Innehållsförteckning för Issue 57 från Artist Profile

In his small studio located in a garage on the Illawarra escarpment, Christopher Zanko has temporarily set aside his wood-cut tools and brushes. His exhibition at The Egg & Dart, Sweet Misgivings, is on soon and final preparations are underway. Large- and small-scale artworks are propped against or hanging on the white walls, ready for photographing. Among them is Lake Illawarra Longing, 2021, one of Zanko’s larger wood relief carvings that captures in excruciating detail a triple-fronted house with creamy white cladding and terracotta-red roof tiles. Green striped awnings, immaculate garden beds, and a concrete kangaroo decorating the lawn complete the picture. If this house was a real estate listing, it might be described as a renovator’s dream, or a development opportunity. But in Zanko’s hands, he returns to the…

Some artists, for instance Rubens, Seurat, and Australia’s Jon Cattapan manage to combine abstraction and figuration within the same canvas – as did Turner; others have long periods of one style before switching to the other – Peter Booth and Philip Guston, for example, or switching materials – paint to sculpture – as did the mid-career Linda Marrinon, or from neo-expressionist painting to screen-based installation in the evolving works of Susan Norrie. And a very few – Richter, Andy Warhol, Louise Weaver, and Giles Alexander – progress abstract and figurative careers simultaneously. In the hands and intellect of Richter we witness a tightrope walk between absolute precision (the portraits of his daughter) and pure chance (squeegeed grids of electric colour). In between, lie Richter’s monochrome, grainily-painted images of the Baader-Meinhof…

Melbourne artist Dean Bowen knows exactly when and why he decided to become a sculptor as well as a printmaker and painter. It was 1993, in Paris, when Bowen was creating lithographs with master technicians at Atelier Franck Bordas. One day, while a lithographic stone was being grained in preparation for his next work, Bowen retreated to the atelier library to wait. There he found books on the French artist Jean Dubuffet. Dubuffet brought the art world’s attention to art brut, a term he coined for the compulsive, instinctive art of the untutored. He was also an advocate of children’s art. Franck Bordas had worked with Dubuffet on his final print project in the 1980s, and Bordas’s grandfather Fernand Mourlot had assisted the younger Dubuffet to produce prints (to say…

Ian: Over the years together, our Pony Express remit has been to create alternate realities that refract and reflect Earth’s current circumstances, in an artform-promiscuous but socially engaged way, via a process we call “world-building.” What is world-building as a process? Loren: World-building is our way of producing richly detailed artworks that invite endless modes of participation and iteration. To me, it refers to a process where the starting point is a social code that gets explored through as many means as possible. Ian: Yes, the ethos of world-building is kind of a template, that forces us to be rigorous yet elaborate in our research, design, and alliances. We always take an initial concept and go “What if it was real? What if it was functioning in the world right…

Australians watched the early stages of pandemic unfold, from a distance, in a series of chapters that were distinctly geographic. First Wuhan in China, secondly Northern Italy, and thirdly, New York. Now, whilst the majority of the United States battles the Delta variant, New York seems to have achieved the highest degree of co-existence with the virus. The euphoric optimism of the “hot vax summer” has faded but life persists, and to me, a new arrival fresh out of lockdown, the sensory overload is significant. Annika Bowker, Jemila MacEwan, and Caroline Garcia are amongst the Australian artists who remain committed to the city, following a challenging eighteen-month period in New York. Annika Bowker’s studio is situated in the bayside neighbourhood of Red Hook. The up and coming area is characterised…

Australian surrealism cuts across all forms of art including painting, prints, drawing, cinema, literature, sculpture, photography, installation, and performance art. How committed was Gleeson to surrealism as a method and critique of the role of art in society and in literature, art criticism and poetry? What is important to grasp concerning Gleeson’s oeuvre was how through its highly allusive, autobiographical, and vivid aesthetic, cultural and iconographical architecture and iconography. Gleeson was constantly concerned with the role of the self in society, and how reason itself needed to be critiqued because of its immense capacity to individual and social conformity. Gleeson was always examining how the self was fashioned by the many critical and institutional orthodoxies of society concerning art, culture, and religion – particularly in the context of Sigmund Freud’s…

