape with Ned Kelly, 1982, Ripolin enamel on composition board.

Born in Melbourne, Sir Sidney Nolan (1917—1992) was an artist known for his paintings based on Australian folklore.

With little formal art training, Nolan started painting at the of age 21 after a variety of jobs including racing cyclist, cook, and gold miner. In his early work he was influenced by the abstract artists Paul Klee and László Moholy-Nagy and his own abstractions, such as Boy and the Moon (1940)—a splash of yellow against a raw blue background—incited controversy among visitors to his Melbourne studio. 

Nolan served in the Australian army from 1942 to 1945, during which time he began to paint the local desert landscapes in a more representational style. Apart from landscapes, most of his works dealt with Australian historical or legendary characters and events—notably, the bushranger, Ned Kelly. Nolan’s painting style is noted for its fluidity, which he emphasized by applying unusual mediums—such as ripolin (an enamel house paint) and polyvinyl acetate—to masonite, glass, paper, or canvas.

Nolan moved to England in 1955 and continued to paint his native Australian landscapes. He remained involved with the theatre, designing stage sets for a production of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring in London in 1962 and for Camille Saint-Saëns’s opera Samson et Dalila, in London, in 1981. Nolan’s work has been exhibited internationally, and many of his paintings and prints are in the permanent collections of the Tate Gallery in London and MOMA in New York. He was knighted in 1981 and became a member of the Order of Merit in 1983.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by UK artist William Reinsch in our Invitational Show opening on Wednesday the 11th of July. Join us for drinks from 6-8pm.

“…my work explores themes of anxiety, confusion and mortality as well as the idea of being nude both physically and psychologically. My hopes as an artist are to find new and more impact-full ways to express complex emotions by way of the paint itself and the play of colour and positioning within the preliminary collage…”

Pictured is Shame Study, 2017, oil on canvas.

Home is pleased to announce we will be exhibiting a work by Sydney based artist Dennis Golding in our Invitational show opening on Wednesday the 11thof July. Dennis has created a response to a Sidney Nolan painting. 

Dennis Golding was born in Sydney 1989 and is a descendant of the Gomeroi/Gamillaraay people from the north west of New South Wales. He spent most of his childhood living in Redfern. Currently in his final year studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the UNSW Art & Design, Dennis continues to develop his creative practice through his studies and also working in local community events and private commissions. As part of his professional development at university, Dennis has experienced working as an assistant curator, in which he was mentored by lead curator, Tess Allas in Under Pressure, 2017 at the Tarnanthi Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. He also worked as an assistant curator for Ngurrambaa, 2018 at Murray Art Museum Albury. 

Pictured is Dennis’s work Illustrated Cape, 2018 which was a finalist in this year’s Jenny Birt Award. 

Home is pleased to announce we will be exhibiting work by Melbourne artist Sam Martin in our ‘Materiality’ exhibition opening in October. Pictured is Fixed Elsewhere, 2018, Thread on canvas over wood frame - courtesy of the artist and STATION, Melbourne.

"...my practice explores various weaving techniques outside the realm of painting. I research many methods of construction such as basketry, embroidery, tapestry, rug-weaving and ancient forms of armour, and reinterpret these as contemporary painted forms.

Protection, strength, labour and layering are all themes and metaphorical scenarios that are running through these pictures. I’m not only interested in the painting as a surface, but also as a container which can hold multiple approaches.

The images are made up of incremental reactions to previous marks, offering opposing dialogues of repetition, variety, structure and improvisation. I allude to this in the titles, which are lifted from improvised music. These sounds and approaches inspire compositional ideas and are a constant soundtrack in my studio..."

Home’s co-director Madeleine Preston has a solo exhibition opening July 25th at Galerie Pompom. The exhibition titled Intolerable Leisure is informed by her recent residency at the Cité.

“…I visited the Quai Branly Museum with its vast collection of art from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. The collection originates in what the museum calls ‘economic exchanges as the result of the first colonial expansion.’ What struck me most was that a large part if not most of the collection would have been amassed through theft and ‘economic exchanges’ that favoured the buyer – if an ‘exchange’ occurred at all. Like many European museums of its kind that are funded to study non-European cultures, the museum is a study in European expansionism and Imperialist attitudes to non-European cultures.  Intolerable Leisure takes the idea of the museum as a cipher for violence and history to talk about how museums continue to be used to tell specific stories…’

Pictured is - Kiaapaatt masks, collected in 1934 from Greenland

                               ‘Voices from Below’ – the work of Lina Džuverović

Art is a reflection of its time. Major shifts in socio-political and economic conditions affect the development and creation of art. Conflicts between East and West during World War II (WWII) had a significant impact on the art world through the displacement of individuals and communities and the consequences of war. Marking the boundary between East and West post WWII was the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia.

During a 37 year-rule, Yugoslavia was held together by President Josip Broz Tito.[1] Yugoslavia was neither part of the Soviet dominated Warsaw Pact or aligned with the West. This allowed Tito to construct a diplomatic path between East and West to Yugoslavia’s advantage. This clever positioning by Tito resulted in the flow of capital from the West and an improved standard of living for many Yugoslavs. Unlike artists from behind the Iron Curtain, artists from Yugoslavia were free to travel, and gain a Western perspective. The subsequent exposure to new methods of art making allowed Yugoslav art and culture to evolve simultaneously with Western ideas.

Art and culture have the power to influence people and embody the identity of a nation and a community. Egalitarian ideals and a unique style of market socialism provided the backdrop to the evolution of the art made in Yugoslavia after WWII. The complexities inherent in this art are a reflection of the social and political environment of the time. The essence of Yugoslav art and culture from this period was expertly documented in the 2016 exhibition, ‘Monuments Should Not Be Trusted’.[2] Curated by UK based curator and academic Lina Džuverović and staged at Nottingham Contemporary[3], the exhibition was the largest selection of Yugoslav art exhibited in the UK to date. Selected from the ‘golden years’[4] of the Socialist Federal Republic between 1960 to the early 1980s, ‘Monuments Should Not Be Trusted’ featured works by some of Yugoslavia’s most prominent art figures including Marina Abramović, Mladen Stilinović, Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) and Sanja Iveković. A decisive feature of the exhibition was its emphasis on “smaller, grass roots often overlooked subcultural moments in the artistic life of the country.”[5]

An independent curator and Lecturer at the Reading School of Art, University of Reading,[6] Džuverović’s dedication to Yugoslavia’s underground art scene and the significance of the contributions of female artists from the region is evident throughout her curatorial practice. Her considered evaluation is evident in two of her curatorial projects which will be the focus of this essay, ‘Monuments Should Not Be Trusted’ (2016) and ‘Unknown Heroine’ – featuring the work of Sanja Iveković [7](2012/13). In a recent interview I conducted with the curator, Lina Džuverović said of the Monuments Should Not Be Trusted exhibition

“This exhibition emerged out of my PhD research (I wrote about Pop in Yugoslavia, and my thesis was associated with Tate’s ‘The World Goes Pop’ exhibition).  I had just come across so much incredible work during my research that the show kind of shaped itself. The four core themes in the show (utopian consumerism and subcultures; comrades superwoman - examining gender roles in Yugoslavia; socialism and class difference; public space and the presence of Tito) were all informed by my desire to communicate the plurality and richness of artistic practices in the country, the cross-pollination between art, film and music, but also all the contradictions embedded in this dynamic and brilliant environment which was soon to collapse with the wars of the 1990s.”[8] (Džuverovic, pers. comm., May 19, 2018)

In ‘Monuments Should Not Be Trusted’, Džuverović unearthed and brought to light artists and subcultures from the former Yugoslavia that had not previously been given a platform. In the curator’s introduction from the exhibition catalogue, Džuverović explains,

“this exhibition focuses on a multitude of voices ‘from below’ – those who were rarely listened to at the time, often remaining omitted from historical narratives of Yugoslav art…particular attention is given to the position of women (and female artists) in Yugoslavia, one of the main sites of discrepancy between public proclamations of socialist goals and private realities.”[9]

Džuverović’s attention to detail throughout the exhibition combined with her thoroughly researched exhibition catalogue[10] are key to the curatorial principles she outlined in our recent interview

“if there is a red thread in my curatorial practice it is a commitment to excluded, omitted or under-represented practices and narratives. My curatorial practice tries to create a space for these practices not only through exhibiting but also creating broader, and lasting discourse around them, through the creation of archives and documentation”[11] (Džuverovic, pers. comm., May 19, 2018)

The meticulous detailing and cross-referencing in the exhibition catalogue not only relay an in-depth evaluation of art made in the former Yugoslavia, but also delivers a comprehensive reference source. The catalogue reveals the intrigues of Yugoslav art and culture during the Tito years, focusing on the lesser known. 

Taking its title from the banned satirical film made in 1958 by Serbian filmmaker and screenwriter Dušan Makavejev[12]  – depicting a young woman’s attraction to a muscle bound male socialist statue – ‘Monuments Should Not Be Trusted’ examined art and culture that addressed the unique picture of social change in Yugoslavia. The timeline of the exhibition culminates with the rise of consumerism during Tito’s presidency in the 1960s and concludes a few years after his death in 1980. Artworks from more than thirty artists in the exhibition explore the context of the political, social and economic impacts during this remarkable era in recent history. I asked Lina Džuverović, what were her key motives behind the exhibition

 “The desire to do such an ambitious show came from the fact that I frequently encounter questions about growing up in a ‘strict and oppressive’ socialist regime, questions which are fuelled by the ill-conceived notion that Yugoslavia was somehow culturally cut off from the west, isolated. These assumptions were partly what I wanted to challenge by simply showing the radical voices of Yugoslav artists. Surely after seeing performance and sound works by Katalin Ladik, Borghesia’s punk videos, films by Karpo Godina, OHO super 8 films or music videos made by Tucko & Bucko (a duo that produced a lot of New Wave music videos)-  all included in the show -  one could not walk out of the exhibition still believing in the myth of isolation and oppression.”[13] (Džuverovic, pers. comm., May 19, 2018)

The commitment to examining under-represented practices and exhibitions is also central to the work of Australian contemporary art historian Anthony Gardner.[14] Currently the Head of School at the Ruskin School of Art, Gardner is also a Fellow of The Queen’s College at the University of Oxford and an editor of the MIT Press journal, ARTMargins. Born and educated in Melbourne, Anthony Gardner completed his PhD at The Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics at the University of New South Wales in 2009. Working at the intersection of political theory, art and exhibition histories since the 1950s,[15] Gardner’s main research areas are postcolonialism, postsocialism and curatorial histories. In a recent interview with Anthony Gardner, I asked him what he saw as the significance of the Monuments Should Not Be Trusted exhibition.

“I think it was very important, especially for UK audiences. It brought the work from this period to a mainstream UK gallery for the first time in years - perhaps even since the presentation of work at Richard DeMarco’s gallery in Edinburgh in the 1970s or Riverside in the 1980s - and with that came mainstream media attention, especially through Adrian Searle’s review in the Guardian.”[16]  (Gardner, pers. comm., May 22, 2018)

The impact of the Džuverović’s Monuments Should Not Be Trusted exhibition saw it listed in chief art critic at the London Guardian Andrew Searle’s ‘Top 10 Art Shows for 2016’.[17]  The exhibition was listed by Searle alongside exhibitions by Robert Rauschenberg at the Tate Modern and William Eggleston’s Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

The commitment to documenting under-represented practices and exhibitions is also fundamental to the 2001 publication, East Art Map.[18] East Art Map is an archival, art historical project put together by IRWIN,[19] a collective of Slovenian artists and an original founding member of Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK).[20] The project constructs an art history for Eastern Europe after 1945 recognising artists, artworks and projects that had an impact on the arts in the region. Anthony Gardner noted the importance of this publication

 “Hence the drive to create the East Art Map in the 1990s and early 2000s by the members of IRWIN, in order to understand the histories of communist and post-communist Europe much better. There had been some connections between artists and Yugoslavia and other major conceptual art centres in Central and Eastern Europe, such as Poland, but it was still fairly limited compared with the Yugoslavia-West lines of cultural traffic.”[21]  (Gardner, pers. comm., May 22, 2018)

Included in the Monuments Should Not Be Trusted exhibition catalogue under the chapter on NSK, Lina Džuverović supports the comments of Gardner stating “NSK, and in particular the group IRWIN, have been instrumental in intervening in the hegemonic western art historical narratives by inserting the art practices of the former east. In their project East Art Map, IRWIN, alongside a wide network of collaborators, proposed a rethinking of twentieth-century art history through the introduction of the category eastern modernism.” [22]

The belief that Yugoslavia was ‘strict and oppressive’ or ‘culturally cut off and isolated’ was a contradiction to the art created during this era. The right for Yugoslavs to travel abroad together with the republic’s singular type of socialism were the conditions promoting an undeniable expressiveness. The shift of art from the gallery to the street was indicative of the way in which art played a central role in Yugoslav society. Džuverović says about growing up in Yugoslavia,

“as a teenager, it was amazing to grow up immersed in the various subcultures that orbited the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade, from New Wave music, to seeing conceptual art shows at the SKC gallery, even though I didn’t understand them at all at the time. I left at the age of 16 to go to France and then the UK, but my time in Belgrade had completely shaped my outlook, cultural interests and the idea of what culture should or could be.”[23]  (Džuverovic, pers. comm., May 19, 2018)

One of the artists benefitting from the unique conditions in the former Yugoslavia was Sanja Iveković.[24] A feminist, activist, and video innovator, Iveković’s work utilises a variety of mediums including conceptual photomontages, collage, video and performance. Iveković was part of a generation of artists whose conceptual practices gravitated toward the use of public space, and broke free from the institutional setting. Her politically charged practice focuses on questions of female identity, consumerism and memory. Iveković made work that was contemporaneous with Western artists dealing with similar concepts including Judy Chicago whose seminal work, The Dinner Party (1974-79) was created in the same time period as Iveković’s ‘Double Life’.

The exhibition ‘Unknown Heroine’,[25] curated by Lina Džuverović and staged across two galleries – South London Gallery and Calvert 22 – was the first exhibition featuring the work of Croatian artist Sanja Iveković in the UK. While her works at Calvert 22 examined the topic of historical amnesia, her work showing in the South London Gallery focused on gender equality. Džuverović says of working with Sanja Iveković

“I had wanted to curate an exhibition of Ivekovic’s work for many years as I felt it was urgent to show her work in the UK, as she had never had a retrospective here…I am interested quite specifically in artists whose work directly deals with different forms of injustice, omission, silencing and erasure, those speaking from an intersectional feminist point of view, who hope to use art for a wider social change, even if in small ways.”[26] (Džuverovic, pers. comm., May 19, 2018)

Two of Iveković’s works exhibited at South London Gallery, ‘Tragedy of a Venus’[27] and the acclaimed series ‘Double Life’,[28] both produced in 1975, relate to female identity. ‘Double Life’, first published as an artist’s book, is a photomontage series pairing images taken from women’s fashion magazine with photographs of the artist. This self-reflective work featuring photographs from Iveković’s personal collection - taken from different stages of her life - explores the disparity between the way women are depicted in magazines and reality. Furthermore, ‘Double Life’ examines how consumerism has played a role in the way female identity is portrayed.

A number of Iveković’s works exhibited in ‘Unkown Heroine’ were also included in ‘Monuments Should Not Be Trusted’. One of her best known and most exhibited works, and an example of artwork created outside the gallery context was Triangle (1979).[29] Comprising of four black and white photographs, the images depict a provocative and defiant performance work. The performance takes place the day President Tito’s motorcade drives past Sanja Iveković’s apartment block in Zagreb. Iveković is on the balcony of her apartment, sipping whiskey, smoking, reading a book and simulating the act of masturbation - as Tito’s entourage is about to pass by. The ‘three’ involved in the ‘Triangle’ are; a security agent on the roof of the hotel across from her apartment block, Iveković, and a police officer on the street. Communication from the rooftop to the street results in the police officer ringing Ivekovic’s doorbell and ordering that persons and objects be removed from the balcony. The gaze can exert a power over an individual. This piece brings to light government repression, the power of surveillance and raises awareness of the rights of women.

Yugoslav artist’s freedom to travel without restrictions had a significant influence on the direction of art in the Socialist Republic. Anthony Gardner discusses this freedom of movement, and specifically where artists chose to travel, and the impact this had on ideas and the art made

“It was significant, both for artists coming to Yugoslavia - Beuys for instance going to the SKC in Belgrade and meeting the New Art performance artists there - and those from Yugoslavia - Todosijević, Abramović of course, later the artists of Neue Slowenische Kunst travelling to Venice or through Europe and North America. Most of the travelling was to the North Atlantic, rather than to other parts of communist Europe, so knowledge of the cultural production east of Yugoslavia was not as strong as knowledge of practices to the west.”[30]  (Gardner, pers. comm., May 22, 2018)

Not only were Yugoslav artists given the right to travel abroad, International artists were able to visit the Socialist Republic. After meeting Joseph Beuys at the Edinburgh Festival in 1973, performance artist Marina Abramović was reunited with German artist at the Student Cultural Center (SKC) in Belgrade in 1974.[31] Joseph Beuys’s happenings had an appreciable influence on Abramović’s performance work. Beuys was in Belgrade to participate in the April ‘Encounters’. Held at the SKC, ‘Encounters’ gave local artists an opportunity to exhibit and perform alongside their International colleagues. Beuys was in the audience at SKC when Abramović performed Rhythm 5.[32] A five-pointed star constructed from timber and wood chips, soaked in 100 litres of gasoline, was set alight. Abramović cuts clumps of her hair and toe nail clipping, tossing them into the fire. She then walks around the burning star, eventually laying down in the centre of the blazing structure. The fire consumes much of the oxygen and Abramović is rendered unconscious. Two of the audience members run in and carry the artist to safety. A photograph and letterpress text panel from the Rhythm 5 (1974) performance by Abramović was exhibited in Monuments Should Not Be Trusted. The performance of Rhythm 5 by Marina Abramović and the influence of Joseph Beuys on her early work are examples of the unique circumstances coming together to shape the art created in Yugoslavia during the Tito years. 

