Innehållsförteckning för Issue 68 från Artist Profile

ARTIST PROFILE TEAM Editor KON GOURIOTIS OAM Art Director KIM GREGORY Deputy Editor IMOGEN CHARGE Principal Writer ELLI WALSH Sub-editor KATHLEEN LINN National Advertising Manager JILL TROCHEI Proofreader DR. GABRIELLE GWYTHER Illustrations SIMON FIELDHOUSE CONTACT EDITORIAL AND ADVERTISING OFFICES Square One Studios, 32 Bowden Street, Alexandria, NSW 2015 T +61 2 8310 2287 artistprofile@artistprofile.com.au artistprofile.com.au SUBSCRIPTIONS T +61 2 8227 6486 Suite 4, Level 1, 41–45 Pacific Highway Waitara, NSW 2077 subscribe@artistprofile.com.au ARTIST PROFILE IS PUBLISHED BY Bandicoot Publishing Pty Ltd PO Box 156, Alexandria, NSW, 1435, Australia COVER IMAGE Ken Unsworth by Effy Alexakis Story page 56 STORIES + PHOTOS EFFY ALEXAKIS is a documentary photographer based in Sydney JUDITH BLACKALL is a curator and writer based in NSW PROF. BRAD BUCKLEY is an artist, writer, and Professorial Fellow…

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.”Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey, 1890 First impressions are formed within seconds of meeting someone. You judge them—and just as quickly, they judge you. These impressions are determined by mannerisms, facial expressions, body language, and they can be near impossible to shake. Madeleine Pfull’s characters are no exception. Her portraits, often presented in diptychs or triptychs, capture the subtle nuances of behaviour and expression. Pfull grew up in a quiet suburban neighbourhood in Sydney, an environment often reflected in her works. She graduated from Sydney College of the Arts in 2015, mentored by artists such as Oliver Watts and Jelena Telecki, the latter introducing Pfull to oil painting, which “transformed” her work. After graduating, Pfull spent an arduous…

Teo Treloar was twenty-six when he decided to apply to Sydney College of the Arts (SCA), the University of Sydney. He graduated with a bachelor of visual arts (first class honours), followed by a master of visual arts in 2006. His experience of education up to that point was awful. Being dyslexic, he struggled with traditional methods of learning, particularly in high school where he dropped out at sixteen years of age. At that time the public school system wasn’t set up to deal with people like him, but he never stopped drawing. It was his way of escaping the intense anxiety that he experienced during school and his apparent continual failure in that system. After leaving school at sixteen, Treloar applied to East Sydney Technical College but was rejected…

In October, the National Gallery of Victoria will host a major mid-career retrospective of Melbourne-based Kamilaroi artist Reko Rennie. The exhibition traces his journey from making works on the inner-city streets of Melbourne to institutions around the world. The western suburbs of Melbourne in the late 1980s. A single mum gathers her children in the morning of what will prove to be a breathless, scorching Melbourne summer’s day. They make their way into the city and enter the doors of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). The air conditioning sweeps over them. The mother takes a seat on one of the couches in the foyer and pulls out a novel to read. The kids, used to this routine, disperse, and leave her to her reading. Her son, Reko aged twelve…

Here are brief segments pulled from fieldnotes that emerged from the beginning of the first two weeks of my fieldwork in the rural town of Carnamah, on Amangu Country in Western Australia. Picture this: the edge of the Wheatbelt, landscapes strewn with monocrops, salt lakes, and those infinite ribbons of flat road stretching into oblivion. I travelled to and from Carnamah from August 2022 to October 2023, under the auspices of a residency program with SPACED and the North Midlands Project. What has this led to? Artworks, workshops, ephemeral events, writings, friendships, and nascent research initiatives. All leading to and from Agripoet(h)ics, a yet-to-be-published fieldnote series. The path ahead was shrouded in the unknown, lost in the thick geopolitical grain of a late-stage agribusiness quiet, a small town of four-hundred…

The Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery’s booth of carefully curated works at Sydney Contemporary 2024 is drawn from their archive, which includes key historical moments, over the gallery’s forty-two-year history. A history of discovering and supporting some of the most recognisable Australian artists, alongside international artists, whose work is often unconventional, sometimes confronting, but always thought provoking. Selected works include a pair of previously unseen images from Bill Henson’s Paris Opera Project, 1990-1991, which was the result of an approach in the late 1980s by the Opéra Garnier and Opéra Comique to collaborate with them. However, Henson was more interested in documenting the audience and did so over a period of several months from different positions in the theatre. He used specific lenses that allowed him to shoot in very low light;…

