Innehållsförteckning för Issue 46 från Artist Profile

THE ARTIST PROFILE TEAM PUBLISHER John Feitelson jfeitelson@artistprofile.com.au PRINCIPAL WRITER John McDonald jmcdonald@artistprofile.com.au EDITOR Kon Gouriotis kgouriotis@artistprofile.com.au INTERNATIONAL ARTS WRITER Lucy Stranger lstranger@artistprofile.com.au ART DIRECTOR Kim Gregory kgregory@artistprofile.com.au SUB-EDITOR Jamie McIlwraith artistprofile@artistprofile.com.au DEPUTY EDITOR Elli Walsh ewalsh@artistprofile.com.au NATIONAL ADVERTISING MANAGER Jill Trochei jtrochei@artistprofile.com.au CONTRIBUTORS SASKIA BEUDEL is an essayist, novelist and nonfiction writer who first trained as a painter PAUL MCGILLICK is the author of numerous books, articles and catalogue essays on art, architecture and design FULVIA MANTELLI is a curator, arts writer and Director of The Murray Bridge Regional Gallery, SA NUR SHKEMBI is a Melbourne-based curator, writer and PhD scholar; nurshkembi.com ROSE VICKERS is an art writer and curator currently based in New York; rosevickers.com LAURA COUTTIE is an arts writer based in Melbourne; lauracouttie.com TAI MITSUJI is…

Shortly before this article went to print the NSW Opposition leader Michael Daley sent out a press release announcing precisely what I was asking for: a cast-iron commitment to preserving the Powerhouse Museum on its current site. Mr Daley also announced commitments for $500 million to be spent on building a dedicated cultural institution in Parramatta, and $45 million for upgrades to the Powerhouse Museum. This sounds extremely positive but the Powerhouse Board immediately complained that $45 million wasn’t enough for a comprehensive fix. Are they suggesting it would be better to spend at least $1.5 billion attempting to move the entire shebang? An incoming Labor government might begin by looking at the scandalous degree to which the Coalition has allowed the Powerhouse to become run down to help with…

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR ART PRACTICE TO a stranger? I make abstract paintings … occasionally sculptures but everything has circled around painting, and colour, to the exclusion of everything else really, for the past decade. Let’s go back a while. Tell me about your early years. I graduated from Sydney College in 1999. I showed in artist-run spaces for almost a decade before my first commercial show. Some of the first shows that really mattered to me, and still do to this day, were at Gallery 19, Imperial Slacks, and Melbourne’s Penthouse and Pavement. I had time to experiment with both making art and shows before regular commercial exhibitions. So what did you do for work? I worked as a gallery attendant at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia…

Why did you leave art journalism and broadcasting? I grew very tired of words. They crushed me. As just about any jobbing journo or critic will tell you, writing can become a slog. It’s enervating and can be hugely destructive of your peace of mind. Moreover, I was never tough enough to be a consistently good critic, though I believe I was often a good writer. Essentially, writing words prevented me from making images. Was it a struggle being an artist and writer? Yes. And as a result I was always punctilious about separating my own artistic prejudices and tastes from whatever I was reviewing. Any deeper conflict? No, because at least it was all about art, everything came back to that. So, any idea of conflict is overstated. The…

ILDIKO KOVACS’ FORTHCOMING survey, at the Orange Regional Gallery in Central-West NSW, and soon after that at the Drill Hall Gallery in Canberra, will be a fascinating re-investigation of the ideas which drove her work up to her previous survey, roughly ten years ago. Bold and fresh as the new work is, its impact is amplified by the way it links back to earlier work. Surveys such as this can represent a sharp and potentially lethal focus on an artist’s career, for what we are looking for in a survey is a consistency of concern. Any lack of conviction, any wavering from the core mission will not just be exposed, but writ large. A painter, for example, may make stylistic shifts or even radical changes pictorially (say from abstraction to figuration),…