As the son of refugees from the former Yugoslavia, I have a particular interest in the politics, architecture and art from this region. My awareness and knowledge of the complexities of the art created during this era have been concentrated through the interviews I have conducted with Lina Džuverović and Anthony Gardner. Like peeling layers of an onion, the depth and complexities of this subject becomes more palpable as one approaches its core. Džuverović’s commitment to the art and culture of the former Yugoslavia during this period, and her focus on ‘overlooked subcultural moments’ is not only illuminating but forms a tangible basis for a curatorial tenet. Lina Džuverović’s attention to the ‘omitted…historical narratives of Yugoslav art’ and her ability in ‘creating discursive spaces and situations’ are fundamental to her instinctive and thought-provoking curatorial process.

“I guess the one thing I would want to highlight is the importance of trusting your instincts as a curator. In curating, as well as academic work, one is often drawn to projects before being able to fully articulate why that is the case or even name them fully. This sense of operating slightly in the dark, and the process of curating being the process of shedding light, is really exciting and the core of what makes this kind of work interesting. I am not sure that is relevant or useful, but I’m trusting my instincts and saying it, in case it is.”[33] (Džuverovic, pers. comm., May 19, 2018)

Anthony Bautovich

Bibliography:

1. Pavlowitch, S.K., 1992, Tito: Yugoslavia’s Great Dictator, A Reassessment, Ohio State University Press.

2. Džuverović, L., 2016, Monuments Should Not Be Trusted; exhibition catalogue. Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK.

3. Nottingham Contemporary, 2018, Monuments Should Not Be Trusted, viewed 20 May 2018, http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/art/monuments-should-not-be-trusted

4. Morton, E., (2016), Monuments Should Not Be Trusted: exhibition on Yugoslavia’s “golden years”opens in Nottingham, viewed 5 June 2018, https://www.calvertjournal.com/news/show/5286/monuments-should-not-be-trusted-exhibition-on-yugoslavias-golden-years-open

5. Džuverović, L., 2016, Monuments Should Not Be Trusted; exhibition catalogue. Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK. p.10

6. University of Reading, 2018, Staff Profile:Dr Lina Dzuverovic, viewed 18 May 2018, https://www.reading.ac.uk/art/about/staff/l_dzuverovic.aspx

7. Lina Dzuverovic, 2018, Sanja Ivekovic – Unknown Heroine, South London Gallery & Calvert 22 Foundation, viewed 15 May 2018,  http://www.dzuverovic.org/?path=/curated-projects/sanja-ivekovic-unknown-heroine-south-london-gallery-calvert-22/

8. Džuverović, L. 2018, Interview for Anthony Bautovich, 19/5/2018

9. Džuverović, L. 2018, Interview for Anthony Bautovich, 19/5/2018

10.  Džuverović, L., 2016, Monuments Should Not Be Trusted; exhibition catalogue. Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK.

11. Džuverović, L. 2018, Interview for Anthony Bautovich, 19/5/2018

12. The Nation, 2009, The Last Yugoslav: On Dusan Makavejev, viewed 18 May 2018, https://www.thenation.com/article/last-yugoslav-dusan-makavejev/

13. Džuverović, L. 2018, Interview for Anthony Bautovich, 19/5/2018

14. The Queens College, University of Oxford, 2018, Anthony Gardner, viewed 14 May 2018,  https://www.queens.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-anthony-gardner

15. The Ruskin School of Art, 2018, Anthony Gardner, viewed 14 May 2018, http://www.rsa.ox.ac.uk/people/anthony-gardner

16. Gardner, A., 2018, Answers for Anthony Bautovich, 22/5/18

17.  The Guardian, Art and Design, 2018, Adrian Searle's top 10 art shows of 2016, viewed 16 May 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/dec/12/top-10-contemporary-art-shows-2016-adrian-searle

18. East Art Map, 2018, viewed 17 May 2018, http://www.eastartmap.org

19. IRWIN, 2018, viewed 20 May 2018, http://www.irwin.si

20. NSK, 2018, Welcome to NSK Times, viewed 20 My 2018, http://times.nskstate.com

21. Gardner, A., 2018, Answers for Anthony Bautovich, 22/5/18

22.Džuverović, L., 2016, Monuments Should Not Be Trusted; exhibition catalogue. Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK.

23. Džuverović, L. 2018, Interview for Anthony Bautovich, 19/5/2018

24. MOMA, 2018, Sanja Iveković Sweet Violence, viewed 12 May 2018, https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/sanjaivekovic/

25. Lina Dzuverovic, 2018, Curatorial Projects, viewed 15 May 2018, http://www.dzuverovic.org/?path=/curated-projects/sanja-ivekovic-unknown-heroine-south-london-gallery-calvert-22/

26. Džuverović, L. 2018, Interview for Anthony Bautovich, 19/5/2018

27. Chladek, J., 2018, Sanja Ivekovic – Tragedy of Venus, viewed 12 May 2018, http://josefchladek.com/book/sanja_ivekovic_-_tragedy_of_a_venus

28. The New York Times, Art and Design, 2018, Croatia’s Monumental Provocateur, viewed 13 May 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/arts/design/sanja-ivekovic-croatias-monumental-provocateur.html

29. MIT Press, 2013, Sanja Ivekovic Triangle, viewed 11 May 2018, https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/sanja-ivekovic

30. Gardner, A., 2018, Answers for Anthony Bautovich, 22/5/18

31. Stokic, J., (2014), Beuys's Lesson in Belgrade, viewed 22 May 2018,  http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/554-beuys-s-lesson-in-belgrade

32. Spector, N., 2009, Marina Abramović Rhythm 5, viewed 23 May 2018, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/5190

33. Džuverović, L. 2018, Interview for Anthony Bautovich, 19/5/2018

Home is pleased to announce we will be exhibiting work by sculptor Anita Larkin in our ‘Materiality’ show opening in October. Pictured is M9 Beretta, 2017, needle felted wool which is one of the objects in the Softly Gently, Softly Quietly installation we will be showing. 

“…Anita Larkin transforms the collected object into sculptures evoking a human narrative, revealing a strange beauty within the forgotten and discarded. The works display a wry sense of wit and humour, and play with the suggestion of physical movement or a practical function for the hitherto inanimate object…”

Anita Larkin is represented by Defiance Gallery.

Home is pleased to announce we will be exhibiting this self-portrait work by Natasha Walsh in our Invitational show opening on Wednesday the 11th of July. 

Self-Portrait, 2016, oil on copper, was a finalist in the 2016 Archibald Prize. 

Natasha completed her Masters at NAS in 2016-17 and has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize three times, including her work ‘Numb to touch (self-portrait)’ in 2018. Natasha Walsh is represented by Dominik Mersch in Sydney.

“…in her recent self-portraits the artist’s examines her own mortality. An inevitable result of working from life, intensely observing the passing of the present as it manifests itself upon her own directly reflected face. The copper support evokes the fluctuating nature of her subject matter as it is highly responsive to change until sealed by the layers of paint…”from the moment that I prepare the surface, it begins to naturally oxidise. Different pigments changed colour in response to this process and the painting visibly ages as I worked on it…”

Home is delighted to announce we will be exhibiting work by Kirsty Budge in our first exhibition in 2019. The show titled ‘Melbourne Comes to Sydney’ will feature a stellar line-up of Melbourne artists. 

Kirsty Budge’s work vacillates between abstraction and figuration. Her psychologically charged paintings are populated with humour, humans, hopes and horrors. The works connect personal experiences, thought patterns, observations and environments through intuitive processes. Real and imagined forms are combined on the same picture plane and, through the process of mark-making, each is given equal value in the space of the painting. The structure of each painting emerges through a lengthy process of excavation and application by the artist, resulting in an image that is both a response to and a construction of a personal narrative.

Kirsty Budge is a New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist. In 2016 she exhibited in The Painters Are In at Spring 1883, her first solo exhibition with Daine Singer; Painting. More Painting, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s major survey of Australian contemporary painting; I’m not desperate, you’re desperate, a solo exhibition at Sarah Scout Presents; and at the Spinnerei Leipzig in Germany. 

During 2017 she had her second solo exhibition Gawkalitis with Daine Singer, exhibited in the VCA 150 alumni 9x5 exhibition and as a finalist in the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize at the Bendigo Art Gallery. In 2018, Budge undertook a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, as recipient of an Art Gallery of New South Wales Studio Scholarship and exhibited in NADA New York. 

Pictured is How could you do this to me question mark, 2017, oil on canvas.

Kirsty Budge is represented by Daine Singer.

We are thrilled to announce that Home’s Madeleine Preston has been selected for the London Summer Intensive.

The London Summer Intensive is a four-week residency for artists offered by the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL and Camden Arts Centre. The Slade is a dynamic, world-renowned international art school and Camden Arts Centre is an influential space for contemporary art exhibitions and education.

The residency will run throughout August 2018 and will focus on independent studio practice, providing a stimulating and flexible environment for 21 artists from all over the world to experiment and make new work. Supported by artist facilitator Jefford Horrigan and visiting artists, it will reflect the lively, rigorous and open-ended approaches to art-making championed by both institutions. Artists will work in studios and workshop spaces at the Slade Research Centre, Woburn Square in Bloomsbury, close to the British Museum and the galleries of Soho and the West End.

Previous residencies have brought together artists from over 20 different countries providing diverse and exciting working environments. Visiting artists and curators from past programmes have included Faisal Abdu’Allah, Caroline Achaintre, Sacha Craddock, Simon Faithful, Mark Godfrey, Dryden Goodwin, Anne Hardy, Evan Ifekoya, Chantal Joffe, Paul Johnson, Sally O’Reilly, Harold Offeh, and Phoebe Unwin. 

Madeleine Preston’s ‘Tanagras Archive’ installation will be showing in Home’s Invitational exhibition opening on July 11th. 

“…The work in The Tanagras Archive are based on the Louvre’s Tanagras collection. On their unearthing in the 19th century, these Greek ceramics were coveted by the French bourgeoisie as affordable symbols of wealth and taste. A large collection of the Tanagras are held in the Louvre in Paris. They are located very near to the more famous Venus de Milo and people trudge past the Tanagras not registering their singular nature, they are made of clay, their age or importance. This heirarchy of artefacts gave me a strong sense of how fashion and museology dictate the way history and the history of art is understood. It also gave me a sense of how the small and quiet can become the forgotten. I chose to recreate the Tanagras in an attempt to remember them…”

Pictured is Museum Quality, 2014, underglazed terracotta and domestic glassware, dimensions variable.

photo: Joy Lai & John Dennis.

Many thanks to arts writer Susie Smith for her review of our 09.05.18 exhibition.

Liminal spaces and shifting states of being trace moments of mediation, transition and absorption throughout Home@735’s exhibition 09.05.18. Assembled together, each of the five artists’ works emanate impressions of presence and absence.

Janet Haslett’s series Cy in the Centre offers a familiar rumination on this theme. Visitors to last year’s Cy Twombly retrospective at the Pompidou form her subjects, as she paints the process of looking. Almost all see the Paris exhibition through the lens of their phones – backlit and bright on the screen and mediated by that small blockade at arm’s length. Haslett places the scenes before us as a simple statement of observation, without a moralising refrain. These are moments captured with her camera during her own process of looking, and reported later in the studio. Rapid and small brushstrokes delineate the spaces within each canvas to render each image a fleetingly glimpsed scene. Through the muted palette of grey, the rectangular spaces of the galleries and works begin to slide in a slippage of layered surfaces, like losses to the visual periphery beyond the screen.

Nearby, Nancy Constandelia’s colourfields on French grey linen form poems in blue. Subtle gradations of colour are the result of a single, loaded brush drawn across the canvas, yielding less and less paint to the surface. Exposed lines of canvas bring us back to the surface of the paintings from a recession into depths of colour and remind us of the physicality of the paint. Constandelia’s fascination with the materiality of her medium is made clear through the textural, smudgy-fringed fields of ultramarine in Epoch I and Epoch II. The ultramarine works on display are translucent, both absorbing and emitting light. In contrast, The Vanishing performs an absorption through a deeply layered recession of blues and blacks. Through these works, Constandelia considers how light, colour and the material of paint itself act together to create an artwork.

Downstairs, the ambiguous spaces within Anthony Cahill’s paintings build landscapes of the mind through snippets of memory. The abstracted spaces unfurl through layered planes of colour. Cahill plays with colour discords, layering dappled colours over others and pushing opposing brights towards new harmonies. Cahill places his figures in these moving spaces in enigmatic and imagined interactions. All at once, the figures are part and apart from one another and the space around them – blending in through tonal harmonies and dislocated by the abstraction of their surrounds. Cahill paints the disjunctures of modern life in a reverie on our experiences in this world of loose digital connections and urban distance from nature. In Souvenir one figure extends the offering of a feather to another as if in memory of the ghostly bird perched nearby. Elsewhere the unknowable majesty of nature is palpable in the solid, shifting spaces which hold the figures’ gaze.

Morphing and in flux, Jenny Orchard’s hand-built earthenware creatures form a polemic against human interference with the world around us. The products of genetic testing, Orchard’s Interbeings have man-made ‘jumping genes’ which continue to change their nature, and are genetic interferences based in fact; on mice with sprouting boar’s tusks and human ears, created to be tested on. The Nigerian multi mud creature is a spiky form of moving limbs, spines and spots with pursed lips, nearby the triffid-like copper green Vase 1 stands sturdily on four legs and across the stairwell the mohawked Punk Dog curls his toes and looks on through leaf encircled eyes. Orchard draws on the African myths of her childhood in Zimbabwe in works such as Creature from the Ghostlands, an ethereal cloud-like figure emblazoned with a metallic lustre glaze, remembering the copper mines of Zambia through its copper and manganese glow. As escapees from the lab, Orchard imagines her creatures building their own societies and environments around their otherness.

Elsewhere, inside the booth Beccy Tait’s looped video work Hypergogia enacts the sensory experiences of night terrors through a split screen of enveloping horrors. As a sufferer of night terrors, Tait’s year-long exploration of the sleep disorder has proven to be a cathartic artistic process. Viewed within the small dark-room beneath the stairs at Home, Tait wished to recreate the confines of her world of sleep for visitors. The images are paired with a ghostly soundtrack of thrums, taken from scientific recordings of planet vibrations in our solar system. In the videos Tait presents figures lost, blindfolded, drowning and decapitated. Hands grasp from unseen corners and a dreamscape of familiar themes make reference to a floating Ophelia, monsters in a wardrobe, fears glimpsed in a mirror, and the soft, golden figure of Tait in an Edwardian dress running in the night recalls a history of the Australian Gothic.

Through the exhibition, Home@735 threads together these liminal moments of flux to focus thought on the thresholds of experience.

- Susannah Smith

Congratulations to Yvette Coppersmith winner of the 2018 Archibald Prize with her work - Self-portrait, After George Lambert, 2018, oil on linen.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting one of Yvette’s portraits in our Invitational show opening on Wednesday the 11th of July. 

Yvette’s painting will be showing alongside works by artists including Vanessa Stockard, Adam Cullen, Deborah Kelly, Tony Garifalakis, Jason Phu, Chelsea Lehmann and UK painter Justin Mortimer.

Home is pleased to announce that Sydney artist Jason Phu will be exhibiting work in our Invitational show opening in July. Jason is one of a group of artists responding to a Sidney Nolan painting. 

Jason Phu works across a range of mediums from installation, painting and sculpture where he traces the connections between the tradition of Chinese brush and ink painting and contemporary practice. His work has been informed by several China based residencies at CAFA, Beijing; DAC Studios, Chongqing; and Organhaus, Chongqing which has enabled him to further investigate the tradition of calligraphy. 

Jason graduated with honours from COFA in 2011 and NSCAD, Nova Scotia. Recent solo exhibitions in Australia include Westspace, Melbourne; Nicholas Projects, Melbourne; CCAS Gorman Arts Centre, Canberra; and ALASKA PROJECTS, Sydney. 

He won the Sulman Prize in 2015 and in the same year received a Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship which allowed him to develop his practice between China and Australia.

We are thrilled to announce we will be exhibiting a pair of collage works by Sydney artist Deborah Kelly in our Invitational exhibition opening in early July. 

Recognised as one of Australia’s foremost political artists, Deborah Kelly has exhibited widely throughout Australia and internationally. Working in collage, portraiture and animation, Kelly questions and challenges global capital, public policy, religious authority, patriarchy and privilege. Throughout, her polemic is always nuanced and always approached with empathy, intellect and wit.

Her work has been shown at MOMA PS1 in NYC, the ICA in London and in the Biennales of Singapore, Venice, Thessaloniki, Tarra Warra and Sydney.

The monograph Deborah Kelly & was published by Artspace in 2013.

Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, QAGOMA, MCA, AGNSW, the State Library of Victoria, Museum Victoria, Artbank, and private collections in Australia, the US, China, Indonesia and Germany.

“…for the first time in my practice, with the collage works Junee Archival (Sausage Party Showdown) #1 and #2, I deal with images of emblematic artefacts and paintings by a named 20th century artist to construct new artworks. The works relate directly to the source material’s cultural weight and meaning and seek to expand upon it; to subvert it, to remix for reuse. 

The Junee Archival diptych is constructed on Nolan's commissioned endpapers for Elwyn Lynn's celebrated 1977 book, The Australian Landscape and its Artists. Notable in retrospect for its crushing preponderance of male artists and complete absence of Aboriginal artists, the books' endpapers strike me as exemplary of the Australian art history I inherited as a 1970s schoolgirl. Produced by a London-based artist performing outback-larrikin-in-exile for his largely European audience, the work Junee is the (parched) ground for what I hope is an ironic, camp, look back at and riposte to craven antipodean reliance on colonial, heteropatriarchal pedagogies and narrations of high culture…”

Home’s co-director Madeleine Preston is featured is the current issue of Art Collector.

Internationally renowned curator Mami Kataoka is a key figure in analysing socio-historical and generational trends, particularly in the context of Japanese and Asian art, and frequently writes and lectures on contemporary art in Asia. She is the Chief Curator at the 2018 Sydney Biennale.

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to interview Mami Kataoka. The interview is a component of our group curatorial experiment for the Contemporary Curating assignment at the UNSW Art & Design. The online interview relates to 'How digital media effects our engagement with the visual arts'. 

QUESTIONS:

1. Digital media plays an important role in the promotion of an exhibition. Could you briefly outline the ways that digital media may have affected your selection of artworks for the Biennale?

I agree that the digital media changed the way of promoting and perceiving an art exhibition, however, I am not sure how it affected my selection simply beyond the level of the use of internet. 

2. The square, scaled-down prism of Instagram has had a significant impact on the way the visual arts are presented. Does how an artwork looks on Instagram play a part in determining an artworks suitability for an exhibition?