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of Melbourne’s Charles Nodrum Gallery, a highly respected gallery that has established a formidable reputation for championing postwar Australian art as well as being a leading advocate of mid-century Australian art and abstraction. The establishment of the gallery, its evolution, and present reputation have their roots in Charles’ employment background during the 1970s as well as his own personal collecting history. During 1971-1975 Charles worked at the Joseph Brown Gallery gaining research skills, expanding his understanding and familiarity with Australian art, and developing his connoisseurship by being in contact with, and experiencing, the works in the Joseph Brown collection. From 1975-1978 Charles managed Christie’s Melbourne office, allowing him to gain a wider understanding of the art market and its workings. Subsequently he assisted Alan…

The first time I saw Jo Chew’s paintings, I immediately begged a mutual friend to introduce us. It was at the 2010 Tasmanian College of the Arts graduate show and as part of her third-year submission, Chew created a suite of small paintings of tree houses and three-legged dogs—a series that, in retrospect, she sees as self-portraits. In Optimism, 2010, a three-legged dog stands next to a pile of books, while a reproduction of her son’s crude drawing of a house sits in the corner. A single flowering plant sprouts from the harsh pebbly ground, a symbol of hope and renewal. The subject was inspired by her now ex-husband’s criticism of her pile of unread books. “You’re like a three-legged dog—you’re limiting yourself by not reading those books,” he told…

If Zoe Paulsen can do for Sydney Contemporary art fair what she did with the Incognito Art Show, she’ll have audiences camping overnight to be the first through the door. That was the scene at this year’s Incognito, just three years after Paulsen co-founded and produced the inaugural show in 2021. Incognito is an innovative, respectful, and successful way to raise funds for artists with disability to develop their creative practice. You need a big heart, a creative mind, and an exceptional work ethic to pull something like that off. Paulsen is bringing these personal qualities to her new position as director of Sydney Contemporary. Paulsen is an experienced arts professional with a bachelor of arts, media, and communications and a history of successfully delivering multiple contemporary art fairs in…

At Sydney Contemporary 2024, OLSEN Gallery will present new work from Leila Jeffreys, Shirley Purdie, Holly Greenwood, Eliza Gosse, and Dani McKenzie—five women whose work reflects variously on nature, on Country, or on scenes from contemporary life. For years, Leila Jeffreys has captured with great sensitivity the personalities of Antipodean birds. In her 2022 OLSEN Gallery exhibition, among her distinctive bird portraits, Jeffreys included an image of a spotted bowerbird egg with lines like paint spatters across its surface. At Sydney Contemporary, Jeffreys will present a new series of egg photographs, including the similarly sinuous camouflage upon the egg of the banded split. This foray into oology—the study of bird eggs and nesting behaviours—is a natural companion to Jeffreys’ broader interest in the conservation of birdlife. Each image is a…

If the central exhibition at the Venice Biennale is any indication of the direction in which the leading discourses in the art world are headed, then for this critic it seems like there’s little to be looking forward to. The trending shift towards focussing on an artist’s identity over the art itself is cemented with this biennale; it offers a lacklustre vision that pushes rigid self-definitions at a time when open-mindedness and a focus on our communalities are called for. The Biennale’s curator Adriano Pedrosa, who emphasised in interviews that he is the first Latin American and openly queer man to be selected for the role, has chosen Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere as the title and theme for the Biennale’s sixtieth edition. The name is based on a series…

Working as closely together as Picasso and Braque ever did, Crowley’s and Balson’s work metaphorically unfolds before your colour-saturated eyes. Moving from figuration to abstraction, then confidently entering areas of the non-referential, it is a physical experience that simultaneously lifts your spirits and has you hopping about in excitement. Eventually, the exhilarated viewer ends up with Balson’s late, great black and white works that predate the neo-expressionism of Anselm Kiefer, or Julian Schnabel at his occasional best. Between the lone artist working in the studio—from Giacometti in the past to Chelsea Lehmann or David Eastwood in the unfolding present—and artists working together as pairs, threesomes, or huge ensembles—Ulay and Marina Abramovic, Gilbert & George, The Telepathy Project (Sean Peoples and Veronica Kent), DAMP, or IRWIN—there is a third grouping of…

Entering the darkened exhibition space at the University of NSW (UNSW) Galleries forms a literal shift from the other two exhibitions on view—also mid-career solo presentations, by artists Lillian O’Neil and Paul Knight—both with brightly lit, white cube layouts. The darkness of How the earth will approach you requires a slowing of my pace and viewing, not least to allow my eyes to adjust, but also for the many discrete elements that make up the larger whole of the works to reveal themselves in diminished lighting conditions. The light that is present bounces from moving mirrored, white painted, and glass surfaces, calling my attention in different directions. The first room feels like an antechamber and contains only one work, A circular logic, 2023. Arranged in a semi-circle, it is composed…