JASPER KNIGHT’S NAME HAS become known through his brightly coloured abstractions of cars, docks and boats on found objects like signs or abandoned sheets of metal. Entwined with the colonial history of the city Knight lives and works in, his paintings speak to the ethos of industrialism that seeps into everyday life. Yet Knight is ready for a departure towards a new style. Now he is trying something different, experimenting with fresh motifs and a bold new palette. The move is unnerving for Knight, who says he feels like an entirely new artist venturing into the unknown. To be a successful artist shown in twenty-two worldwide art fairs with numerous sold-out exhibitions internationally – what happens when you try something new? Knight mentions that he took several months off to ‘pour…

WHERE ARE YOU IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW, AND what are you reading? I’m in Christchurch, where my mother is from, and I’m about to go back to Vienna. I can categorically say I am not reading anything. I’m writing more, and I think those two things are mutually exclusive. It’s anecdotal art writing for a publication coming out next year, I hope. Is writing part of your practice? It is. I set up a publisher, called Painting Diary, this year, dedicated to artists’ editions. The publication isn’t a part of my practice but sits alongside; it’s a discreet output. Your practice has a strong theoretical underpinning and clearly leans on some epistemological philosophy. How do you reconcile the impetus to make with a theoretical point of view? An experience…

OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES AMANDA MARBURG’S work has ranged from bar scenes in Western movies, to reinvented Dutch still lifes, ’70s skin magazines, vignettes from Grimm fairy tales with their menacing violence, clay figurines modelled by children, Spanish tiles and surrealist lobsters. ‘I paint from what I’m reading, looking at or where I am at the time,’ Marburg says. In her essay Why I write, Joan Didion explores the power of images that linger in one’s memory – the ‘greyed and obscurely sinister light’ of oil refineries seen decades earlier through a bus window in San Francisco, a flowering pear tree outside a window, a young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walking through a casino at one o’clock in the morning. ‘What is going on…

IN 1996, YOU COMPLETED A BACHELOR OF FINE ART from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. Would you have ever dreamed that twenty four years later, your painting, Michael Buxton Portrait (2012) would be hanging on the walls of the gallery next door? To be perfectly honest … I never thought about it! It’s in a really prominent spot though, I am very proud to have it hanging there that’s for sure. I hadn’t seen the painting for roughly five years until recently. You never know when a painting is going to stand up or not after a few years, but I’m really happy with this work. In your portrait of Buxton, left blistered from the sun and painted without a mouth, he is rendered somewhat vulnerable to a…

A LOT OF WHAT I DO IN MY ART practice stems from nostalgia and longing: sorting through things I find beautiful or poignant, looking for objects, feelings or locations I find security in. When I first started sorting and archiving as a studio process I did so as a way to reconnect with the idealised utopias I constructed for myself as a coping mechanism during adolescence. This led to my broader research on how archiving, appropriation and transformation allows us to process and cope with anxiety and identity issues today. I tend to keep things longer than I should. My studio is overflowing with plastic boxes of wigs, parking fines, wrapping papers and trash. Hoarding, often believed to stem from a love of mess or chaos, is actually linked to a…

VISITING WEDDERBURN, ON THE outskirts of Sydney, the temperature was moving towards forty degrees. Despite the fans, Suzanne Archer’s bush studio felt like an oven – the heat and glare of an Australian summer providing a strange backdrop for a body of work that has been growing darker, denser, ever more gothic in character. The incongruity reflects the temperament of an artist who doesn’t set out to please anyone but herself. This may be another way of saying ‘an artist who has rarely enjoyed consistent commercial success’, but that’s never been Archer’s priority. Her work develops its own momentum in the studio, regardless of her original intentions. Like Alice on the trail of the White Rabbit, she follows it down some unusual pathways, although her entry into Wonderland more closely resembles…