Being "Instagram friendly" might be one of the points of consciousness, but again I don't think it would come any priority level of selecting the works or determining the details of installation. In an actual exhibition space, it is much more than square image. It has to be the experiences in the given space with all senses. Digital media cannot deliver the sense of scale, sound vibration nor scent experience.

3. Could you briefly describe some of the challenges in staging an exhibition like the Biennale over a number of venues?

It is a simple relationship between the physical space and the capacity or impossibility of one human being to be at multiple place at one time.

4. How important is critical reception to your practice? (reviews, online reviews, interviews, response to public programs)

Those are all important factors, but it is more important that I have my own sense of achievement as well as the satisfaction of artists.

5. In this age of marketing quotas, how does attendance to an exhibition impact on your curation?

Curating includes consideration to all those expectations.

6. Of the artworks you curated into this Biennale, which artist’s work surprised you most when you saw it in-situ?

During the preparation, curator imagine the outcome, so most of the things are rather deja-vu once it is realized.

However, the configuration of Carriageworks turned out to be really good in terms of the light and sound components which was a bit of gambling.

7. Has digital media changed the way you engage with visual arts?

Changing and development of media has been always a part of art history including photography and video. 

The way I see the work is not determined by the medium.

Many thanks to arts writer Sharne Woolf for her essay on our 'Colour & Form' exhibition. 

COLOUR AND FORM - HOME GALLERY, MARCH 2018

Sharne Wolff

On Wednesday 21st August 1968, Melbourne’s ‘The Age’ newspaper ran a small article tucked to one side of page two. Headlined, On Moon in 1969 ‘possible’. The brief snippet from Washington reported the growing probability of a manned Lunar landing by Apollo spacecraft the following year. The same day, splashed across the front page, an ostensibly more important domestic announcement heralded the opening of the new St Kilda Road premises of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV).[i]

Amidst much heady fanfare and the palpable optimism of the era, the inaugural exhibition named The Field welcomed crowds at the new NGV. The aptly titled display included works by forty young Australian artists – most of whom had been introduced to American ‘post-painterly abstraction’ by virtue of their overseas travels or via imported exhibitions. By means of The Field, this new generation of artists entered the mainstream with a selection of colour field and hard edge paintings, shaped canvases and sculptures.

Fifty years on The Field is still regarded by many as a ground-breaking show. Its lasting relevance is visible in Colour and Form – which forefronts the work of three of The Field’s original group of painters. Work by Michael Johnson, Sydney Ball and John Peart – the latter two artists having died in recent years– are accompanied by a larger party of next generation colourists namely, Ron Adams, Belle Blau, Angela Brennan, Celia Gullett, Saskia Leek, Sean Meilak, Jonny Niesche, Tomislav Nikolic, Madeleine Preston, Kate Rohde and Louise Tuckwell.

In the cosy confines of Home Gallery’s living room and hallways, Colour and Form’s intention mirrors that of The Field to, “make possible a considered judgement of the work of these artists seen in the company of their fellows and of stylistic principles they share”.[ii]. Curator Anthony Bautovich has juxtaposed the work of emerging artists with that of the three original artists, and grouped together unlikely old and new forms in shared spaces. Historical and mid-career painting and mixed-media works from Peart (1965) and Johnson (1987) respectively, are brought together with Ball’s duo of new-millennia screenprints from the 2003 Canto series (first developed in the mid-1960s), and over twenty recently-made paintings, sculptures and ceramic assemblages.

While five decades separate Colour and Form’s oldest and newest examples, the exhibition demonstrates the Australian artists ongoing regard for the international style originally evidenced in The Field. It modestly nods agreement with the proposition that art’s interest in unravelling the mysteries and potential of colour has never waned. At the same time, Colour and Form proposes contemporary means of exploiting and interpreting the genre.

Encouraging the idea of the movement’s continuum from its American beginnings Bautovich is interested in the parallels between Sydney Ball and American artist, Frank Stella. Favouring Stella’s reductionist style that represented a rejection of abstract expressionism – and drawn from the Canto series based on Ezra Pound’s epic series of poems of the same name, Ball’s Canto IX and Canto XXI are examples of this idea. While formally confined by the geometry of their respective circles, they shimmer with intense colour and a paradoxical sense of the shape’s symbolic infinity.

From the next generation of artists in Colour and Form, we can recognise homage to these pioneering artists being fuelled by the influence of contemporary culture. The transcendental effect of colour in Jonny Niesche’s immersive Personal Cosmos signals the work’s affinity with Mark Rothko’s painting of the 1940s and 50s. Rothko publicly insisted that he was attempting to find “a pictorial equivalent for man’s new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.”.[iii] On closer view – as Rothko himself preferred – the medium of Personal Cosmos is revealed as voile and acrylic mirror. This added dimension delivers a twist and endows the painting with savvy power to reflect the viewer in certain light, including when taking a selfie. Meanwhile Niesche’s zig zag adventures with Cadence Loop #10 (cyan to magenta) – constructed from steel and ‘flip flop’ auto paint that encourages angled viewing – suggest his ability to refresh and extend Rothko’s original concept as well as conserving it.

While it may seem obvious, it is worth noting that each of the artists in Colour and Form share a common and profound interest in colour and form, though each has their unique way exploring these elements in their art. Ranging from Adams’ pop-inspired painting and Preston’s politically-associated assemblages to Rohde’s exotic neo rococo sculptures, Colour and Form epitomises the expansion of the genre and the experimental attitude of the group as a whole.

Later this year The Field will be restaged in its entirety at the NGV. Though only a few will personally remember the heady optimism of Melbourne in 1968, it seems the possibilities for colour and form are increasingly timeless.

[i] The Age, 21 August 1968, 1–2, Melbourne, Google News Archive, 20 March 2018.

[ii] Finemore, Brian. and Stringer, John. The Field, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1969, 3.

[iii] Anfam, David, Ed. Abstract Expressionism. Royal Academy of Arts, 2016, 113.

Home will be exhibiting a work by Tony Garifalakis in our Invitational show opening in early July. Pictured is Untitled #14, from the Mob Rule (Family Series), 2014, Enamel on C type print.

This is one of six works from the collection of art consultant Kate Smith to feature in the exhibition alongside paintings by Sidney Nolan, Ricky Swallow and UK artist, Justin Mortimer.

“…Tony Garifalakis’ practice over the past two decades has constituted an examination of social relations and the semiotics of power. His work particularly engages the ways in which the meaning of signs, symbols and images might be ascribed, conveyed or transformed through culture, and how conventional notions of hierarchy and status might be undermined or subverted. Garifalakis interrogates social, political, artistic and religious systems of belief – as well as the institutions that uphold them – through a range of strategies that include amplification of the signifiers utilised by those institutions themselves; subversive juxtaposition of image and text; and the deployment of dark, incongruous humour. Previously, Garifalakis has utilised the imagery from various of his own subcultural interests to consider the ways in which such iconography infiltrates popular culture…”

Tony Garifalakis completed a Master of Fine Art (Painting) at RMIT University in 2000. Solo exhibitions include  Information Discharge Systems, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, 2018, Repertoires of Contention (with Joaquin Segura), curated by Ivan Muniz Reed, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne  in 2017, Bloodline, Sarah Scout Presents, Auckland Art Fair, New Zealand in 2016, Mob Rule, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2014; Angels of the bottomless pit, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2014; Warlords, Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide, 2014; Affirmations, Daine Singer, Melbourne, 2012; The Misery of Philosophy, Curro Y Poncho, Guadalajara, Mexico and The Philosophy of Misery, Yautepec Gallery, Mexico City, both 2011. 

His work has also been presented in a number of major curatorial projects and group exhibitions, including The Shape of Things to Come, Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne 2018, The Sunshine Suite, curated by Jon Campbell, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney 2017, Pleasure and Reality, National Gallery of Victoria, 2015; Neverwhere, Gaia Gallery, Istanbul, 2015: Dark Heart, the Adelaide Biennial of Australian art, 2014; Whisper in my Mask, TarraWarra Biennial, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 2014; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, 2013; Theatre of the world, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, 2012; Things Fall Apart, Artspace, Sydney and Negotiating this world: contemporary Australian art, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2012.

Three of my colleagues from the Contemporary Curating class at UNSW Art & Design, Astrid, Angie, Sophie and I will be conducting a curatorial experiment over the coming 2-3 weeks. 

We will be interviewing a number of patrons viewing the Sydney Biennale exhibition at the MCA this coming Monday and recording their responses to a series of questions regarding how technology/social media has changed the way they engage with visual art. These recordings will be uploaded to encourage a response from our online audience. 

We will also have a survey of the questions on our social media platforms we would love you all to take part in - this will provide a statistical component to our experiment.

We are looking forward to your involvement. 

Pictured is the shell work of artist Esme Timbery - part of the Sydney Biennale exhibition at the MCA.

“…Bidjigal elder Esme Timbery is recognised for her decorative shelled models and objects that range from depictions of Sydney attractions to small slippers, frames and boxes….with her sister, Rose Timbery, Esme learnt the skills for shellwork as a young girl, first collecting shells from local beaches on the NSW south coast, before creating her first brooches at the age of seven. Timbery and her sister began selling their shell works in the ‘50s, and Timbery’s pieces were first exhibited in a contemporary art context in 2000 as part of the exhibition ‘Djalarinji – Something that Belongs to Us’ at the Manly Regional Gallery and Museum. Since then, Timbery has been involved in several significant exhibitions and contemporary art projects, and was awarded the inaugural 2005 Parliament of NSW Indigenous Art Prize for two shell-worked depictions of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Many thanks to writer Vanessa Berry for her compelling piece 'Internal Logic' for the 'Colour & Form' exhibition. 

At the end of the hallway at the entrance to the gallery hangs a screenprint by Sydney Ball. Canto XXI is a radiant orange square, which frames a circle of a softer orange, which further frames a stripe of ultramarine. The colours are arresting, their incandescence constrained by the stillness of the precise, geometric forms. It is a distillation of planetary energy, perhaps, or a pattern underlying a mathematical process: one of the gifts of abstraction being the openness of interpretation it bestows on the viewer.

Ball's Cantos series, initially produced in New York in the 1960s, are landmark works of abstract painting. They were named after an epic poem by Ezra Pound which the poet worked on for more than fifty years. It is fitting for them to be a reference point for these works by Ball, for Ball's Cantos also set the trajectory of his life's work: his preoccupation with colour and form.

The two screenprints from the Cantos, produced by Ball in 2003, are something of a lynchpin for the Colour and Form exhibition. The exhibition combines works from Australian abstract artists of the 1960s - Sydney Ball, Michael Johnson, and John Peart - with contemporary artists working with abstraction in painting and sculpture. The three 1960s artists introduce a range of forms of abstraction, from the formal geometry of Ball's Cantos, to the textured and organic shapes and colours of John Peart's 1965 acrylic work Untitled #982, and the dynamism of Michael Johnson's Collins Street #4 and its dashes and drips of colour.

In counterpoint to the historical precedent of representational painting that preceded it, abstract art offers no "window on the world". It is an opaque viewing experience, an opportunity to look at the materiality of the artwork rather than through it. Nonetheless, abstraction suggests an internal logic: within the boundaries of the work viewers navigate form and colour in sensory and associative ways.

Jonny Niesche's Personal Cosmos builds on the immersive, floating effect of a colour field painting, using the reflective and shimmering surfaces of mirrors and voile. The viewer is reflected in the work, shadowed within the pink cosmos, visually becoming a part of it and moving within it. Niesche's sculptural work Cadence loop #10 shares this shimmering quality. The zigzag strip of steel has been painted an iridescent purple-blue which changes in hue as you move past it, and the light angles differently on its surface.

Other works invite a different method of navigation. Sean Meilak's sculpture series Arrangements, six collections of geometric and architectural shapes, plays with scale so the viewer, too, feels a telescopic shift in perspective. These could be models of ruins or monuments. Or they could be the elements of a visual alphabet, and each arrangement a phrase or a sentence: Meilak's process is to cast the elements individually, and to compose the arrangements during installation. Each arrangement has the sense of a light touch, of elements drawn together in the moment.

Intuition was also an important part of the process for Celia Gullett's painting Geometric Abstraction XXI. Gullett uses layers of oil paint to build up a luminous surface, inspired by medieval works on wood. Her use of colour is often intuitive, developing as the work progresses and one colour leads to another. Here she uses a geometric motif of simple, slightly-overlapping shapes. At the overlapping edges the colours change, and the forms seem to embody the shape of a quiet thought. 

Abstract forms heighten contemplation, and can suggest a way of thinking as much as a discrete thought. This way of thinking can be playful and indeterminate. In Tomislav Nikolic's I don't intend to understand, fields of delicate pastel tones resolve into lines of darker colour within the bright blue of the painted frame. This balance of nebulousness and resolution hints at a thought-state where ideas float, sometimes coalescing, other times drifting. This thought-state contrasts with those suggested by more defined geometry, such as Belle Blau's Whole Unto Itself, where strong lines create clear boundaries within the space of the canvas, as they open it up into an illusory depth.  

Another work of tight geometric composition is Ron Adams' Lucky Strike for Nicola. Adams' work takes shape from influences and relationships: in this case the box of matches that is emblematic of his friendship with the artist Nicola Smith. The rows of pale stripes with black tips are interrupted by one varying segment of red, the one unspent match. The red glows with potential, tempting the eye in the same way one's fingers would reach for the last remaining good match in the box.

The influences that shape abstract work often remain only as the lightness of resonances, but can provide a rewarding insight into the works' intentions. In Smoker Series - After Guston, Madeleine Preston uses shapes from, and the lung-like pink and black colour palette, of Phillip Guston's Nixon-era paintings. This establishes a visual connection between two eras of American politics: the Watergate crisis of the 1970s, and the contemporary American political situation of the Trump administration.

The resin sculptures of Kate Rohde also engage with the idea of corruption, taking influence from Adolf Loos' argument, in the 1913 essay "Ornament and Crime", that excess in design can have a corruptive influence on society. Rohde's florid bowls and vases have a gleaming, scampering vitality. Each vessel seems to burst forth with ornamentation, a challenge to the neat boundaries of the object.  

For all their variations in style, artists who work with abstraction use colour and form to play on our associations, transposing our thoughts and perceptions. Sometimes this is an immersive and quiet experience, and other times an exuberant one, and often our engagement is one of transcendence. The works in Colour and Form carry us into their internal worlds, as they are drawn into connection, across the decades.

I'm pleased to announce that Home will be exhibiting work by Vanessa Stockard in our 2018 Invitational exhibition opening in June. 

For all their variations in style, artists who work with abstraction use colour and form to play on our associations, transposing our thoughts and perceptions. Sometimes this is an immersive and quiet experience, and other times an exuberant one, and often our engagement is one of transcendence. The works in Colour and Form carry us into their internal worlds, as they are drawn into connection, across the decades. 

“…twenty years of introspection and experimentation, ranging over a number of media, have forged Vanessa’s style and craft, enabling her to reveal complex misdemeanours, while simultaneously demanding the viewer’s self-reflection. She deals with isolation and sadness with intimate care and attention…the deceptive everyday nature of her subject matter belies hidden depths of relationship, feeling and emotion. One could describe her process as absence of thought, a freedom of construct, not unlike the stream of consciousness associated with authors such as Hemmingway and Thomas Wolfe…these works are more like innocent and delicate poems, whispering untold truths with an economy of words…”  

Vanessa’s work will be exhibited in our upstairs gallery alongside works by Justin Mortimer, Yvette Coppersmith, Ricky Swallow, Chelsea Lehmann, Nuan Ho, Tony Garifalakis and Natasha Walsh.

Big thanks to Belle Magazine for including the wonderful Angela Brennan sculptural works from our ‘Colour & Form’ show in their current issue.

Angela Brennan is represented by Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney.

I hope you can join us tonight for Home’s ‘Colour & Form’ exhibition opening. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to curate artworks by 14 exceptional artists.

‘Colour & Form’ includes artworks by Sydney Ball, John Peart and Michael Johnson – three of the artists involved in the seminal 1968 ‘The Field’ exhibition at the NGV – showing alongside some of Australia’s finest contemporary practitioners of non-objective and hard edge abstraction in two and three-dimensional forms.

Thanks to all the artists and galleries involved with in the show with a special thanks to Kate Smith for loaning us the wonderful Tomislav Nikolic work, Darren Knight for the painting by New Zealand artist Saskia Leek and Damien Minton and Watters Gallery for loaning us an exceptional John Peart painting from 1965.

Come along for opening drinks from 6-8pm – 735 Bourke Street in Redfern – kick off your Art Month night at Home!

Cheers, Anthony

One of six stunning sculptural installations by Melbourne artist Sean Meilak opening tomorrow night in Home’s ‘Colour & Form’ exhibition. Join us for drinks from 6-8pm for the Redfern/Chippendale precinct night for Art Month. 

“… Sean is interested in the psychology of space and his work references the architecture of ancient Rome, film set design as well as modern and postmodern art and design movements. He is particularly influenced by Surrealism, Italian furniture design and the theatrical environments created by filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Reiner Werner Fassbinder…”

Pictured is Arrangement 1, 2018, plaster and plied pigment.

Sean Meilak is represented by Niagara Galleries.

Sydney based artist Celia Gullett will be exhibiting in Home’s ‘Colour & Form’ show. Join us for drinks on Thursday from 6-8pm in Art Month - 735 Bourke Street Redfern. 

“…Celia’s work reflects an ongoing interest in surface; stripping the colour to its purest state. In much the same way that the Dutch Masters worked, she builds up the surface of the painting through methodical layering, creating a luminosity from below the surface. She partners colours, creating a dialogue between the physical and metaphysical properties of colour - one hue calling for the presence of another to complete the composition…”

Pictured is Geometric Abstraction XXI, 2017, oil on panel.

One of two sculptural ceramic pieces by Melbourne based artist Angela Brennan showing in Home’s ‘Colour & Form’ opening this Thursday from 6-8pm.

Angela Brennan’s practice incorporates a range of media including painting, drawing and ceramics. She incorporates both abstraction and figuration in her work, and has a varied approach to subject matter, informed by classical and contemporary sources.

Angela Brennan was commissioned to exhibit a solo study in the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s major 2016 exhibition Painting. More Painting. In 2017 her work has been included in Shut up and Paint at the National Gallery of Victoria, and the National Gallery of Australia’s touring exhibition Abstraction: celebrating Australian women abstract artists. She has been awarded numerous overseas residencies, most recently the Australia Council studio at the British School of Rome and Artist in Residence at The University of Sydney Archaeological Excavations of the Paphos Theatre Site, Cyprus. 