For commuters in Sydney, 12 June 2015 was a sombre day. For it was on this day that the free, tabloid newspaper mX released their last published edition. For those who don’t know, mX was a pithy commuter newspaper that’s content comprised of “celebrity gossip” (if you regard what Neil Perry did with his ponytail on the weekend “gossip”), rumours, readers’ gripes (“Vent Your Spleen”) and my personal favourite, “Overheard.” “Overheard” was the section where devoted readers could SMS bizarre things overheard on their daily commute. Picking up an mX almost always guaranteed one to bray like a donkey trying to visualise the contours of “Pauline, Platform 25” who was overheard saying “leave your husband and become a chocolate like me!” Did she identify as a chocolate? Was she part…

Sydney-based artist Amy Dynan uses a harmony of figuration and abstraction within her gestural skyscape artworks, revealing her approach of maximum expressivity. Dynan has been painting professionally since 2012, first capturing the likeness of her peers in hyperreal drawings. By 2017 she completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, under the supervision of Lindy Lee, who had a profound effect on the trajectory of her practice. “[Lee] encouraged me to investigate why I was drawn to hyperreal portraiture … and to do so, she encouraged me to look into abstract expressionism,” says Dynan. “We experimented with flung ink work and different philosophies and methodologies that would be, as I understood it, more freeing for me to play with in order for…

In her Op Art practice, Argentinian-born, Sydney-based artist Celia Fernandez explores optical effects through her geometric abstract painting style, fascinated by the perception of movement achieved by combining colours and variations in contrast. Her hypnotising pop pointillism displays intense attention to precision and detail, playing with the illusion of perfection. Inspired by two influential artists, Bridget Riley and Yayoi Kusama, the artist developed her own original technique. Through the use of dots, Fernandez explores shapes, colour fields and reactions through layering, colour combinations and gradation of shade. The artist has lived in four countries — Argentina, Spain, The Netherlands, and Australia — as such, travel highly influences her work, granting her the opportunity to find herself and a passion for art. Fernandez’ oeuvre reveals this sense of experimentation and exploration…

Kim Guthrie is an Australian conceptual artist primarily working in photography and media. In 2019 his Rivers Edge photographs were presented at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Also in 2019, he was curated by Kevin Wilson in Exchange Value at Queensland University of Technology QUT Art Museum. He has been a finalist of the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre 66th Blake Prize, the National Portrait Gallery Living Memory: National Photographic Portrait Prize, Gold Coast City Gallery Josephine Ulrich & Win Schubert Photography Award and the Moran Contemporary Photography Prize. Selected monographs include The Beautiful People/Love The World and EXTRAordinary. A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, he is represented by Fletcher Arts, Melbourne Subscribe Now: online subscribe.artistprofile.com.au by phone 02 8227 6486 by post Artist Profile Subscriptions, PO…

Bundjalung Country, known as the land of the three rivers, is located across northern New South Wales and southern Queensland, with the boundaries being roughly created by the Clarence River, the Great Dividing Range, and the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps non-Indigenous Australians would be more familiar with Bundjalung Country when they realised that towns such as Coffs Harbour, Tweed Heads and inland Lismore and Grafton are all located within its borders. Bronwyn Bancroft is a senior Bundjalung artist, activist, storyteller, and writer, and this is her Country. Born and raised in the small town of Tenterfield, Bancroft is the daughter of Bill Bancroft, a Bundjalung man of Aboriginal and English heritage, and Dorothy Moss, a European of Scottish and Polish descent. At high school Bancroft experienced some troubled years, but with…

"Gilson’s work will stand up against the colonial works forever" For Gilson, the catalyst to her picking up a brush came when she was diagnosed with cancer. Her husband cut out wooden houses for her to paint on as a distraction. “My daughter then bought me a canvas and I painted Bundjil, the eagle – that’s our creator spirit along with Waa the crow. All the paintings contain our totems. That’s where it started. I would have loved to have gone to art school but I had to go out and work. I made raincoats at Bramac, a factory on the Geelong Road in Melbourne.” The self-taught artist now makes extraordinary paintings from her home in Gordon, a town near Ballarat, Victoria. It’s a far cry from the Sydney Opera…

Isaac Julien confessed to Laura Barnett in a Guardian article in 2013 that he was a frustrated painter. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that his film and video works are so painterly, that his installations inhabit gallery spaces, and his picture-making within each frame is so considered and visually poetic. Like Francisco de Goya and Gustave Courbet before him, he constructs powerful images that document the pivotal events of his time. Beautiful to look at and carefully crafted, they retain their political and cultural integrity, providing an alternative to mainstream reportage of social justice issues. In his early sixties, Julien lives and works in London. He was born and raised in London’s East End to parents from the Caribbean island-nation of St. Lucia. Julien adopted video as a medium while still a…