A NEW ART AWARD ESTABLISHED by Australian law firm King & Wood Mallesons looks to contemporary Aboriginal art as a mechanism to assist reconciliation and relationships within its corporate culture, while also reaching out to broader Australia. The ambition and scope inherent in the prize highlights the significant (and often unacknowledged) role that private initiatives make toward cultural progress. Australia is not short of art prizes and the calendar becomes more crowded with every passing year. An art prize offers its founder important exposure, and for artists there is an exhibition opportunity, plus promotion and potential sales. However, the King & Wood Mallesons Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (the KWM Award), launched in September 2018, is driven by an ambition that’s different from most art prizes –…

YOU HAVE BEEN EXHIBITING REGULARLY SINCE THE late 1980s. How has your practice evolved over that time? Art-making occurs in the flow of my everyday existence. I don’t think of my painting practice as unfolding in a linear, periodic way. Rather, the works are defined by phases and preoccupations. These are always in circulation, and inexhaustible; there is always something more to make. Throughout my life, I have made abstract, figurative and text paintings. I am concerned with certain forms, structures, patterns, colour, space, and how paint behaves on a surface. I return to these forms continuously. Could you describe your creative process? I work more or less continuously, with studio time punctuated by exhibitions, but not everything I make is for an exhibition. Sometimes I have a definite plan,…

JOHN, WHEN I THINK OF YOU, I THINK WRESTLING and then painting. Wrestling was my other identity. I like wrestling in martial arts because it’s really brutal and hard. After moving to Melbourne in 1998 I trained in Aikido for nine months. I dabbled in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and in more recent years have been training in Thai boxing mainly for fitness. You studied at City Art Institute (now UNSW Art and Design) in Sydney in the late 1980s. Have you ever thought about doing a research degree? I wasn’t really interested in being in an institution again. I prefer doing research myself. I don’t like to frame my work within the context of conventional art history or having to continually validate what I’m doing. What made you start painting? I…

THE NEW YORKER ACCOUNT BY Ernesto Malley of the first Paintforum International held in Melbourne in March 2018 revealed a city, indeed, a community, so committed to the visual arts that every public and private gallery and exhibition space, even the vast railway stations, were replete with work from the most visible and utterly unheard-of artists. A conference staged by four universities was advertised on every tram and train station, Lear Jets bearing bidders and buyers crowded Melbourne Airport, and a million-dollar painting prize was awarded. The host city of the to-beannual event promised to become the epicentre of the international art market. Except … readers familiar with Australian twentieth-century cultural history would spot the ‘Ernesto Malley’ reference. In 1944 Max Harris published a set of free-verse poems in his modernist…

IN LATE NOVEMBER I WAS TALKING with Indigenous Australian contemporary artist and political activist Richard Bell in the back room of Josh Milani’s Gallery in Brisbane. Milani had been called away on business and Bell had come over from his studio to meet me. He was wearing paint-splattered shorts and a blue button through shirt. Several days of white stubble seemed to have been spray-painted onto his chin while his head was framed by a halo of wiry white hair. A conversation with Bell is anything other than predictable. His opinions are strong, as one would expect of a long-standing activist for Indigenous rights. He doesn’t suffer fools easily. Bell eschews labels and prefers to describe himself as ‘an activist who masquerades as an artist’, a line I had heard before.…

DALE HARDING Harding’s largest exhibition to date, ‘Current Iterations’ brings together new and recent works focusing on objects dislocated by museum practices. Until 30 Mar IMA, Brisbane NATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT PRIZE Photographic portraits by 40 finalists selected from over 3000 entries across Australia. Until 7 Apr NPG, Canberra DAN KYLE In his first Melbourne exhibition, Kyle continues his investigations into the elevated Australian landscape of the Blue Mountains and Great Dividing Ranges. 10 – 28 Apr, Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne JOHN WOLSELEY AND MULKUN WIRRPANDA Wolseley and senior Yolgnu artist and clan leader Mulkun Wirrpanda extend their decade-long collaboration in an immersive installation titled ‘Molluscs/Maypal and the warming of the seas’ – part of ‘ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2019’. 30 Mar – 2 Jun, Geelong Gallery, Vic LOVE, DISPLACED A group show of…