Pictured is Echo, 2014, earthenware - Image courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney.

Light activates Personal cosmos, Voile and acrylic mirror - one of two works by Jonny Niesche showing in ‘Colour & Form’. 

“…favouring the openness, clarity and seduction of post painterly abstraction Niesche’s works combine the traditions of sculpture, digital printing and installation to recast our understanding of the effects of surface, color and architectural space. Using complex steel fabrication, mirrors and digital printing processes on transparent fabric, Niesche aims to go beyond associative feelings about color and instead bring forth associations from every type of experience: sexual, psychological, religious, metaphysical, architectural, material or superficial…”

Join us for opening drinks on Thursday from 6-8pm for the Redfern/Chippendale precinct night in Art Month.  

Jonny Niesche is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery.

We are thrilled to be exhibiting new work by ceramic artist Jenny Orchard in our 2018 program. Jenny will be part of our May exhibition along with Anthony Cahill, Nancy Constandelia, Janet Haslett and UNSW Art & Design graduate Beccy Tait. 

Expressing the connected nature of all life and matter is at the core of Jenny Orchard’s art practice. Working with painting, collage and primarily ceramics, her work forms part of a narrative about a fictitious and parallel world in a state of change. Her practice references places she has lived and lives, as well as her fascination with European tradition, African and Aboriginal mythologies, Australian contemporary culture and the environment. Jenny’s ceramic ‘creatures’ and vases are formed using earthenware clay and an array of vibrantly coloured glazes, each possessing a unique personality and exhibiting a complete defiance of convention. This intermix of elements combined with the decorative tradition of clay expresses her interest in the interconnectedness of life, culture and form. “…each image or ceramic forms a story on its own, but the narrative running through all of them is that of accelerated change, chance encounters and the suggestion of parallel realities…” 

Born in Turkey, Jenny grew up in Zimbabwe and immigrated to Australia in 1976.  She studied at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney, receiving her Bachelor of Arts in 1980.  Jenny has exhibited widely in Australia and Internationally. She has been awarded many prizes including the 2017 University of Queensland’s National Self-Portrait Prize and the 2017 Biennial Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Art Award. Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Queensland Art Gallery, Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. 

Two of the wonderful artworks in our ‘Colour & Form’ exhibition - Tomislav Nikolic, I don’t intend to understand, 2015, acrylic, marble dust, 13.5ct white gold leaf on linen and wood.

This painting exhibited with courtesy of art consultant Kate Smith. 

Tomislav Nikolic is represented by Fox Jensen Gallery. 

Foreground: Angela Brennan, Potami, 2014, earthenware.

Angela Brennan is represented by Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney.  

Join us for opening drinks from 6-8pm on Thursday the 1st of March in Art Month.

Melbourne artist Sean Meilak will be exhibiting a sculptural installation in our ‘Colour & Form’ show opening on the 1st of March. Join us for drinks from 6-8pm on the Redfern/Chippendale precinct night in Art Month. 

Check out an excellent account of Sean’s work and practice in current instalment of The Design Files. 

Pictured is Marble Park, 2016, plaster, marble, steel, MDF, acrylic paint, enamel, UniBond adhesive, PVA.

Sean Meilak is represented by Niagara Gallery, Melbourne.

Currently completing her Master of Fine Arts at the National Art School, artist Belle Blau will be exhibiting work in our ‘Colour & Form’ show opening on Thursday the 1st of March. 

“…Belle Blau is an interdisciplinary artist based in Sydney, Australia. Her work begins in writing; using poetics as the starting point for the creation of both music and painting. In exploring the relationship between language and image, her words act as source material to generate new avenues of abstraction. By allowing subjectivity to infiltrate the self-referential purity of formalism, she subverts the traditional intentions of the genre: placing emphasis on the value of emotional experience over objectivity. Blau hijacks and reinvents the possibilities of reductionism, enacting a feminist expansion of the traditionally male movement. 

Blau extends the boundaries of abstraction by employing its potential to “make physical” otherwise enigmatic aspects of human experience. What results is a visual conversation; paintings that stand alone yet speak to each other, of written complexities grasped through their distillation into image…”

Pictured is Whole Unto Itself, 2017, acrylic on canvas

Our ‘Colour & Form’ show will feature works by three artists - Sydney Ball, John Peart and Michael Johnson - who exhibited in the seminal ‘The Field’ exhibition at the new NGV in 1968.

“…the work of forty young emerging artists who had turned away from figurative art to the 20th century trends of American abstraction: most notably colourfield, hard-edge minimalism and op art…”

Join us for drinks from 6-8pm on Thursday the 1st of March for the Redfern/Chippendale precinct night in Art Month. 

Pictured is Michael Johnson, Collins Street #4, 1987, mixed media on paper.

“…Michael Johnson’s work is marked by a metaphysical orchestration of colour and a muscularity of presence. His paintings are romantic in essence; in their application, they are raw and intuitive, deeply connected to his intense and complex relationships with nature, natural process and mood…”

Michael Johnson has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, and was included in the seminal exhibitions, ‘The Field’, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (1968); the UNESCO Biennale, France (1968); the São Paulo Bienal, Brazil (1969); and The Australian Biennale, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (1988). His works are held in all major Australian state and regional collections, New Zealand’s Chartwell Collection, and in numerous corporate and private collections in Australia and abroad. Beagle Press published a substantial monograph on Michael Johnson’s work in 2004.

We are thrilled to be exhibiting two sculptural works by Angela Brennan in our ‘Colour & Form’ exhibition opening on Thursday 1st of March.

Based in Melbourne, Angela Brennan’s practice incorporates a range of media including painting, drawing and ceramics. She incorporates both abstraction and figuration in her work, and has a varied approach to subject matter, informed by classical and contemporary sources.

Angela Brennan was commissioned to exhibit a solo study in the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s major 2016 exhibition Painting. More Painting. In 2017 her work has been included in Shut up and Paint at the National Gallery of Victoria, and the National Gallery of Australia’s touring exhibition Abstraction: celebrating Australian women abstract artists. She has been awarded numerous overseas residencies, most recently the Australia Council studio at the British School of Rome and Artist in Residence at The University of Sydney Archaeological Excavations of the Paphos Theatre Site, Cyprus. Her work is widely represented in major public and private collections in Australia and overseas.

Angela Brennan graduated in Fine Art, painting, at RMIT University in 1981. In 1992 she received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne, majoring in Philosophy. She is presently completing a PhD at MADA, Monash University.

Angela Brennan is represented by Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney.

Madeleine and I visited Artspace yesterday to see Helen Johnson’s ‘Warm Ties’, one of the most compelling painting exhibitions shown in Sydney for quite a while. 

Johnson weaves and overlays historical and contemporary signifiers creating points of tension and reflection through these paintings. The complex colonial relationship between Australia and Britain is dealt with, using large scale paintings that have become purposefully disassembled installations throughout the space. 

Premiering at the ICA in London, Johnson was mindful of the gallery’s location, close to the seat of power that served as the point of Australia’s colonisation.

“I was thinking about its context here, in such close proximity to power in the UK…it provided an opportunity to make work about the power structures the UK sent out to Australia when it was colonised…the chasm between the “state-sanctioned account of colonisation that’s cleaned up and idealised”…and the “violent, brutal process” it conceals, delivers the underlying narrative of Warm Ties.

Helen Johnson artist statement:

“..painting serves as the primary ground of my practice, though the approaches I take seek an understanding of painting as a loaded medium operating on new terms in a post-medium condition. I have an interest in how painting might be used as a means of addressing and reflecting on aspects of cultural identity in an open way, which I might position against a declarative way. Painting is an interesting vehicle for me because it is loaded, neurotic, problematised, a market force, scattered, essentialised and recomplexified, loathed, able to operate simultaneously within and beyond itself, able to be beautiful and horrible at the same time. My approach to painting divagates from a grounding in figuration in search of a space of pluralism and openness, where the privilege of the subject becomes slippery. A gesture, alive in one painting, might be deadened through mechanised replication in the next. Figures begin to merge with their backgrounds. Construct and intuition ask questions of one another. The space of painting is for me a space where seemingly incontrovertible things are constantly being reconsidered, put into new relations with other things, where slippage is always present. In this regard it is a useful space for thought…” * * this artist statement was taken from the Sutton Gallery website.

Home@735 Gallery co-director Madeleine Preston recently returned to Sydney after a three month residency at the Cite. One of Madeleine's favourite paintings from her Paris trip was – Philip Guston’s In Bed,1971, oil on canvas on show at the Pompidou Centre.

Philip Guston (1913-1980) was born Philip Goldstein, in Montreal, Canada. He was the youngest of seven children born to a Jewish couple who had come to America after fleeing the pogroms in Russia. America seemed to offer shelter from persecution, yet the family found life difficult in their new country. Guston's father had been a saloon keeper, but he struggled to find work. In 1919 the family moved to LA with hopes of better fortunes, but they encountered more hardship and were also confronted with the racism that surrounded the rise of the Klu Klux Klan during that period. Four years later, his father committed suicide by hanging himself. Guston discovered the body; an experience which profoundly marked him. As he moved into adolescence, he retreated in the fantasy world of comics, and started to become interested in drawing. His mother enroled him in a correspondence course at the Cleveland School of Cartooning, beginning his training as an artist.

Although the abstract painting which launched his career in the 50s continues to be highly respected, Guston remains best known for the figurative pictures he made. By the mid 1960s Guston was becoming uneasy with the meditative isolation that abstract painting required, and the political turmoil in the U.S. encouraged his return to figuration. His work eventually developed into the highly original cartoon-styled realism for which he is best known. These works are populated by hooded figures, reminiscent of the Klu Klux Klan. They are not meant to directly reference racism but rather to take a stand against war, injustice, and the hypocrisy Guston witnessed in American politics. During the years before his death, Guston continued to hone this imagery, creating increasingly enigmatic compositions reminiscent of still lives or spare landscapes, with clusters of figures, heavy boots and tools, and cycloptic heads.

Canto XXI, 2003 is one of two screen prints by Sydney Ball we will be exhibiting in our ‘Colour & Form’ show opening on March the 1st. 

Painter, printmaker and sculptor Sydney Ball (1933-2017) was a pioneer of post-painterly abstraction in Australia. Born in Adelaide, Ball worked as a draughtsman before taking up art studies in the late 1950’s. His early influences were challenged when in 1963 he moved to New York and encountered the work of abstract expressionists including Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell.

Through the influence of these artists, Ball developed his own sophisticated language of colour-based abstraction. This was first presented in Ball’s ‘Cantos’ series, works that were initially exhibited after his return to Australia in 1965. With their bold structured forms of unmodulating colour and precise surfaces, the ‘Cantos’ signalled the domination of colour expression and formed a new direction in abstract painting in Australia, culminating in ‘The Field’ exhibition at the NGV in 1968.

Canto XXI, 2003 is from a suite of screenprints that revisit Ball’s ongoing series of ‘Cantos’ paintings, drawings and prints, which he first developed in the mid-1960’s while living and working in New York between 1963 and 1967.

The title Cantos is drawn from a cycle of poems by Ezra Pound.

Home@735 Gallery will be exhibiting a work by Louise Tuckwell in our ‘Colour & Form’ show opening on March the 1st.

“…Tuckwell’s work searches for a system of balance and harmony – drawing on the influential algebraic and geometric work of Ancient Greek mathematician, Euclid. His systems of logic, opposing axioms and geometry pervade Tuckwell’s intuitive compositions. Suggestion, surprise and a subtle sense of humour are also important elements for Tuckwell. Contrastive diagonals, obtuse colour juxtapositions and subtle perspectival shifts demonstrate a bold and playfully abstract architectural language…”

Louise Tuckwell originally studied at the Julian Ashton Art School and later graduated from the National Art School. While painting is her primary practice she is also well known for textiles works. A series of her tapestries recently toured Australia as part of the 2nd Tamworth Textile Triennial. Tuckwell has been exhibiting her work for over 30 years and has previously shown with Tim Olsen Gallery, Utopia Gallery and Damien Minton Gallery.

Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Artbank, City of Sydney, New England Regional Art Museum, Tamworth Art Gallery, Bathurst Regional Gallery, Allens Linklaters and the Justin House Museum.

Pictured is Is It There, 2017, acrylic on board. 

Louise Tuckwell is represented by Gallery 9, Sydney.

Home@735 Gallery is pleased to announce we will be exhibiting work by Sydney artist Jonny Niesche in our ‘Colour & Form’ show in Art Month opening on Thursday March the 1st.

“…favouring the openness, clarity and seduction of post painterly abstraction Niesche’s works combine the traditions of sculpture, digital printing and installation to recast our understanding of the effects of surface, color and architectural space. Using complex steel fabrication, mirrors and digital printing processes on transparent fabric, Niesche aims to go beyond associative feelings about color and instead bring forth associations from every type of experience: sexual, psychological, religious, metaphysical, architectural, material or superficial…”

Jonny Niesche completed his MFA at Sydney College of the Arts (2013) under Mikala Dwyer, and under Heimo Zobernig at Academy Fine Arts in Vienna. In 2015 he was awarded the Fauvette Loureiro Travelling Scholarship. Recent group exhibitions include Matter matters, at Massimo Carassi, Milan, Italy, March, 2017 ; Superposition of three types, Artspace, Sydney, 2017; Shut up and Paint, National Gallery of Victoria, 2016; Painting. More Painting, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2106; The Kaleidoscopic Turn, National Gallery of Victoria 2015;  

His recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include: Love-light at Sarah Cottier Gallery this coming April, Zeller van Almsick in Vienna, Austria in June; Peter von Kant in London in September, Cosmos cosmetics, Minerva, 2016; New Jörg, New Jörg, New Jörg Kunstverein, Vienna Austria, 2016;  

His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, MONA, Artbank, and private collections in USA, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Pictured is 'Love-light' installation view at Sarah Cottier Gallery April, 2017. Photo Ashley Barber.

Jonny Niesche is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery.

New to Home’s stockroom, this limited edition screenprint - Bongos, 1999 by Adam Cullen. 

Adam Cullen (1965 – 2012) was an Australian artist whose style at times had been labelled by some art critics as simplistic, crude, adolescent or puerile. Conversely, Cullen is regarded as one of Australia's most collectible contemporary artists.

He graduated from the City Art Institute with a Diploma of Professional Art in 1987 and received a Master of Fine Arts from the UNSW in 1999. He exhibited widely across Australia and Internationally. In 2002 he represented Australia at the 25th Sao Paulo Art Biennial.

Cullen used a highly personal visual language to address a broad range of topics including crime, masculinity and cowboy culture. He merged high and low cultural influences in his work, which are defined by their iridescent colours and bold gestural marks. His artworks combine irreverent humour with an astute sensitivity to society. He often employed the image of infamous and iconic Australian bushranger Ned Kelly in his artwork. He also portrayed the killers of Anita Cobby and illustrated the Chopper’ Read’s fairy tale book, Hooky the Cripple.

He spent the last three years of his life with writer Erik Jensen working on a biography. Jensen became witness to the decline and death of Adam Cullen. The book that eventuated, Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen was eventually published by Black Inc. The book is an intelligent and visceral memoir of the disintegration of Cullen’s life, shining a light on the mythology the artist had created around his artistic persona.

Adam Cullen won the Archibald Portrait Prize in 2000 with his portrait of actor David Wenham. He was a finalist in the Archibald in 1997, 1999, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2011 & 2012, a finalist in the Moran Prize in 2000 & 2001 and won the Mosman Art Prize in 2005.

Home@735 Gallery’s ‘Invitational’ exhibition opening on Wednesday the 20th of June will feature a number of artworks from the collection of art consultant Kate Smith Many thanks to Kate for loaning us paintings by artists including Sidney Nolan, Ricky Swallow, Tony Garafalakis and UK artist Justin Mortimer. Pictured is Donor VI, 2014, oil on canvas by Justin Mortimer.

“…Justin Mortimer (b.1970) is a British artist whose paintings consistently invite us to question the relationship between subject matter and content, beauty and horror, and between figuration and abstraction. While the imagery is almost exclusively pitiless, the texturing of the paint, the play between light and shade and the passages that lead from photo-realist definition to near-abstract formlessness are so sensitively handled as to make the work at least partially redemptive as well as to indicate a key philosophical dimension: the oblique relationship between evidence and interpretation…Mortimer’s paintings are not reportage or documentation, they are far too allusive and de-specified for that. Instead they represent a powerful and poetic visualisation of contemporary life, in all its grim and magical reality…” - Ben Tufnell

 Justin Mortimer graduated from the Slade School of Art in 1992 and lives and works in London. He has won several prestigious awards including the EAST Award (2004), NatWest Art Prize (1996) and the BP National Portrait Award (1991). Recent solo exhibitions include Haunch of Venison, London (2012), Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2011) and Master Piper, London (2010). Recent group exhibitions include How to Tell the Future from the Past, Haunch of Venison, New York (2013), Nightfall, MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Arts, Debrecen, Hungary (2012), MAC Birmingham (2011) and the 2011 Prague Biennial. His work is held in private and public collections including the National Portrait Gallery, London, the National Portrait Gallery, Canada, Royal Society for the Arts, Bank of America, NatWest Bank and the Flash Art Museum of Contemporary Art in Trevi, Italy.

This text is reproduced with kind permission from Parafin Gallery, London. 

Home@735 Gallery is pleased to announce we will be exhibiting a work by John Peart in our ‘Colour & Form’ show opening on the 1st of March 2018. Many thanks to Damien Minton and Watters Gallery for allowing us to exhibit this work - untitled #982, 1965, acrylic, felt tip on paper, 30x40cm.

John Peart (1946 – 2013) was an abstract artist with a career spanning more than 45 years. Peart was recognised as a leading non-figurative artist within Australia and has been included in numerous definitive exhibitions. 

John Peart only ever planned to be an artist. Born in Brisbane, he moved to Sydney in 1962, finding work with Barry Stern Galleries and a friend in Frank Watters. Two years later, Watters and Geoffrey Legge opened their own gallery. Peart had his first exhibition at Watters Gallery as a painter in a group show, aged 19.

Peart had a long and distinguished career, first coming to national prominence through the seminal The Field exhibition in 1968. Featuring artworks of Colour field expressionism movement, the exhibition was held at the new National Gallery of Victoria. John Peart was awarded four major art prizes during that year.