My recent exhibition, Colony, at Tolarno Galleries in August 2019, was a large-scale immersive installation that was conceived after a personal experience of a viral infection. However, throughout the pandemic it’s metastasised into something more universal. In the installation, two figures in white protective suits are surrounded by a legion of brightly coloured globular forms that fill the gallery space like an army of greatly expanded microorganisms, bacteria, viruses and fungi, along with scaled-down asteroids and space-junk forms. Some of these presences, which range in size from slightly larger than a soccer ball to well over human-scale, float in the air, while others perch or have landed on the ground. Their size, configuration, and bright colours make them seem kind of like cartoon sci-fi – which makes them strangely appealing…

Tarnanthi, the Art Gallery of South Australia’s celebration of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art returns for its sixth iteration in October 2021. Curated by Nici Cumpston, the exhibition is an extensive survey of contemporary Aboriginal art from across Australia. The word “tarnanthi” comes from the language of the Kaurna people, the Traditional Owners of the Adelaide Plains. It means to spring forth or appear – like the sun and the first emergence of light. Held during the warm South Australian spring months, Tarnanthi very much appears as an energetic and immersive insight into First Nations culture, traditions and imagination. As the curator of all six editions, Nici Cumpston has visited many parts of Australia and has seen a new generation of artists emerge. She has been working with…

To Campbell Robertson-Swann, Director of Defiance Gallery, the prize originated as he wanted to support the Paddington Art Prize, but rather than traditional fund-based sponsorship he felt it would be more meaningful to give a “practical experience and participation in the process.” To him, mentorship through studio visits and support as the artists worked towards the exhibition, coupled with the residency, creates a “total and fulfilling experience.” Michael Nock had formally established a residency program in 2013 in Hong Kong and loved how it “took artists out of their comfort zone and introduced them to a completely different environment. To see how this transitioned into completely different works twelve to eighteen months later gave me quite a thrill.” He expanded the residency program a few years back and started to…

Was there a more prolific maker of unforgettable images than Matisse, at least in the twentieth century? The number of exceptional works he created, in painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and his own medium of the paper cut-out, is astounding. He coaxed a wealth of aesthetic qualities from his materials and evolved a huge inventory of motifs. But perhaps what is most affecting of all about Matisse is the coherence of the search from which all of his work issued. A Matisse survey gives us the journey and the sense of arrival, the resolve of his late works adding significance to the remarkable list of works that come before. Of how many artists can we say that their concentration on a project was maintained across sixty-five years, with a final chapter…

I speak with Lisa Sammut from her Canberra studio. She tells me that the leaves of paper surrounding her in the space come mainly from the illustrated books which she has been sourcing and collecting, and then painting over, creating a kind of solution out of making and research. “I have a lot of these old books,” she says, “dating from the 50s to the 70s, that time pre-internet where if you wanted to learn about the world, you did so through these illustrated volumes. I’ve been using them to think about representational relationships, thinking about how to access really large concepts through tangible things.” Sammut’s media are not usually paper and paint, as audiences familiar with recent works from The National: New Australian Art 2021, and the 2021 Ramsay Art…

“Felix Reynolds remembers being 'dragged around museums as a kid… bribed with the promise of cheesecake at the end'” Genevieve Felix Reynolds is a collector. Her items of interest range from antique figurines and kitsch crystal dolphins, to thick 1950s museum catalogues and online archives. “I have folders of images,” she says, both digital and analogue. These images are used to make collages, which are in turn used to compose her paintings. The dual use of the analogue and digital is significant, notes Felix Reynolds. “In relation to photography, the computer mimics the darkroom, but each technology forces you to think about composition differently… both are processes of flattening.” Felix Reynolds’s most recent exhibition at Galerie pompom in Sydney was descriptively titled The Flattening of Everything, which she says is…

"There is a sense…of moving forward, while looking backwards" In his first-floor studio on the fringe of a large industrial estate on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, Indonesian-Australian artist Jumaadi is crouched down in the middle a suite of paintings that spread across the floor. He has removed his shoes and is scrambling over six three-metre-long epic narrative paintings that employ his familiar naïve imagery. So delicately painted are they that I wonder how the images remain intact. Each of the six canvases measures approximately 3 × 3.5 m. They’re so large that Jumaadi can barely see one end from the other and with six on the floor at any one time things are getting out of hand. The paintings are destined for the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10)…