Dear Allegresse, You’ve been working in Canberra for some time now, so you have an excuse. However, my surprise is that so many other people haven’t noticed MoHA floating above AGNSW in central Sydney. Although it’s not yet a household word, I’m sure more people are aware of it than either dare or care to admit. MoHA is kept afloat by hot air produced by the opinions of art viewers, and we know how everyone has something to say about art. The proximity to AGNSW ensures a constant flow of observations, with an added boost from the recently opened Sydney Modern. Insignificant, pretentious, and throw away comments are a precious resource. A sophisticated eavesdropping mechanism with an in-built crap-detector separates hot from cold and lukewarm dialogue, amassing a continuous supply…

The year 2024 is a special year as Australia somewhat confidently readies for the approaching Olympic Games in Paris. The national society feels it has a proud sporting record, if lacking in balance of achievements in intellectual, cultural, and moral terms. A form of cultural cringe perhaps. Lieutenant Cook didn’t discover our continent but did name the prison-colony South Wales, and New South Wales, after similar beaches in south Wales to beaches on our continent’s east coast. The year 2024 is the bicentenary of the official usage of the European word Australia by Matthew Flinders—from the Latin word Australis meaning southern—to name the entire continent. This year, artist Archie Moore’s kith and kin family tree installation, in a national and international first and a personal, well deserved, “rags to riches”…

In a corner of the cacophonous, chaotic New York Art Book Fair, stands a collection of potted rose bushes. Walking amongst them, the Australian artist Gabriella Hirst picks up a blade and proceeds to demonstrate how to cut at an acute angle into a thorny stalk. Peeling back the surface layer like skin, she gently tugs out the node and bundles genetic materials together to graft and propagate Rosa floribunda Atom Bomb rose. Which makes one wonder, what’s in a name? The rose at the heart of Hirst’s project How to Make a Bomb, 2015-ongoing, might smell as sweet if it was named something else, but that’s a moot point. This variety of ornamental flowering shrub was developed by Remier Kordes in 1953. He named it after the most powerful,…

On the rugged northwest coast of Lutruwita | Tasmania, nestled near the leafy Fern Glade Reserve and the winding Emu River, you will find the carefully aged whiskies of Hellyers Road Distillery. With its commitment to exceptional artisan craftsmanship, Hellyers Road Distillery is partnering with Sydney Contemporary 2024 to introduce the splendour of premium single malt whisky crafted in Tasmania’s unique climatic conditions to new audiences. The distillery’s story unfolds amidst the untamed beauty of Lutruwita’s wild oceans, the ancient takayna | Tarkine wilderness, and some of the world’s most pristine waters. These unique environments influence Hellyers Road’s products and the company’s approach to making. In 1997 a small group of local dairy farmers operating under the name Betta Milk, decided to diversify by forming a cooperative to produce premium,…

Drendel eschews a nostalgic view of rural life and the vivid experiences associated with his youth, recreating the low horizon line and flat plains of monotonous landscape, unrelieved by either natural landmarks or signs of activity. The relative absence of vertical structures in the local environment of farm blocks is referenced in Monument 2, 2024, where a large water tank looms over a recently harvested paddock. "I sometimes just like to make a disjunctive break in the composition of a painting. I also have a tendency to take the ordinary as subject matter and make something of it. The tank is an example where a very prosaic utilitarian object is placed in a situation out of its normal context only, to my mind anyway, to take on an almost heroic…

“Whenever I stand on a cliff looking at the sea, I envision an infinite beyond. The horizon lies within bounds and the imagination stretches to infinity.”Hiroshi Sugimoto The esteemed contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto has spent much of his creative practice questioning and reflecting on the transience of time, human existence and consciousness, the importance of art, invention, and the nature of infinity. Known principally for his sustained photographic explorations that have engaged him for over fifty years, his broad creative practice also encompasses sculpture, architecture, landscape design, interior environments, and major artworks in the public domain. Sugimoto brings an inherently curious and enquiring mind to each of his projects; he is constantly questioning perception and analysing relationships. His approach is open and playful at times, revelatory and nimble, traversing disciplines…

University museums are a significant and diverse sector within the broader museum community, embracing visual arts, natural history, ethnography, science and technology, social history, medicine, archaeology and classics, all within a university setting and construct. It is estimated there are more than 3,500 university museums spread across all populated continents. Some act as local, state, and regional cultural and scientific centres for their communities, others are aligned solely to a single discipline or faculty within the university. With collections in some cases dating back centuries, most began life as teaching facilities tied to a single discipline or faculty. The museums were largely inward looking, their collections used for teaching and research, and as teaching methods changed were at risk of becoming irrelevant within their own institutions. Yet the collections they…