In the 1980's, Peart moved to the Wedderburn artist community. Situated on a 25 acre property south of Sydney, the informal group included artists Elisabeth Cummings, Roy Jackson, Suzanne Archer, David Fairborn and David Hawkes. Wedderburn advanced the shift towards a specifically Australian style of art – Peart later said “I realised that painting was not developing along a linear path dictated entirely by New York, then I got busy rediscovering Australia”.

John Peart’s work is held in the Australian National Gallery, all State Galleries and numerous other collections. He won the Wynne Prize in 1997, the Sulman Prize in 2000, and was a finalist in the Archibald Portrait Prize in 1998. A survey exhibition of his work toured Australia during 2004-06.

Home@735 co-director Madeleine Preston has been absorbed in some amazing art while on her residency at the Cité. I will be featuring some of the highlights of Madeleine’s time in Paris over the coming weeks. Pictured is The Yellow Scale, 1907, oil on canvas by Frantisek Kupka - Pompidou Centre, Paris. 

Born in Bohemia in 1871, František Kupka first studied at the School of Fine Arts in Prague. This was followed by a period in fin-de-siècle Vienna, at that time the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the vibrant setting for thinkers and artists such as Sigmund Freud and Gustav Klimt. Kupka’s early spiritual interests soon led him to become interested in Symbolism, a style that focused on the quest for universal truth, the use of metaphor to express ideals, and a mood of introspection. The artist’s profound interest in the metaphysical and his fidelity to his origins would be evident throughout his career. The modern spirit of Paris encouraged Kupka to move there in 1896, and he remained there until his death in 1957.

An artist of his time but one difficult to categorise, in the French capital Kupka became acquainted with the artistic movements that arose during the first half of the 20th century. He established links with them but still maintained his own personal direction. Kupka was never comfortable with the limits imposed by a particular movement, and as a result his painting does not fit within the traditional account of the rise of the early avant-garde movements. Instead, it invites the viewer to adopt new perspectives on the birth and evolution of modern art.

For some time Kupka’s independent artistic nature allied itself with the Puteaux group of artists, alongside the Duchamp-Villon brothers, and with the Section d’Or, who were close to what Guillaume Apollinaire termed Orphic Cubism (a poetic, colourful variant of Cubism). These artists were also interested in the existence of a fourth dimension in the sense of mathematical proportions, movement and spiritualism. Within this context, his investigations towards a distinctive type of abstraction that he would go on to develop in two principal directions, evident from that point onwards in his work.

I'm pleased to let you know that Sydney artist Ron Adams will be exhibiting a work in our ‘Colour & Form’ Show opening on Thursday March the 1st 2018. 

“Psychological  animated geometric abstraction.” 

For Ron Adams, form comes through the careful interplay of colour, geometry and text. He constructs common universal symbols with a positive chromatic intensity. His works gesture towards the act of painting as well as the influences of modernism, formalism and pop art, but always with irony and good humour. His small but perfectly formed acrylic geometrical paintings use a strict and controlled compositional methodology with brightly hued, richly contrasting colours and shapes. 

Ron Adams has exhibited widely in Australia at artist run, commercial and regional galleries, including C3 Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne, UTS Gallery, Dubbo Regional, Blacktown Arts Centre, Rubyayre, Blaugrau, Firstdraft Gallery, Peloton, Kaliman Gallery, Sherman Galleries, James Dorahy Project Space, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre, University of Southern Queensland and the Museum of Contemporary Art. 

Adams has produced commissioned artworks for Tiger Beer, the English pop band Autoheart, and the Barangaroo offices of Roche Pharmaceuticals. 

Ron Adams is represented by Galerie pompom, Sydney.

Home@735 is pleased to announce we will be exhibiting a series of resin based sculptural works by Melbourne artist Kate Rohde in our ‘Colour & Form’ Show opening in March 2018. 

“…the Ornament Crimes series of vessels were made as a tongue in cheek response to the famous 1913 essay ‘Ornament and Crime’ by Adolf Loos, and the idea of overtly decorative design as something evil with the ability to corrupt society. The overtly decorative forms are a celebration of excessive sculptural forms, inspired by the spectacularly detailed Baroque and Rococo age which attempt to convey a playful and contemporary rendering of the traditional decorative arts of these eras. Using mainly resin and non-traditional craft materials, I create a range of zoomorphic sculptures, jewellery and decorative art objects…”

Home@735 Gallery is pleased to announce that will be exhibiting a work by Tomislav Nikolic in our ‘Colour & Form’ exhibition opening during Art Month in March 2018. Many thanks to art consultant and collector Kate Smith for loaning us this wonderful work for the show. Tomislav Nikolic is currently exhibiting a new body of paintings titled ‘Vestiges of Now’ at Xavier Fiol Projects in Madrid. Pictured is vestige of now: 2, 2015, acrylic, marble dust, 23.75 Platinum gold leaf, glass on linen, plaster gesso and wood.

Home@735 Gallery is pleased to announce that we will be exhibiting a work by Sydney artist Celia Gullett in our ‘Colour & Form’ show in March 2018.

Celia graduated from Sydney’s COFA with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in 1984. She has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at Tim Olsen Gallery, Nanda\Hobbs Contemporary and Hill Smith Gallery in Adelaide. She has been selected as a finalist in leading Australian art prizes including Mosman Art Prize, Fleurieu Water Prize and the Paddington Art Prize.

“…Celia builds up the surface of the painting through methodical layering, creating a luminosity from below the surface. Her work reflects an ongoing interest in surface; stripping the colour to its purest state. In much the same way that the Dutch Masters worked, she builds up the surface of the painting through methodical layering, creating a luminosity from below the surface. She partners colours, creating a dialogue between the physical and metaphysical properties of colour – one hue calling for the presence of another to complete the composition…”

The catalogue for the Monumentalism exhibition I curated at Kudos Gallery last year has arrived. If you are interested in receiving a copy, please get in touch via the contact page. 

I'm thrilled to let you know that we will be exhibiting a work by the late and great Sydney Ball in our 'Colour & Form' exhibition opening in March 2018.

Painter, printmaker and sculptor Sydney Ball (1933-2017) was a pioneer of post-painterly abstraction in Australia. Born in Adelaide, Ball worked as a draughtsman before taking up art studies in the late 1950’s. His early influences were challenged when in 1963 he moved to New York and encountered the work of abstract expressionists including Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell.

Through the influence of these artists, Ball developed his own sophisticated language of colour-based abstraction. This was first presented in Ball’s 'Cantos' series, works that were initially exhibited after his return to Australia in 1965. With their bold structured forms of unmodulating colour and precise surfaces, the 'Cantos' signaled the domination of colour expression and formed a new direction in abstract painting in Australia, culminating in 'The Field' exhibition at the NGV in 1968.

Home@735 Gallery will be exhibiting Sydney Ball’s Canto IX, 2003, screenprint in our “Colour & Form’ show in March 2018. This work - from a suite of screenprints - revisits Ball’s ongoing series of ‘Cantos’ paintings, drawings and prints, which he first developed in the mid-1960’s while living and working in New York between 1963 and 1967.

The title Cantos is drawn from a cycle of poems by Ezra Pound.

“For me, the holy trinity of colour painting is colour, space and light.” Sydney Ball, 2012. 

I'm pleased to announce that Auckland based artist Saskia Leek will be exhibiting a work in our ‘Colour & Form’ show opening in March 2018 during Art Month. Pictured is Untitled 2016, oil and gesso on aluminium board.

“…her sourcing of subject matter from amateur found art works and unfashionable outdated second-hand prints creates a sense of both kitsch sentimentality and nostalgic melancholy…”

Saskia Leek is represented by Darren Knight Gallery

Home@735 Gallery is pleased to announce that Melbourne artist Sean Meilak will be exhibiting in our ‘Colour & Form’ show during Art Month - opening in March 2018.

“… Sean is interested in the psychology of space and his work references the architecture of ancient Rome, film set design as well as modern and postmodern art and design movements. He is particularly influenced by Surrealism, Italian furniture design and the theatrical environments created by filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Reiner Werner Fassbinder…”

Pictured is Study for a metaphysical garden, 2017 (detail). 

Sean Meilak is represented by Niagara Galleries.

Home@735 Gallery is delighted to announce we will be exhibiting a suite of paintings by Tonee Messiah in our last show for 2017 opening on Wednesday September the 20th from 6-8pm. 

Tonee Messiah builds her painted surfaces with various hard and soft forms that overlap and intersect in an archaeological drift. The effect is one of movement and agitation, closure and expansion, drawing the viewer towards the inner sub-structure of the painting. Eschewing fixed references, Messiah explores complex psychological experiences the cannot be easily defined. She considers painting like another form of thinking, and as her surfaces build, so does her response to the world around her. 

Messiah was born in Israel in 1983 and moved back and forth between Australia and Israel several times during her childhood before settling in Sydney where she still lives and works. She graduated from Sydney College of the Arts with Honours in 2004. Messiah is represented in the collections of Monash University Museum of Art, Artbank, Allens Linklaters, Barker College and Campbelltown Hospital.

Pictured is Data Compatibility, 2017, oil on canvas.

Tonnee Messiah is represented by Gallery 9, Sydney.

I recently purchased this print of a Sidney Nolan painting from the second Burke & Wills series created in 1961-62. 

"I doubt that I will ever forget my emotions when first flying over Central Australia and realizing how much we painters and poets owe to our predecessors the explorers, with their frail bodies and superb will-power.” - Sidney Nolan 1967

The ill-fated expedition of the Irish explorers Burke and Wills, who set out from Melbourne for the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1860, first interested Sidney Nolan during the late 1940’s. What continued to fascinate Nolan about Burke and Wills was their resilience in the face of adversity; their experience highlighted a fragile grip on reality. Nolan’s personal experiences of the land were closely linked to the development of mythology in his work.

Home@735 Gallery is pleased to announce that Melbourne artist Irene Hanenbergh will be exhibiting a suite of painting in our last show for 2017 opening on Wednesday the 20th of September. 

Irene Hanenbergh deals with concerns of disciplined immaterial sensibilities within (marginalized) Romantic, Visionary and Fantastic art practices. She uses various media including drawing, painting, sculpture and printmaking. 

Hanenbergh completed a Master of Fine Arts by Research at the Victorian College of the Arts (The University of Melbourne) in 2010. She holds as well a BFA (Hons) in Painting and Sculpture from The Academy of Fine Arts Minerva (1988, The Netherlands), a BFA (Hons) in Printmaking, from The Athens School of Fine Arts (1995, Greece) followed by 2 year Postgraduate Research at the same academy. Additionally she completed a Post Graduate Program at The Royal College of Art (1992, London). Intermittently over the last 25 years, she has spent considerable time on artist residencies & for the purpose of exhibitions, in various locations across Europe, Asia (Japan and Thailand) and the USA (NYC). 

She has held solo exhibitions in Australia and internationally; amongst other Libertine, Celestine, at Neon Parc, House of Dandelion & Lohr (outperformance) at Hugo Michel Gallery, Adelaide; Argyle Dreaming (1863), a Black art project in Sydney; Dada-Roman (4711), at Caves in Melbourne and a collaborative exhibition Zilverster with Sharon Goodwin at Sarah Scout Presents in Melbourne. Other recent solo shows have included Long Live Jezebelusa (The overseer & the divide) and Lace Monitor (Victoria Everglades) at Ryan Renshaw in Brisbane; Periwinkle Flower for the Beggar and Laudanum & De Breeder at Neon Parc in Melbourne. 

Over the last few years Irene has contributed to a number of notable group projects/exhibitions such as Lubok 11, a collaboration between Lubok Verlag (Leipzig) and PrintRoom (Rotterdam) presented at Museum Boymans Beuningen in Rotterdam; Like Mike (Neon Parc), Sedition (Bus Projects), The Parlour # 2 in Brooklyn, New York and previously in shows such as Athens Pride, The Breeder Gallery , Athens; New Psychedelia, QU Museum, Queensland; Show You My World, Gitte Weise Gallery, Berlin, amongst other. 

Hanenbergh’s work is held in public and private collections in the Asia-Pacific (Australia, Japan, New Zealand), Europe and the United States; including The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), QU Museum (QLD), The Museum of Old and New Art (Tasmania), Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery (Victoria), Artbank Australia (NSW), ABSOLUT European Collection (Stockholm, Sweden), Centre for Contemporary Art (The Netherlands), Collection ASKT (Athens, Greece) and Rabobank (The Netherlands). Irene was twice named as one of 'Australia's 50 Most Collectible Artists' by Australian Art Collector. 

Irene Hanenbergh is represented by Neon Parc

Th

This is a digital catalogue for Home@735 Invitational, an exhibition I curated in JUNE 2017. The exhibition featured artworks from the Badger & Fox Collection including photography by Andre Kertesz, Brassai, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Garry Winogrand, Max Dupain, Olive Cotton, Bill Henson and painting by Brett Whiteley. 

Home@735 Gallery director Madeleine Preston has new sculptural works opening at Maunsell Wickes Gallery next Tuesday the 15th. Come along for drinks from 6-8pm at 19 Glenmore Road Paddington.

“…my new work uses Philip Guston's later paintings, and specifically his pallette to create forms and groupings about the trouble we find ourselves in when we allow populism to succeed. The period Guston created his Nixon series in and the Watergate crisis has resonances with today’s political climate and with the workings of the current US administration. Using media traditionally associated with the domestic - textiles and ceramics - the commentary is not literal or loud. Instead the work acts as an interloper between the internal domestic world and the external one of world politics…”

Also showing works by Gerry Wedd, Bern Emmerichs, Jane McKenzie, Valerie Restrict & The Bankstown Koori Elders Group.

Mid-career survey exhibition by Marko Lulić is currently showing at LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, Austria. Curated by Wilfried Kuehn, ‘Futurology’ consists of large scale sculpture and architectural installation. 

Since 2000, Lulić has been investigating Yugoslavian and International Modernism. He addresses the relationships of form and ideology and the relation between body and representation in different political contexts. Utopian aspects of the twentieth century are analyzed, translated and queried. Architecture and display - central themes in Lulić’s work, become the means of a restaging in the museum. The exhibition runs till September 10.

Home@735 Invitational closes this weekend. Last chance to see photography by Garry Winogrand (pictured), Andre Kertesz, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Brassai, Bill Henson, Olive Cotton and Max Dupain. 

For anyone interested in more information on Garry Winogrand and his work, please visit the ARTSY website A fantastic resource featuring Winogrand's bio, over 75 of his works, exclusive articles, and up-to-date Winogrand exhibition listings. The page also includes related artists and categories, allowing viewers to discover art beyond the Winogrand page.

Home@735 Invitational closes this weekend. Come along to see Nick Collerson's response to Brassai's, Untitled (Eating at the Velodrome), circa 1932, silver gelatin print. 

Home@735 Invitational features a number of works from the Badger & Fox Collection including photography by Bill Henson, Andre Kertesz, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Brassai, Garry Winogrand, Olive Cotton, Max Dupain and painting by Brett Whiteley. A number of Sydney artists have created responses to these works including:

Tom Polo’s The Most Elaborate Disguise (15), 2016, oil stick on paper responding to Jacques Henri Lartigue’s 40 Rue Cortambert, silver gelatin print taken in 1903. Tom Polo is represented by STATION, Melbourne.

Arts writer Stella Rosa McDonald delivers a great piece on Home@735 Invitational.

Our Arrangements

Brassaï: A few years ago, I was in the valley of Les Eyzies in Dordogne. I wanted to see cave art at the source. One thing surprised me: every generation, totally unaware of the ones that preceded it, nevertheless organized the cave in the same way, at a distance of thousands of years. You always find the "kitchen" in the same place.

Picasso: Nothing extraordinary about that! Man doesn't change. He keeps his habits. Instinctively, all those people found the same corner for their kitchen. To build a city, don't men choose the same sites? Under cities you always find other cities; other churches under churches, and other houses under houses. Races and religions may have changed, but the marketplace, the living quarters, pilgrimage sites, places of worship, have remained the same. Venus is replaced by the Virgin, but the same life goes on.[i]

I imagine Art as Brassaï’s iterative cave. I imagine Artists entering the cave and heading straight for the ‘kitchen corner’, levelling the earth and preparing the build. But the artist, in this conceit, doesn’t behave entirely like Brassaï’s common cave dweller, who remains ignorant of the home’s previous arrangements. The Artist is totally—and necessarily—aware of what came before. This knowledge is essential if they are to raise the galley again, their antecedence guides their sense. And so, they begin to arrange the kitchen once more, in the very same place, but with difference.

The idea of working ‘in response’ is not an alien task for the artist, whose arrangements form both the echo and the call. The photographer Olive Cotton (whose own 1985 photograph Pepperina Lace is re-formed here in a 2017 ceramic series by Alice Couttoupes) returned to the same subjects with heartbeat regularity in her life. The photograph Willows (1985), for example, could be the opposing view of the very same tree that is depicted in Willow Rain (1940)—and it probably was, only with 45 years in between. Cotton made careful studies of her subjects and she wrote with even greater caution around the photographs that contained them. Her notes were spare and direct and they tasked the image with the heavy lifting. There are no photographer’s notes for Pepperina Lace (1985, showing here). But from the descriptions Cotton assigned to other photographs, we can assume she might have simply noted the delicacy of the flowers and, perhaps, their equivalence to thread. Because of its small scale, Olive Cotton’s daughter Sally tells me Pepperina Lace was possibly sent out by Olive and her husband as Christmas cards for close family and friends in the 1980s. The card making was meticulous and heartfelt on the part of Cotton and her family and took around a week from print to post. Some recipients of the cards threw them away at the end of the season; others kept them carefully, and even framed them. Chance plays no small role in laying the foundations for Art’s cave.  

Beneath the city lies another city, there are churches under churches and houses resting atop the foundations of other houses. The kitchen is, now, where it has always been. We return to each other with time.

SRM

[i] Brassaï̈, Jane Marie Todd, and Henry Miller. 2002. Conversations With Picasso. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 92

This beautiful still life assemblage by Sarah Goffman will be showing in Home@735 Invitational opening this Thursday. The installation is Sarah’s response to Andre Kertesz’s 1970 silver gelatin print, Untitled (Still life on painted bureau). Join us for drinks from 6-8pm - 735 Bourke Street, Redfern. Pictured is Table Peace 2017, PET found plastics, resin, enamel paint, permanent marker, silicone, dimensions variable.