At a time when schedules seem to cease to exist and days are framed by Zoom meetings and family FaceTimes, I spoke with Jonathan Jones to reflect on his extensive artistic practice thus far, and what may lay ahead in an ever-shifting future. Jones’s practice centres on the act of storytelling and art’s intrinsic ability to disseminate narrative and experience. However, the inception of Jones’s career was clearly paved for a much simpler reason, in that “there was nothing else [he] could do.” During his schooling, report cards were riddled with D averages apart from art, so it was “either pursue [art] or getting a labouring job on a farm.” Jones left school prior to completion and was later supported by his family to enrol at the College of Fine…

If art tends not to exist (well) in a vacuum, the same may be said of artists. This is particularly true for the Australian sculptors Rosalie Gascoigne and Lorraine Connelly-Northey, who are the subject of an upcoming, carefully focussed survey at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV): Found and Gathered. I use the term “survey” loosely, however, as the exhibition is staged far from chronology. Instead, it centres on a series of sets: the diametric themes, subjects, and visual devices employed by both artists in their biographically discrete careers. Yet, while these sets suggest that, methodologically, a parallel can be drawn, the curators are quick to stress that the exhibition “is not a comparison.” Rather than being a retrospective of both women’s practices, Found and Gathered focuses on a particular…

We waited for Brad Hammond, the Director of the Orange Regional Gallery, with construction site manager Tony Luhan. Arriving in Orange in 2018, Tony has settled in the town. Like everyone you meet in the region, he enthuses about good shopping, cafés and restaurants, lively nearby villages. The gallery extension we’d come to preview is a material manifestation of this enthusiasm – while the New South Wales Government’s Regional Cultural Fund provided just over four million dollars, the Orange City Council added a million, and was prepared to lend the gallery another $500,000 to complete the project with technology – audio visual equipment in the seventy-five-seat theatre and LED lighting – new storage systems, and to refurbish a redesigned reception area. Brad arrived with hard hats and visivests. As we…

KHALED SABSABI’S SOLO EXHIBITION SURVEYS OVER TWENTY YEARS OF HIS WIDE-RANGING PRACTICE, USING CIRCULAR METAPHOR TO CONCEPTUALISE THE RHYTHMS OF LIFE, POLITICS AND FAITH. WHAT EMERGES IS AN INCISIVE ENGAGEMENT IN CURRENT GEOPOLITICAL DEBATES, AN AFFIRMATION OF THE PLACE OF SPIRITUALITY IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY, AND AN ABIDING COMMITMENT TO WESTERN SYDNEY. Founded by the followers of the poet and mystic Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī, the Mevlevi, or Mawlawiyya, is a Sufi order originating in Konya in south-central Turkey. They are commonly known in the West, somewhat inscrutably, as the “whirling dervishes,” for their ritual (sema) performed as part of dhikr (remembrance of God) ceremony. Through a rejection of the ego (nafs), the dervishes seek communion with the divine through a practice of repetitive spinning. In doing so, they mimic the…

Given national survey shows are often at the forefront of the art as cultural diplomacy model – showcasing, surveying, and value-signalling – this show embraces a transcultural exchange, while attempting to unsettle the idea of promoting cogent national narratives. Curated for the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of diplomatic relations between Australia and South Korea, the show’s curatorial process had to adapt to the global pandemic. Instead of trips to and within Australia, the curatorium for the show (including Gahee Park, Eugene Hannah Park, and Kani Kim from SeMA, and Alexie Glass-Kantor, Michelle Newton and Johanna Bear from Artspace) undertook “unlearning” exercises during their regular online meetings – a more durational and involved process than may have been elicited by travel. The title for the show was also a dialogic…

Within Puisque tout passe (This Will Also Pass), Hossein Valamanesh’s first European solo exhibition at the Institut des Cultures d’Islam (ICI), is a documentary that provides insight into Valamanesh’s fifty-year practice. It almost runs chronologically, detailing significant life experiences that have profoundly influenced his works. The artist himself gently narrates over the rolling footage. He describes how he finds churches and mosques as almost paradoxical spaces for him to enter. How can a person that doesn’t necessarily consider themselves religious feel a wave of spirituality when entering these physical structures? I find the gallery space to present itself as a similar paradoxical space. What makes an artwork, an assembly or application of physical materials to form imagery, placed within a physical location, provoke an emotive response from the viewer? This…