Home@735 Gallery is pleased to announce that we will be exhibiting works by McLean Edwards in our upcoming show opening in Thursday June the 15th.

“…painting in oil on canvas, Edwards’s works are fluid and change sometimes dramatically as those thoughts and ideas correspondingly reform. He also scribes his age in the artwork, often in the corner of the canvas as a countdown to his mortality and signature of his work. Edwards paints in an intriguing manner, his brush strokes are confident and loose and yet by contrast are reinforced with delicate lines and considered details. He skilfully makes this technique look easy, however this approach is achieved through his many years of painting full time…”

Pictured is Art student#18, 2016, oil on canvas. McLean Edwards is represented by Olsen Gallery Sydney

Home@735 Gallery in pleased to announce we will be exhibiting an early Brett Whiteley painting, Figure Of A Young Man 1958, oil on board in our upcoming show opening on Thursday June 15th.

Brett Whiteley (1939 – 1992) is one of Australia’s most celebrated artists. He won the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes several times, and his artistic career was bolstered by his celebrity status in Australia and abroad.

Whiteley started working as a commercial artist in 1956, began life-drawing classes at the Julian Ashton Art School and joined John Santry’s sketch club where he became friends with Australian landscape painter Lloyd Rees, who was a strong influence. On weekends Whiteley painted around the towns of Bathurst, Hill End and Sofala, producing works such as Sofala 1958. In 1959 he was awarded the Italian Government Travelling Art Scholarship, which was judged by Australian artist Russell Drysdale at the Art Gallery of NSW. Whiteley remained in Europe for the next decade, exhibiting his work regularly in group exhibitions in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin, establishing an international reputation. He also lived in the USA, staying at New York’s Chelsea Hotel where he socialized with celebrities such as musicians Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan.

Returning to Sydney in 1969, Whiteley moved to Lavender Bay and became involved in the Yellow House artists’ collective in Kings Cross. His work became highly collectable, in particular his Matisse influenced large-scale interiors and landscapes. In 1976 he won both the Archibald Prize for portraiture and the Sulman Prize for genre painting. The following year, he was awarded the Wynne Prize for landscape. He won all three prizes in 1978 (the first artist to do so) and the Wynne a third time in 1984. In 1991 he was awarded an Order of Australia.

Brett Whiteley died in Thirroul on the New South Wales south coast in 1992. His last studio and home in Sydney’s Surry Hills is now a museum managed by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Located at 2 Raper Street in Surry Hills, the studio is open to the public Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, 10am-4pm.

Home@735 Gallery is pleased to announce we will be exhibiting artwork by photographer Bill Henson in our upcoming show. The triptych, Untitled 73,74,72 from The Badger & Fox Collection will be showing alongside paintings by Brett Whiteley, McLean Edwards and Patrick Hartigan. Join us for drinks from 6-8pm on the 15th of June.

Bill Henson (born 7 October 1955) is a visionary explorer of twilight zones, between nature and civilization, youth and adulthood, male and female.  His photographs are painterly tableaux that continue the traditions of romantic literature and painting. The use of chiaroscuro is common throughout his works, through underexposure and adjustment in printing. His photographs' use of bokeh is intended to give them a painterly atmosphere. The faces of the subjects are often blurred or partly shadowed and do not directly face the viewer.

“…his girls are young and vulnerable because they are natural metaphors for the kind of fragile beauty he wants to evoke, symbols of transient human experience that he sets against the deep void of nothingness or mortality that surrounds them. Eros and pathos are blended in a bittersweet equilibrium that requires a fine tact to avoid the pitfalls of exploitation on the one hand and sentimentality on the other…” Christopher Allen

Henson’s work has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally including the Guggenheim, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Venice Biennale, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

This compelling still life painting by Helen Gauchat will be showing in Home@735 Invitational opening on Thursday the 15th of June. 

Helen Gauchat’s quietly intimate yet dynamic paintings, depicting the ceramics she has created, draw on both Eastern and Western sensibilities and belie a deep and all-encompassing understanding of her subject. At the heart of these paintings is a confident, curious and responsive gesture and an openness to chance perhaps best defined by the Japanese tea ceremony aesthetic of wabi-sabi wherein perfection is sought through imperfection. Gauchat’s exquisitely arranged tableaus of utilitarian vessels contain a subtle tension between a sense of ceremonial stability countered by one of schism and possibility. 

In 2003 Helen completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at the National Art School followed by an Honours year at COFA. She has been a finalist in The Mosman Art Prize, The Redlands Art Prize, The Paddington Art Prize and has won the Fishers Ghost Prize for works on paper.

Pictured is Still LIfe Variation VI, 2016, oil on canvas

Helen Gauchat is represented by Defiance Gallery in Sydney

David Moore documented the depressed inner-city areas of Sydney, taking still photographs in the style of the documentary movement. The informal structure of 'Redfern interior' was taken when a young David Moore was mistaken for a press photographer and asked by a neighbour to take a photograph of a condemned house and squalid conditions in which the family were living. The cramped space, despair and poverty passing through three generations to a newborn baby, has little hope for change.

The matriarch, leaning on the bed, withdraws connection from the family, seemingly self-absorbed as she contemplates their bleak environment. As the mother breastfeeds, the women do not appear to notice a young photographer in the room. Each face carries equal weight, their despair palpable. The image is roughly divided into equal parts of white and black - a metaphorically representation of life and death

The first photograph to enter the collection of the NGV was Surry Hills Street, 1948 by Australian photographer David Moore (1927 – 2003). Moore began to make photographs in 1947 and this image is an outstanding example of an Australian photographer working in the social documentary style.

Between 1948 and 1951 he assisted Max Dupain, and began to develop his own approach to the documentary style, walking the streets of depressed inner-city suburbs of Sydney taking still photographs. Moore’s ‘Redfern interior’ 1949 was included in Edward Steichen’s ‘Family of Man’ exhibition, which toured internationally from 1955. He used the pictorial plane to draw disparate subjects into relationship with one another. As Judy Annear, senior curator of photographs at The Art Gallery of NSW, noted in 1997, Moore’s work is united by his ‘ongoing fascination with the structure of the image within the frame: its geometry and, within that geometry, the relationship between all the elements depicted, no matter how small they may be’. Moore’s photographs are held in Australian and international collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, and the Smithsonian, Washington, DC.

Pictured is Surry Hills Street, 1948, silver gelatin print. We have a print of Surry Hills Street on show permanently in our entrance hall at Home@735 Gallery. Stop by some time and have a look. 

A new suite of paintings and drawings by McLean Edwards will be opening at Olsen Gruin Gallery in New York on the 13th of May. The works from ‘Marsupials’ are available at www.olsengruin.com and our New York friends can view the works at 211 Elizabeth St, NY.

Born in Darwin in 1972, McLean Edwards studied at the Canberra School of Art and had his first solo exhibition in Sydney in 1995. Known for his theatrical, darkly humorous take on figurative painting and his bold use of colour, he has had over 20 solo shows and is collected widely by private institutions across Australia and is in many International and Australian private collections.

An Australian arts reviewer stated his work has the ‘same sour humour as Samuel Beckett’s plays and prose, an absurd, theatrical sadness that celebrates idiosyncrasy while acknowledging the seeming impossibility of fighting the universe…His work is marked with a palpable sense of mortality and humility, a tragicomedy of figures and apparitions, thought-bubbles and asides, a diary of his anxieties and dreams.’ (Art Collector Australia, Issue 57 2011)

Pictured is Wreath, 2017, oil on linen. McLean Edwards is represented by Olsen Gallery Sydney.

Olive Cotton (1911–2003) is regarded as one of the pioneers of Australian modernist photography. Cotton's lifelong obsession with photography began with the gift of her first camera, a Kodak Box Brownie, when she was eleven. She was a childhood friend of Max Dupain's, and in 1934 she joined his photographic studio, where she made her best-known work, the angular composition Teacup Ballet in 1935. The common threads of Cotton's work are her use of light and form, keen observation skills and equal treatment of subject matter. Between 1939 and 1941 Dupain and Cotton were married, and she photographed him often; her work, Max After Surfing is frequently cited as one of the most sensuous Australian portrait photographs.

Cotton's iconic photograph Tea cup ballet taken in 1935 reappeared in Gael Newton's 1980 publication, Silver and Grey: Fifty years of Australian photography 1900-1950. The following year, her work was included in the travelling exhibition, Australian Women Photographers 1840-1960. In 1983 she reprinted 40 years worth of negatives. Sixty-six of these were exhibited in her first solo show, Olive Cotton - photographs 1924-1984. In 1991, Tea cup ballet was issued on a stamp to mark the 150th anniversary of photography in Australia. In 1993, Cotton was awarded an Emeritus Fellowship from the Australia Council. In 2000, the Art Gallery of New South Wales held Cotton's first retrospective exhibition. It featured 68 photographs ranging from vintage prints, such as Beachwear fashion shot (1938), Max after surfing (1938) and Only to taste the warmth, the light, the wind (1939), to her early 1990s works. Olive Cotton died in 2003 aged 92. The annual Olive Cotton Award is dedicated in memory of her role as one of Australia's leading twentieth century photographers.

Olive Cotton’s work Pepperina shot in 1985 from the Badger & Fox Collection will be showing at Home@735 Gallery in our June exhibition. Sydney artist Alice Couttoupes has created a ceramic piece in response to the photograph. The two works will be show alongside one another in the exhibition. 

40 Rue Cortambert by Jacques Henri Lartigue will be on show at Home@735 Gallery in June. One of 9 artworks from the Badger & Fox Collection, the photograph taken in 1903 will hang alongside a painting by Tom Polo responding to Lartigue’s print.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) was a French photographer and painter noted for the spontaneous photographs he took beginning in his childhood and continuing throughout his life. Lartigue’s boyhood photographs were almost always candid images taken of his family and friends. Lartigue studied painting at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1915 to 1916. Born into privilege, Lartigue's father was a banker, and the family belonged to the upper French bourgeoisie. He was afforded time to build race cars, oil paint, and learn the mechanics of photography from an early age.

Lartigue photographed everyone he came in contact with. His most frequent muses were his three wives, and his mistress of the early 1930s, the Romanian model Renée Perle. His photographic work came into art world prominence in 1962 when a meeting with curator John Szarkowski led to a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The importance of the work was immediately recognized, and numerous exhibitions and publications followed.

During his life, he was friends with influential artists such as Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Kees van Dongen, and has served as an important influence to later filmmakers, notably Wes Anderson. Lartigue’s work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Lartigue was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1975. A collection of his work, Diary of a Century, was published in 1970 (reprinted 1978). Later collections of Lartigue’s work include Les Femmes aux cigarettes (1980; Women Holding Cigarettes) and Les Autochromes de J.-H. Lartigue, 1912–1927 (1980; The Autochromes of J.H. Lartigue, 1912–1927). He continued to photograph into his 90s

Madeleine and I walked down Bourke Street yesterday to Artspace for a studio visit with Sydney artist Tom Polo. Tom gave us the lowdown on his Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship and his 3 months at the cité. Tom also generously gave Madeleine a few ideas on how to navigate her AGNSW residency at the cité later this year. We also got a preview of new works for Tom’s upcoming show at Station Gallery in Melbourne. 

We are thrilled that Tom will be painting a response to the Jacques-Henri Lartigue photograph titled 40 Rue Cortambert taken in 1903 for Home@735 Invitational. The two works will be shown alongside one another. The Lartigue photograph is one of 9 artworks from the Badger & Fox Collection we will be exhibiting - the show opens on Thursday the 15th of June. 

Eating at the Velodrome, circa 1932 by Brassai will be showing in Home@735 Invitational opening on Thursday the 15th of June. This is one of 9 works from The Badger & Fox Collection we will be exhibiting including photography by Brassai, Lartigue, Kertesz, Max Dupain and Bill Henson. 

Sydney artist Nick Collerson will be painting a response to Brassai’s ’Eating at the Velodrome’. The two works will be shown alongside one another in Home@735 Invitational opening in June.

Born Gyula Halász (1899 – 1984), the French photographer Brassai took his name from his hometown of Brassó in Transylvania – now Brasov in Romania. Brassai studied art at the academies of Budapest and Berlin before coming to Paris in the mid-twenties.

Brassaï’s love affair with Paris started at Montparnasse. The pulsating heart of art in Paris, the district was also known as one of its most colourful; its night-time population a kaleidoscope of petty criminals, hoodlums, streetwalkers and pleasure seekers. Brassaï’s first project seized the essence of nocturnal Paris in a series of grainy, textured pictures which set the basis for early street photography. Published in 1933 with the title ‘Paris de nuit’, this portfolio remains the most famous exploration of the city’s hidden underbelly and is considered a classic of early street photography. His series of photo-books of Paris graffiti have also been hugely influential.

One of the most renowned photographers of the interwar period, Brassaï’s reputation was built on contributions to both commercial and avant-garde photography. His long-time friend, the author Henry Miller, nicknamed him “The Eye of Paris” for his devotion to the city.

He was close to many artists including Dali, Picasso, Matisse and Giacometti – many of whom are portrayed in his collection ‘The Artists of My Life’  published in 1982. His relationship with Picasso produced many famous portraits of the artist, as well as important publications including ‘Conversations with Picasso’. The book is a compilation of the photographer’s diary entries in which the image of wartime Paris stands alongside unknown aspects of the personality of Picasso himself. Unable to wander the city streets under the curfew imposed by the German occupiers, Brassaï dedicated the early ‘40s to photographing the works of Picasso in his studio, creating a unique photo-chronicle of the artist’s creative output.

I had a very enjoyable studio visit yesterday with Sydney artist Nick Collerson. Apart from a sneak preview of his compelling new works for his upcoming solo exhibition, ‘Mix’ at Liverpool Street Gallery, we talked about Nick’s motivations for making art, critique, art education, Benjamin and a few of the issues our world will have to deal with in the near future. Along with his paintings, Nick’s studio has a drum kit and a Fender Thinline guitar - we finished the visit off with a jam on a few songs…perfect morning really. 

Nick will be painting a response to a photographic work by Brassai from the Badger & Fox Collection titled ’Eating at the Velodrome’ taken in 1932. The two works will be shown alongside one another in Home@735 Invitational opening on June 15th.

Sydney-based artist Kate Mitchell will be exhibiting her video work ‘Hypnotised Into Being’ in Home@735 Invitational opening on Thursday the 15th of June. For this work Mitchell enlisted a hypnotist to induce her into a sub-conscious state and prompt her to respond to a selection of statements that she had earlier provided. Initially approaching the session with a degree of cynicism, the artist was later amazed that she had indeed been induced into a subliminal state. Mitchell physically enacts various prompts related to art history, critical discourse and her own practice, as if playing a game of charades in a hypnotised state. ‘Hypnotised Into Being’ will be showing in our video booth alongside paintings by Patrick Hartigan, Mclean Edwards, Brett Whiteley and photography by Bill Henson. 

Selected exhibitions include In Time, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne (2015); Magic Undone, Artspace, Sydney (2012); and Future Fallout, Chalk Horse, Sydney (2014), Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2012); Contemporary Australia: Women, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2012); The Grip / La Mainmise, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2010); and The Horn of Plenty: excess and reversibility, Para Site, Hong Kong (2009).

Kate Mitchell is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne and Chalk Horse Gallery in Sydney.

Sydney based artist Sarah Goffman will be exhibiting in Home@735 Invitational opening on Thursday June the 15th. Sarah will be creating a still life assemblage in response to the Andre Kertesz photograph, Untitled (Still life on painted bureau), circa 1970, silver gelatin print - available at Badger & Fox Gallery

“…I make what I want to own. And of course, I try to make what I want to see.  Sometimes I make work in reaction to other people’s works, or in response to a time, a place, a substance and sometimes in response to myself.  When I consider a space, I try to find the perfect response, the response that will highlight the past and it’s tension with today…” 

Sarah Goffman’s current exhibition,  I am a 3-D Printer at the Wollongong Art Gallery runs till June 18th. Pictured is Plastic Arts, 2009, The Good, The Bad, The Muddy, Mori Gallery photo: Mike Myers.

André Kertész (2nd July 1894 - 28th September 1985) was a Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and his efforts in developing the photo essay. His ability to compose lyrical images, infused with wit and insight would remain a constant throughout his career. Neither a surrealist or a strict photojournalist, Kertész combined a street photographer’s dry humour and eye for the moment with the formal aesthetic of a modernist in his black and white photography. In addition to the street life of Paris, he also photographed many famous artists including Chagall and Mondrian. In 1964 his photography was featured in a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. The work of Kertész was featured in many exhibitions throughout the world, exhibiting into his early nineties. Pictured is Untitled (Still life on painted bureau), circa 1970, silver gelatin print available at Badger & Fox Gallery www.badgerandfoxgallery.com

Born in New York in 1928 where he lived and worked much of his life, street photographer Garry Winogrand was lauded for his portrayal of American life and its social issues in the mid-20th century. He received three Guggenheim Fellowships to work on personal projects, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and published four books during his lifetime. He was one of three photographers featured in the influential New Documents exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in ’67 and had solo exhibitions at MOMA in 1969, 1977 and 1988. In 2013 the San Francisco Museum of Art staged a major retrospective exhibition with over 160 photographs of Winogrand’s work. The exhibition was shown at venues including the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jeu de Paume in Paris and Fundacíon MAPFRE in Madrid, Spain. 

Winogrand's output was prodigious. At his death, he left behind 2500 undeveloped rolls of 36-exposure 35mm film, 6,500 rolls of film that had been developed but not printed and 300 unedited 35mm contact sheets - that’s at least 300,000 images – equal to at least two life's work for other photographers. Garry Winogrand died at the age of 56.

Women Are More Beautiful Than Men, Silver gelatine print by Garry Winogrand from the Badger & Fox Gallery Collection will showing in the Home@735 Invitational exhibition opening on June 15th.

Still life painting by Queensland based artist Helene Grove will be showing at Home@735 Gallery in our Invitational exhibition. White Teapot, 2006, synthetic polymer on board is one of works from the Badger & Fox Collection we will be exhibiting opening on June 15th. Helen Grove won the Portia Geach Prize in 2013 and has been a finalist in the Moran, Wynne, Archibald and Dobell Drawing Prize.

Max Dupain is one of Australia's most revered photographers. He developed an influential style of commercial photography that emphasised the geometric forms of his architectural and industrial subjects. Born in Sydney in 1911, he lived there all his life, photographing the city from the late 1930s. 

For many Australians, Dupain's photographs define beach culture, and it was the beach that was the inspiration for his most famous and enduring images. A dedicated patriot, he believed in clearly and simply showing Australia's way of life. His 1937 photograph ‘The Sunbaker’, shot at Bondi Beach, became an icon that enjoyed worldwide recognition.

His early work was fairly conventional pictorial imagery, but by the mid-1930s he had broken away and taken up a Modernist, realist style, experimenting with light and formal composition.

From the 1950s Dupain specialised in architectural photography, which is the finest of his professional work. He developed a close working relationship with prominent architects including Harry Seidler, Philip Cox and Glenn Murcutt.

Dupain's philosophy could be summed up in two words, simplicity and directness. Dupain remained an adherent of black and white photography, he believed that colour was restricting in its objectivity and that nothing was left for individual interpretation. 

In 1939, Dupain married photographer and childhood friend Olive Cotton, but they divorced soon after. A decade later, Dupain married Diana Illingworth and subsequently they had a daughter Danina and a son Rex, who also became a photographer. Dupain was given an OBE in the New Year's honours list, 1981. His photographs are held in most of the major galleries around Australia and as well by private collectors world-wide. Dupain continued working until his death in 1992 aged 81.

Roadside Stall Princes Highway by Max Dupain is one of the artworks from the Badger & Fox Collection we will be exhibiting at Home@735 Gallery in June. The show opens on Thursday the 15th, join us for drinks from 6-8pm. 

Had a great studio visit yesterday with Sydney artist Mclean Edwards. We are thrilled to be exhibiting two of Mclean’s compelling portraits in our Invitational exhibition opening on Thursday the 15th of June. McLean Edwards studied at the Canberra School of Art. Since that time he has exhibited his work in numerous group and solo shows including the Archibald Prize at the AGNSW in 2004, 2006, 2007, 2010 and 2013. His artworks are held in collections including 1346 Venice Collection, Australian War Memorial Museum, Canberra, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, Allens Arthur Robinson, Germanos Collection, Sydney, Artbank, Bond University, BHP Collection, Deutsche Bank, Hong Kong investors, PT Kodel (Indonesia), University of Queensland Art Museum and private Collections in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, UK and U.S.A.

Mclean Edwards is represented by Olsen Gallery Sydney.

Check out available paintings by Mclean Edwards at Olsen Gallery. 

Opening on Thursday June the 15th, Home@735 Invitational will feature a selection of small portraits. One of the works is by Melbourne artist Steve Cox. 

UK based Melbourne painter and writer Steve Cox is best known for his psychologically penetrating images of young men. His work ranges from portraiture to narratives to what he describes as stream of consciousness landscapes. He writes art-related and queer-related articles and reviews for a number of publications. He studied painting at the Victorian College of the Arts from where one of his main lecturers was Gareth Sansom. In 1983 he was awarded the Keith & Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship and subsequently spent eighteen months making work in London and Cairo. In 1983 he was included in the survey of Australian art, Perspecta, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Cox’s work is held in The National Gallery of Australia, The National Gallery of Victoria, The Ian Potter Foundation, Melbourne, The estate of Francis Bacon, London and The estate of Reggie Kray, London. His work has been featured in Nevill Drury's New Art series of books, and in Sonia Payes' Untitled, a book of photographic portraits of contemporary Australian artists.

Performing Dog 1930’s, Silver gelatin print by French photographer Brassai will be featured in our June exhibition - Home@735 ‘Invitational’.  The show will feature works from a prominent Sydney collection by some of the seminal photographers of the 20th century including Brassai, Andre Kertesz, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Max Dupain, Bill Henson and painting by Brett Whiteley. We will also be inviting a number of Sydney artists to contribute one of their works to be included in the exhibition across portaiture/figuartion, still life and landscape. You can see a portion of the collection at the online gallery https://badgerandfoxgallery.com

Born Gyula Halász (9th September 1899 - 8th July 1984), the French photographer Brassai took his name from his hometown of Brassó in Transylvania - now Brasov in Romania. Brassai studied art at the academies of Budapest and Berlin before coming to Paris in the mid-twenties. 

Brassaï’s love affair with Paris started at Montparnasse. The pulsating heart of art in Paris, the district was also known as one of its most colourful; its night-time population a kaleidoscope of petty criminals, hoodlums, streetwalkers and pleasure seekers. Brassaï’s first project seized the essence of nocturnal Paris in a series of grainy, textured pictures which set the basis for early street photography. Published in 1933 with the title ‘Paris de nuit', this portfolio remains the most famous exploration of the city's hidden underbelly and is considered a classic of early street photography. His series of photo-books of Paris graffiti have also been hugely influential.

One of the most renowned photographers of the interwar period, Brassaï's reputation was built on contributions to both commercial and avant-garde photography. His long-time friend, the author Henry Miller, nicknamed him "The Eye of Paris" for his devotion to the city. 

He was close to many artists including Dali, Picasso, Matisse and Giacometti - many of whom are portrayed in his collection ‘The Artists of My Life’  published in 1982. His relationship with Picasso produced many famous portraits of the artist, as well as important publications including ‘Conversations with Picasso’. The book is a compilation of the photographer’s diary entries in which the image of wartime Paris stands alongside unknown aspects of the personality of Picasso himself. Unable to wander the city streets under the curfew imposed by the German occupiers, Brassaï dedicated the early ‘40s to photographing the works of Picasso in his studio, creating a unique photo-chronicle of the artist’s creative output.

Charted, 2013, oil on board by Patrick Hartigan will be one of the works featured in Home@735 Invitational in June. The exhibition will focus on a selection of the works from the Badger & Fox Gallery Collection - https://badgerandfoxgallery.com - including works by some of the seminal photographers of the 20th century including Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Andre Kertesz, Brassai, Gary Winogrand and Bill Henson. 

Patrick Hartigan’s practice brings together drawings, paintings, film and written work made in response to his experiences of domesticity, travel and found imagery. Patrick Hartigan is the art critic for The Saturday Paper.

“…painting has been, and continues to be, central to my process but I continue to enjoy working across different media. Painting is a more visceral medium than others and therefore feels more suited to the mess and complexities of people…”

His work is held in collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; the Chartwell Collection, Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand; and Wollongong University, New South Wales, Australia.

My partner, artist Madeleine Preston and I will be curating a show - Home@735 ‘Invitational’ - opening on Thursday June the 15th. The exhibition will feature works from a prominent Sydney collection by some of the seminal photographers of the 20th century including Andre Kertesz, Brassai, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Max Dupain, Bill Henson and painting by Brett Whiteley. We will also be inviting a number of Sydney artists to contribute one of their works to be included in the exhibition across portaiture/figuartion, still life and landscape. You can see the works at the online gallery Badger Fox Gallery.  

Pictured is Andre Kertesz (Hungarian American, 1894-1985) Untitled

André Kertész (2nd July 1894 - 28th September 1985) was a Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and his efforts in developing the photo essay. His ability to compose lyrical images, infused with wit and insight would remain a constant throughout his career. Neither a surrealist or a strict photojournalist, Kertész combined a street photographer’s dry humour and eye for the moment with the formal aesthetic of a modernist in his black and white photography. In addition to the street life of Paris, he also photographed many famous artists including Chagall and Mondrian.

He served briefly in World War I and moved to Paris in 1925. Due to persecution of the Jews and the threat of WWII, Kertész decided to emigrate to the United States in 1936, where he had to rebuild his reputation through commissioned work. In the 1940’s and 1950’s he stopped working for magazines and began to achieve greater international success. His career is generally divided into four periods; the Hungarian period, the French period, the American period and toward the end of his life, the International period.

In 1946, Kertész had a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, featuring photographs from his Day of Paris series. In 1952, he and his wife moved to a 12th-floor apartment near Washington Square Park, the setting for some of his most iconic photographs. His late life Polaroids taken from within his apartment re-explored his concepts of life, love, and loss generated by his reaction to the hand-held camera itself.

In 1964 his photography was featured in a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. With his work critically acclaimed, Kertész gained recognition in the photographic world as an important artist. The work of Kertész was featured in many exhibitions throughout the world, exhibiting into his early nineties.

Thanks to Brett East - @docqment - for his documentation of the exhibition. 

Many thanks to Art & Education for listing the Monumentalism exhibition. To see the listing click here.

“…established in New York in January 2006 as a joint venture between e-flux and Artforum, Art & Education reaches an international network of more than 80,000 visual arts professionals and academics on a daily basis through its website and e-mail list. Its news digest—Art & Education announcements—distributes information about some of the world’s most important contemporary art exhibitions, publications, and symposia taking place within educational contexts, as well as academic employment positions available in the visual arts…”

I was interviewed on ABC Radio by presenter and Fairfax journalist, Jacqueline Maley. The show, 'Sunday Afternoon', went to air yesterday. Here is a link to the podcast: Sunday Afternoon on ABC Radio.

Thanks to everyone who came to the Monumentalism opening. Here is a video featuring image of opening night and works by the exhibiting artists. The vision is set to the sound of my band The Forresters - the song is 'Never Too Far' by the late and great Tim Hardin. 

During the 1970’s, the Yugoslav government produced a sticker book - titled ‘Spomenici Revolucije’ - featuring stickers of 252 monuments. Similar to collecting footy cards, school children were encouraged to buy stickers of anti-fascist modernist monuments at local kiosks to fill up their sticker books. This was an attempt by the government to try to install a feeling of unity and togetherness in the youth of new Socialist Republic. The first school with all the students’ albums completed would win a trip to the most important monuments: second prize was a colour TV set.

The compelling single channel video ‘All of Them in There' by Sydney artist and writer Kuba Dorabialski will be one of 5 projections showing in Monumentalism. ‘All of Them in There’ is a video installation and essay film, shot in Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Romania during October 2015.

Kuba Dorabialski presents a political ecology in an architectural landscape. ‘All of Them in There’ is a filmic dialogue between city and household, where concrete, walls, multilayered floors and staircases, repetitive balconies and windows, are (ex)changed via the crowd, observed by the narrator.” - Ashley Haywood

Croatian-born Sydney based artist Biljana Jančić will be creating a site-specific installation as part of Monumentalism opening at Kudos Gallery next Tuesday the 8th of November. Currently exhibiting work at the MCA’s Primavera and Tarra Warra Biennial 2016 curated by Helen Hughes and Victoria Lyn, Biljana has exhibited extensively including exhibitions at Artspace and Stills Gallery. She is the recipient of the 2016 Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Travel Award.

Jančić’s large-scale architectural interventions investigate the way in which subjects and objects inscribe, delineate or territorialise sites. Her artworks operate as punctures that highlight, amplify or distort existing architectural features. These interventions can be seen as parallel to interferences in virtual spaces, where phenomena such as glitches and other ‘errors’ create an awareness of the fragility that belies the structures that organise our lives. 

Biljana Jancić completed her Bachelor of Visual Arts in 2007 and PhD in 2013, both at Sydney College of the Arts. Her art making practice is supported by her critical writing and curatorial practice.

Losing all four of his brothers to the fascist execution squads in World War II, abstract sculptor Vojin Bakić was a significant figure in the context of Croatian and European modernism in the second half of the 20th century.

In the early 60’s, Bakić became a prominent figure in abstract expression and optical research. His vision and creativity resulted in a decisive change in the way large memorial monuments in the former Yugoslavia were designed.

His public monuments Dotrscina, Kamensko and Petrova Gora were exceptional examples of modernist public sculpture, displaying a departure from socialist aesthetics. During the Balkans War in the 90’s these memorials were neglected or destroyed.

Bakić’s most famous project was the memorial centre at Petrova Gora southwest of Zagreb. The 37 metre high stainless steel structure comprising angles and curves was completed in 1981. Holding an exhibition space and a café, the outlandish memorial was visited by school trips and work outings from all over Yugoslavia. The interior was devastated and looted after 1991, and the stainless steel panels covering the exterior of the memorial were stolen by locals. 

Vojin Bakic died in 1992 in Zagreb.

Visual artist and musician Tim Bruniges will be creating a site-responsive sound installation as part of Monumentalism, opening at Kudos Gallery on the 8th of November. Working across a range of media including installation, sound and video, his practice is focused on exploring sound and space and their relationship with time. Bruniges’ site-specific sound work will use live input, amplification and manipulated feedback.

Bruniges is a current PhD candidate at the UNSW Art & Design. In 2013 he was awarded the Greene St. Studio artist residency by the Australia Council for the Arts and is a finalist in the NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) 2016. 

Bogdan Bogdanovic (1922–2010) the Yugoslav architect, urbanist, writer, and politician, designed some of the most remarkable memorials in Europe. Some of the most renowned works are Flower of Stone (1966), a memorial for the victims of the concentration camp in Jasenovac, the Dudik Memorial Park for the Victims of Fascism in Vukovar, Mound of the Unbeaten in Prilep Macedonia and standing in the form of some lost Roman addition to Stonehenge, Mitrovica. 
Bogdanović taught architecture at the University of Belgrade, where he also served as dean. He was also involved in politics - as a partisan in WWII, and later as mayor of Belgrade. When Slobodan Milosević rose to power and nationalism took hold in Yugoslavia, Bogdanović became a dissident.

I caught the AGNSW Art Bus in early 2013 - visiting a number of Sydney galleries, the last stop on route was Peleton. Exhibited, was a video/sound work and photographic prints by Kusum Normoyle entitled, Accord with Air: Tjentište (2012), which features Normoyle performing alongside the Tjentište monument in the Sutjeska National Park in Eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina. It’s a compelling piece of work that also struck a chord with me, as the Tito commissioned monument designed by sculptor Miodrag Živković is not that far from where some of my family originates.

Kusum’s performative style is incisive, extreme, abrasive and primal. Armed with a microphone and amplifier and using her physique - kicking, contorting and throwing her body on the ground; she creates loud, often public or architecturally/site specific performances. Normoyle’s work utilises extreme voice, audio feedback and the body’s relationship to materials and environment through these means for both performance and installation. 

She is currently a PhD candidate at UNSW Art and Design under the supervision of Douglas Kahn and is an active member of the Sound and Materials Research Group at UNSW Art and Design. 

Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions, festivals and events including Dark Mofo 2015, Primavera: Young Australian Artists, MCA Sydney 2013, ISSUE Project Room NYC, Superdeluxe at Artspace for the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Liquid Architecture AU, the NOWnow AU, N.K Berlin, UrBANGUILD JPN, Lines of Flight Festival NZ, and Dogodek: The Event, 29th Biennial of Graphic Art, Slovenia.

Jan Kempenaers, Tjentište from his 2010 publication 'Spomenik'.

One of the bloodiest battles in which the Partisans engaged against joint German-Italian forces was the Battle of Sutjeska. Also known as The Fifth Offensive, and "Operation Schwarz” the battle took place between 15 May and 15 June in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. On June the 9th, President Tito was severely injured when a bomb fell near the leading group. During the months of struggle over 7,500 of Partisan fighters of the Main Operational Group of Yugoslavian National-Liberation Army were killed. The Tjentište monument was built in 1971 and designed by sculptor Miodrag Živković.

The Tjentište monument also appears as one of the nine meditative portraits in the poetic-experimental documentary ‘Monument’ by Croatian multimedia artist Igor Grubić and has been photographed by Dutch photographer Jan Kempenaers in his 2010 publication ‘Spomenik’. Both Grubić and Kempenaers works will be showing in Monumentalism.

Brutalist architecture proliferated from the 1950’s to the mid-70’s descending from modernist architecture in the early 20th century. The term ‘Brutalism’ originated from the French word for ‘raw’ used by the finest exponent of brutalist architecture Le Corbusier describing his choice of material béton brut (raw concrete). 

Brutalism became widely used due to the speed and cheapness of construction. It’s an architectural philosophy often associated with socialist utopian ideology. This style is prominent in European communist countries including Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, USSR and Yugoslavia. 

The memorials featured in Monumentalism are exceptional examples of Brutalist architecture from the former Yugoslavia. The exhibition opens at Kudos Gallery on Tuesday the 8th of November. Here are a few striking examples of Brutalism.

My partner Madeleine Preston met Austrian artist Marko Lulić at the 2014 Sydney Biennale when he exhibited his video, ’Space Girl Dance’. Through their meeting I started a communication with Marko. Our two families originate from the same region of Croatia. Early this year Marko sent me a link to his latest video work ‘Kosmaj Monument’ (2015). The video was part of a two-person exhibition at the MAK Center in Los Angeles. The exhibition ‘Spomenici revolucije’ - was a collaboration with LA artist, Sam Durant. 

Spomenici revolucije was the title from a Yugoslavian sticker album from the 1970s, produced for children who were encouraged to buy stickers of anti-fascist modernist monuments to fill up their albums. The first school with all the students’ albums completed would win a trip to the most important monuments, second place winning a color TV set.

Lulić’s video features interpretive dance in conjunction with the Kosmaj monument located in present-day Serbia. Lulić juxtaposes the flux of bodies in movement with the static and imposing aspects of modernist monuments. The six free standing 40 metre high structures comprising the monument, commemorates the 5,000 partisans killed fighting against the German occupation in Southern Belgrade.

Dancers are shown creating contact through improvisation, while trying to establish a dialogue with the shapes of this specific icon. The video was shot at a cultural center in nearby Belgrade, an area with state-owned student homes built during the same era as the monument— both sites employed raw concrete to represent their respective utopian period.

Lulić has created a number of videos in the last few years with dancers interacting with public sculptures, seeing those works as both performances and expanded sculptural pieces that analyze and grasp the historic and socio-politcal essence of the objects they explore.

Marko Lulić is a Vienna-based artist, whose work is concerned with the intersection of architectural modernism, ideology, and aesthetics. Lulić has remade a number of modernist monuments, as well as reactivated them in some form by using those public sculptures as reference and/or location of his performances. He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Oldenburger Kunstverein, MAK, Vienna; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Kunsthalle Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich; 21er Haus / Belvedere, Vienna; Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Kunstverein Heilbronn, Grazer Kunstverein, Kunsthalle St. Gallen and Frankfurter Kunstverein. His work was included in The Biennale of Sydney; the 12th Swiss Sculpture Exhibition, Biel / Bienne; the October Salon, Belgrade, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial. In recent years he has also curated several exhibitions at the Secession, Vienna; Siemens Arts Program, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. He won several awards such as the Kardinal König Kunstpreis, the Award of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation, and the Erich Hauser Foundation Award. For the last five years he has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Lulić is represented by Gabriele Senn Gallery.

Sydney based artist and writer Kuba Dorabialski will be exhibiting his compelling poetic single channel video ‘All of Them in There’ as part of the ‘Monumentalism’ exhibition opening at Kudos Gallery on Tuesday the 8th of November. Shot in Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Romania during October 2015, ‘All of Them in There’ was first shown at Firstdraft in February 2016. Born in Wroclaw Poland, Dorabialski’s interest in the aesthetics of Eastern European politics stems in part from his background and from his interest in the violence the capitalist state wreaks on its citizens. This work speaks to the utopic elements of socialism and the failure of market based capitalism to effectively replace the system it so derides. 

‘All of Them in There’ features architecture from Eastern European states including one of the Tito commissioned monuments. Niš – located in southern Serbia - depicts three concrete obelisks in the form of raised fists. Designed by Ivan Sabolić and built in 1963, the memorial commemorates the 10,000 victims of fascism killed at Bubanj plateau between 1941 and 1944.

Croatian multimedia artist Igor Grubić will be exhibiting his 2015 film Monument at Kudos Gallery in November. Monument is a poetic-experimental documentary, structured as a series of nine meditative ‘portraits’ of the massive concrete memorials commissioned by the former Yugoslav state. These sentinel forms were originally built to honour the Second World War victims of fascism.

His work includes site-specific interventions in public spaces, performances, photography and video works. He is known for his activism and his consideration of the public space as a means of expression. In 2000, he started working as a producer and writer of documentaries, tv reportages and socially committed commercials. His work has been exhibited extensively across Europe and at Monash University Museum of Art - ‘Concrete’ curated by Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow in 2014 and in 'Zero tolerance', MOMA PS1, NY in 2015.

Madeleine’s mother, Yvonne Preston was a foreign correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. The Walkley Award winning journalist and her family spent a number of years living in China during the final period of Chairman Mao’s rule. Madeleine’s formative years were spent as one of a handful of foreign students living in Beijing through this turbulent era.

As part of her appointment, Yvonne Preston interviewed an array of leaders, dictators and despots visiting Beijing including Pol Pot, Yasser Arafat, Sadam Hussein and President of Yugoslavia, Marshall Tito. 

The photo above was taken when Tito visited China in 1977, just prior their interview.

Tito was a master of playing both sides of politics - East and West. As the President of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia (SRY) for 37 years, Tito had huge support from the West due to his tempered partiality to capitalism. Tito’s openness to the West lead to a steady flow of capital and resources into Yugoslavia, resulting in a rise in the standard of living for the majority of Yugoslavs during his presidency.

Tito was noted for his penchant for the finer things.  Although this was at odds with his socialist ideology, his “Hollywood’ lifestyle was admired by his citizens and celebrated by the West. 

One of the most extravagant examples was the now derelict, Haludovo Palace Hotel. Haludovo was an opulent accommodation and casino complex financed by Penthouse Magazine tycoon, Bob Guccione. Located on the Croatian island of Krk and designed in the Brutalist style by Croatian architect Boris Magas, Haludovo was a haven for the rich and famous. At a cost of 45 million US dollars, the mile long ‘Xanadu of glittering bulidings’ was a magnet for well-to-do American and British businessmen. Surrounded by the excesses of the ‘70’s lifestyle and Penthouse Pets as croupiers, this supreme statement of indulgent capitalism was ultimately irreconcilable with Socialism. Ultimately western guests failed to embrace the resort as expected and local residents were barred from gambling. The complex now lies in ruins. 

Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers will be exhibiting his renowned ‘Spomenik’ series as part of the Monumentalism exhibition. Extensively exhibited across Europe and the US, the series comprises of 26 images depicting the futuristic memorials built in the former Yugoslavia commemorating WWII battles. The series will be shown as a large projection with accompanying interpretive text.

Drawing on local knowledge and a map from the ‘70’s depicting the whereabouts of the monuments, Kempenaers traversed the Balkans between 2006 and 2009 locating and photographing these abstract structures. Devoid of people, these powerful images were an Internet hit after his book ‘Spomenik’ (a Croatian word meaning monument) was released in 2010 with a flood of blogs dedicated to these futuristic sculptural forms.

Below is one of Kempenaers’ works, his photograph of Jasenovac – a memorial built to the victims of a concentration camp located in Slavonia in northeast Croatia. Designed by renowned architect and academic Bogdan Bogdanovic, Jasenovac commemorates the reportedly 100,000 mostly Serbs, Jews and Gypsies who were exterminated, mostly by hand, at the WWII concentration camp. Known for having been one of the most barbaric death camps for the extreme cruelty perpetrated, Jasenovac came to be known as the Auschwitz of The Balkans. Bogdanovic’s architectural design ‘Stone Flower’ was created to symbolize renewal and forgiveness. The monument was vandalized during the Balkans War but unlike many of the other damaged structures has since been restored.

Jan Kempenaers lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium and is currently affiliated to the School of Arts Ghent. He studied film and photography at the School of Arts in Ghent and completed his PhD in 2012. Recent solo exhibitions include Triennale de Photographie et Architecture #5, Brussels (2015), Jan Kempenaers, Breese Little, London (2013), Spomenik, Fowler Museum, L.A. (2013), I’m not tailgating, I’m drafting, Still Gallery, Belgium (2013), Jan Kempenaers: Spomenik, Liquid Courage Gallery, Nassau (2013), Kempenaers was a participating artist in Back to the Future, Breese Little, London (2012) and The Architecture Biennale, Venice, (2010).

Kempenares has released a number of publications featuring his photographic work, a selection are available through Melbourne bookstore Perimeter Books.

Over the coming weeks I will be profiling the artists who will be exhibiting in Monumentalism. Here is a brief synopsis of the exhibition.

The decaying monuments from Tito’s Yugoslavia form the backdrop for ‘Monumentalism’ - an exhibition curated by Anthony Bautovich at Kudos Gallery in November.

Memorials from the past, these abstract structures were commissioned by President Josip Broz Tito to convey a sense of confidence and strength in the new Socialist Republic. Designed and built in the ‘60s and ‘70s by leading architects and sculptors including Vojin Bakic and Bogan Bogdanovic, these stunning gestures to modernism are located at sites of battles and concentration camps commemorating the victims of fascism in WW11.

Devoid of signs of ideologies, war heroes or religions, these abstract forms were symbols of a modern and unified future. Established as recreational areas to visit and cultivate a sense of national and cultural togetherness, these remote and isolated memorials now lay idle. 

As the Balkans War took hold in the early ‘90s and Yugoslavia fell apart, the monuments became touchstones for the inherent hatreds from the past. Many of the monuments have been destroyed and even today the remaining memorials are being dismantled for their raw materials. The authorities turn a blind eye. From triumph to tragedy, these abandoned and decaying forms are a reflection of a broken and disbanded state. The original intention for the creation of the monuments has resulted in their demise. Politics created the monuments and politics has destroyed them.

Can the monuments continue to exist as sculptures? Can monuments derive a new meaning in a altered context? Do monuments have a purpose today?

The son of migrants from the former Yugoslavia, the curator’s interest in art from Eastern Europe was the catalyst for 'Monumentalism'. The exhibition will bring together International and Australian artists to respond to the emotional and social impact of the failings of the single party state.

My review of the Sydney Biennale - Cockatoo Island

2016 Sydney Biennale review by Anthony Bautovich

The Heartbeat of the Island

The boycott of the 2014 Sydney Biennale was an attempt to highlight the plight of refugees in Australia’s detention camps. Little has changed since the resulting withdrawal of founding sponsors Transfield, managers of Australia’s detention facilities. The camps remain, as does our indifference. What appears to have been affected is the level of financial support for The Biennale.

The theme of this year’s Biennale, ‘The Future Is Already Here – It’s just not Evenly Distributed’, is borrowed from a comment by science fiction author William Gibson. His quote refers to the evolution of technology and the fact that many people are denied access to fundamental resources, specifically the Internet. 

Artistic Director Stephanie Rosenthal has closely overseen her vision for the 2016 Biennale. Rosenthal, Chief curator at Hayward Gallery in London since 2007, has brought together 85 artists from 35 countries. Unlike previous Biennale curators she has chosen to live in Sydney since last September. This engagement with the locale is evident in her considered curation - her careful selection and grouping of artists into ‘Embassies of Thought’ emphasizes concepts rather than aesthetics. Dubbed the ‘Embassy of the Real’, Cockatoo Island is one of the major Embassy venues along with the AGNSW, MCA, Artspace and Carriageworks. With the paring back of this year’s program due to the downturn in funding, Rosenthal has cleverly repurposed a number of smaller venues forming a constellation of alternative, temporary sites scattered throughout Sydney’s inner east.

Stepping off the 301 bus at Circular Quay, I cross the street and ‘tap on’ at the dock. A ferry ride on the harbour is a simple pleasure for Sydneysiders. As Australians, our environment allows us freedom of choice, a diversity of possibilities and the entitlement to move freely. Passing between the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, the ferry filled with families, tourists and seniors heads towards Cockatoo island - the former penal colony and more recently Navy ship building facility provides an industrial backdrop for artwork by 21 artists: 2 are Australian. 

Leaving the ferry, I head along Burma Road towards the Upper Island. Dozens of tents line the right hand side of the thoroughfare. Resembling a military bivouac, the site is the Island’s permanent camping ground. As I approach the first cluster of installations housed in the Convict Precinct, the air is filled with a constant, resonant beat. The pulsing, low frequency punch is the sound of Room of Rhythms – Long Distance Relationship, 2016, a work by Turkish artist and musician Cevdet Erek. With a background in sound design and architecture, Erek is known for his site-specific installations. His work for the Biennale is immersive both aurally and emotionally, and penetrates the Upper Island. As Burma Road steepens, and I near the doorway to the Convict Barracks, the pulse of Erek’s work intensifies like the heartbeat of the Island.

Entering the Convict Barracks through a single door, leaving the reverberation behind, my senses turn to the work of Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. Shiota’s installation, Conscious Sleep, 2016 is housed in a dark, damp rectangular room. A minimal amount of natural light emanates from two small windows and the entry and exit doors. The room has a musty odour. Small, dimmed stage lights are perched adjacent to the ceiling. The lights subtly draw attention to the hundreds of metres of tangled black thread cocooning a series of beds. Their unadorned, metal frames lean against the sandstone wall at an acute angle. The beds are generously spaced unlike those of the original convict inhabitants; the linen is a pristine vivid white. Dust has started to settle on the web of black thread. The capture of memory and emotion of the enveloping thread is a trait of Shiota’s practice. Living and working in Berlin for 20 years, Shiota is renowned for her intricate, large-scale creations, using everyday objects, weaving them into their determined domain.

Passing through the room, a permanent plaque is fixed alongside the exit door. It is an excerpt from a report on the conditions of convict life on Cockatoo Island, 1861. A portion of the text from the plaque reads “…double tiers of double sleeping berths, with coffin-like apertures opening upon a narrow central passage. In this passage are placed night-tubs for the common use of the men during the 12 hours they are locked up… He often sees them at the iron gratings gasping for fresh air from without, and he ‘wonders how they can live’.”

There are parallels to draw with our nation’s cruel past and the treatment of refugees – perhaps not in severity but certainly in principal. The difficulty in making work about this level of callousness is undeniable; nonetheless Shiota’s work has the capacity to trigger our emotions.

From the exit door, several metres across a common gravel courtyard is the former Mess Hall housing the work of Miguel Angel Rojas. The 70-year-old Columbian artist challenges the viewer’s perception with his subtle examination of the impact of colonialism on indigenous cultures. Piedra en el Zapato, 2016 – meaning ‘stone in the shoe’, is an understated and resolved work. 

The dominant feature of Rojas’ installation is the floor. Fashioned from earth and sand sourced from Cockatoo Island, the work is a painstaking reproduction of Victorian era tessellated floor tiles. Tonal browns and dirty white colours have been flawlessly arranged in a pattern, adding a performative element to the artwork. An enormous rock inhabits the right part of the room. Sandstone in appearance, the form has a number of Aboriginal style carvings on the upper surface. The tones embodied in the rock are identical to those of the tessellated tile pattern. The rock represents our indigenous peoples’ bond to the land and the heritage of their culture. Freshly welded prison like bars, suggestive of both the island’s history and the impact of colonization on the indigenous population, border the viewing area - preventing people from walking on the tiles. 

Since the opening, visitors have either purposely or unwittingly disturbed the pattern of the outer tiles. ‘Do Not Touch’ signs and an accompanying low-level perspex shield have been installed. Running repairs have been attempted – unsuccessfully. I sit down in the corner of the small viewing area, take in the work and watch the reaction of a number of visitors. One after another they enter and leave within a few seconds. The signs, for those who take the time to read them, have altered the nature of the work. The exactness and subtlety of this installation conveys a sense there is nothing to see.

Leaving the Convict Precinct and negotiating a precarious concrete stairway leading to the lower level of the Island, I am again confronted with the throbbing beat of Erek’s sound work. His constant aural reminder reorients one’s awareness of the environment. 

Rosenthal’s calculated curation of the work on the Upper Island and her ability to pair an artist’s work to a specific site is a tribute to her skills. The quiet contemplation of the Upper Island is a stark contrast to the installations framed by the gigantism of the Turbine Hall. The nature of a space dictates the scale of the work. Scale has become a key consideration when selecting and creating artwork for major exhibitions and Art Fairs. Size often equates to impact, however size can also suggest overblown and less thoughtful works.

Two key installations showing in the Hall are by three Asian artists – Lee Bul, Korakrit Arunanondchai and Boychild. South Korean Lee Bul is regarded as one of the most important female artists to emerge in the 90’s. She is perhaps best known for the work Rosenthal’s Biennale marketing department have been utilizing in their publicity, the much-photographed Diluvium made in 2014. Her work for the Sydney Biennale Willing to be Vulnerable, 2016, is a new work. Bul creates her artwork with a team of assistants in her residential studio complex in the Hills in Northern Seoul. Her site-specific installation, monumental in scale, fills a large section of the Turbine Hall, a vast 1640 square metre space. The artwork is an elaborate interconnected assemblage made of plastic, reflective metal surfaces, glass, LED lights and paint. The space is broken up into three indistinct sections by enormous sail-like plastic sheets, harboring motifs of cranes, air balloons, carousels and unidentifiable figures. The installation draws the viewer in with traces of the everyday yet is simultaneously surreal. A suspended silver Zeppelin-like object, suggestive of the ill-fated Hindenburg Airship, dominates the central portion of Bul’s installation.

Huge plastic floor sheets covered with painted abstract images are draped over stands adding an architectural dimension to the work. Paint has started to peel away from the plastic sheeting. The work is said to be interactive yet there are ‘do not touch’ and ‘do not walk’ signs placed throughout the space. The tent-like structures draw in small children who are told to move on by volunteers. These instructions are at odds with the catalogues’ claim that Willing to be Vulnerable is an interactive work. 

Bul examines the human condition and the concept of utopia, searching for what is out of reach - an investigation of the human capacity for destruction.

‘Our plans about utopia are undoubtedly going to fail. But as human beings, just because it’s destined to fail doesn’t mean we should stop dreaming about it. We need to keep trying, don’t we?’

Bul's work is installed in the bay next to artists Korakrit Arunanondchai and Boychild. Arunanondchai’s installation incorporates his video work, Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3, 2015-16 and the remnants of the opening night performance by transgender artist, Boychild.  

The big draw card on opening night was the one-off performance Untitled, Lip Sync#225, 2016 by Boychild. Hundreds of the Sydney art cognoscenti crammed around a lengthy runway to catch a glimpse. The artist’s eccentric moves and hypnotic gestures were recorded by a torrent of mobile phones. At the far end of the catwalk were a number of large containers of acrylic paint. The artists’ performance began with her smearing herself in primary coloured paint and rolling along the runway. Her gestural performance, painting the denim-covered platform with the contours of her body was viewed simultaneously on the enormous LED screen.

‘The character and body of the artist acts as a vessel for the work: flesh is treated as canvas, and an ever-evolving palette of makeup provides a tool for communication’. 

The coloured paints on the artists’ body intermingle, blending together over the course of the performance. Terminating at the end of the catwalk, they read as a tonal brown. Through her contortions and unique movements, Boychild took on the character of Naga, a mythical serpent featured in the Korakrit Arunanondchai video that screened prior to the performance.  

At the head of the catwalk was a huge ‘lounge room’ set up featuring oversized beanbag like denim-covered cushions. The cushions are arranged in front of the massive LED screen showing the video. Arunanondchai’s work is beautifully shot featuring quick cuts and fast paced editing to a background of strident dance music. English subtitles draw your eye to the bottom of the screen. 

The video is shot using drones and hand held cameras. It is overloaded with an eclectic mix of images ranging from pop culture references to billboards, cityscapes, technology and animals. His pastiche of styles blurs the line between reality and fantasy. The barrage of information lacks a linear narrative structure prompting the audience to form their own interpretation of the work. In the video, Arunanondchai appears with a group of friends all dressed in his signature acid wash denim. They perform formation dance routines that suggest a Thai boy band and pop video clips. Both Arunanondchai and Boychild ‘wear paint’ as if they are themselves artworks in the process of being created. 

Heading towards the ferry dock the heartbeat of the Island starts to fade. I think about how technology and the pace of life have influenced the way we perceive and respond to our environment. Having time to stop and contemplate is becoming a luxury. I think about Lee Bul’s reference to an unattainable utopia and about the simplicity of Rojas’ work; its ability to evoke awareness of dispossession and marginality. As the ferry heads back to the Quay and the figure of Cockatoo Island recedes, my thoughts drift to another Island to the North of Australia.

Bibliography:

Akel, J, 2015, The Many Faces of Boychild, V Magazine, viewed 22nd April 2016

Bailey, S, 2015, Art Paper Magazine. Jan/Feb. Vol. 39 Issue 1, p68

Carlos/Ishikawa, 2016, Korakrit Arunanondchai, viewed 28th April 2016,
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Yoshimoto, M, Beyond ‘Japanese/Women Artists’, Nobuho Nagasawa and Chiharu Shiota, Third Text, 2014. Vol. 28, No. 1, 67–81

Zelenko, M, 2013, Boychild Talks Performance Art, Hood By Air, and Her Greatest Fears, viewed 19th April 2016