Painting. More Painting Painting. More Painting Abdul Abdullah Travis MacDonald Nicola Smith Australian Centre for Contemporary Art Colleen Ahern Robert Macpherson Sam Songailo 30 July – 28 August; Teresa Baker Gian Manik John Spiteri 2 – 25 September 2016 Vivienne Binns Samson Martin Madonna Staunton Karen Black Helen Maudsley Esther Stewart Daniel Boyd Nigel Milsom Tyza Stewart Ry David Bradley Tully Moore Kristina Tsoulis-Reay Stephen Bram Jan Nelson Trevor Vickers Angela Brennan Elizabeth Newman Jenny Watson Kirsty Budge Nora Ngalangka Taylor Bradd Westmoreland Janet Burchill Jonathan Nichols Peter Westwood Mitch Cairns Jonny Niesche Ken Whisson Jon Campbell John Nixon Bugai Whyoulter Nadine Christensen & Unknown Artist Karl Wiebke Timothy Cook Rose Nolan Nora Wompi Juan Davila Daniel Noonan Marjorie Yates David Egan Nora Nungabar Nyapanyapa Yunupingu Hamishi Farah Alair Pambegan Diena Georgetti Oscar Perry Matthys Gerber Stieg Persson Nyarapayi Giles Tom Polo Irene Hanenbergh Elizabeth Pulie Melinda Harper Adam Pyett Louise Hearman Ben Quilty Raafat Ishak Lisa Radford Helen Johnson Lisa Reid David Jolly Reko Rennie Josey Kidd-Crowe Robert Rooney Fiona Lowry Gareth Sansom Moya McKenna Gemma Smith Tim McMonagle Kate Smith Foreword considers the material, perceptual acknowledge with appreciation the Contents and conceptual operations of many public and private lenders to Painting. More Painting explores contemporary painting as both a the exhibition, and the assistance the pictorial logic and medium self-referential, critical practice, and provided by artists’ gallerists HANNAH MATHEWS condition of contemporary painting as a means to explore the wider and representatives. We also to examine the ways in which artists conceptual implications of the work acknowledge our Media Partner Painting. More Painting 6 continue to reinvent painting within of art in the world today. JCDecaux, paint supplier Dulux, and strict limitations, and in response to our ongoing corporate and event new perceptual conditions brought The curatorial structure of Painting. partners, and philanthropic donors, QUENTIN SPRAGUE about by the advent of digital and More Painting was initially conceived who are acknowledged elsewhere in Six False Starts For An Essay On Painting. More virtual realms. by ACCA Curator Annika Kristensen the publication. and Associate Curator Hannah Painting 12 The exhibition is presented over two Mathews, and it has been a great We are grateful, above all, to the chapters, with each chapter structured pleasure to work with them on the participating artists – many of whom around a series of solo presentations development of this project. I would have created new work especially JUSTIN PATON alongside an expansive panoramic like to especially acknowledge for the exhibition – for the critical group exhibition set within a dynamic Annika and Hannah for their skilful insight and enduring inspiration of Necessity and glut: notes on painting 18 mural-scaled wall painting. The orchestration and management of their work. solo presentations offer a focused what is an ambitious and complex consideration of the practices of curatorial and logistic undertaking. Painting. More Painting is the JAN BRYANT fourteen Australian artists – seven first major institutional exhibition The Painterly 24 in each chapter – demonstrating We are grateful for the lucid analysis dedicated to contemporary a range of distinctive positions. and critical insights of catalogue Australian painting in over a decade. Two panoramic group exhibitions – essayists Jan Bryant, Justin Paton We hope that it stimulates further Mural Commission: Sam Songailo 32 encompassing some thirty artists in and Quentin Sprague, and for the engagement, debate, exhibitions each chapter, arranged alphabetically contributions of ACCA staff members and public appreciation of the role – present the work of early, mid who have written catalogue entries. that painting plays within the wider Solo Studies 33 and senior-career artists conceived Special thanks are also due to discourse of contemporary art. within the canon of painting and Stephanie Berlangieri, Curatorial the medium-specificity of painterly Intern, who has contributed to Max Delany Panorama: A–M 86 discourse. These are displayed upon a all aspects of the research and Artistic Director & CEO newly commissioned architecturally- development of the exhibition and scaled wall painting by Sam Songailo publication, along with ACCA’s Panorama: N–Z 116 which serves as a dynamic network staff and installation team for their within which a range of diverse and professionalism and commitment to at times incommensurate painterly the realisation of this project. positions are presented. An exhibition of this scope would Reflecting the resurgent activity not be possible without inspired and critical agency of painting over sponsorship and philanthropic the past decade, Painting. More support. We are especially Painting provides an overview of appreciative of the significant contemporary Australian painting support provided by Creative in a context in which diverse Partnerships Australia through the conceptual, polemic and stylistic Plus 1 Program, and we are equally connections and debates can grateful to the Gordon Darling be drawn between individual Foundation for their generous approaches across generations. It support of this publication. We

4 | 5 HANNAH MATHEWS the proliferation of painting currently or materialist, yet its fixed (final) form being made in this early part of the never represents an instance in the Painting. More Painting twenty-first century. Its intent is way of a snapshot. Painting involves to promote more detailed critical a temporal and material complexity exhibitions of painting and dialogue that never quite privileges the single Painting. More Painting is an around the discourse. moment in time. exhibition that acknowledges the continuing insistence of Painting. More Painting addresses Painting is autonomous. It does not contemporary Australian painting. painting’s demand for attention. need anything beyond its material Focusing on living artists, it takes into It responds to the return of early qualities. Painting does not need account early, mid and senior-career career artists to painting studios, the an immediate audience to justify practices from across the country. endurance of local painting practices, its operations, choices or positions. the current rise of publishing and It does not need a specific external The exhibition takes place a decade discourse about painting, and the environment. Painting comes from after the last large-scale institutional broader international focus given to the artist’s control of their own survey of Australian painters.1 While the medium in recent years. discipline and the discursive context artists have continually exhibited of painting itself. In turn it can enter paintings in commercial galleries In exploring the pictorial logic and into various sites and relations and independent art spaces, material condition of contemporary while retaining control. In a world of public institutions have tended to painting, questions around the contemporary art where ‘anything concentrate more on exhibitions that definition of painting naturally arose. and everything goes’, painting has focus on various thematics, histories Why painting? Why now? learned more and more to use its own and participatory experiences. In the material specificity to ensure a kind of instance of recent medium-specific Painting as an art form is deeply integrity and questioning that can’t be shows, video art and installation historical, innately self-reflexive and, simply unpacked from the outside. have become the new orthodoxy. somehow, in its material specificity, singular. Painting can pick up A painting is first and foremost a Painting. More Painting addresses qualities of other disciplines such painting. We understand this idea the gap between the unceasing as sculpture, photography and film, from Modernism. It is a condition of activity of painters and their and yet it exists first and foremost as thinking applied in a material way. It relative absence in institutional itself. This singular ability contributes may be this and only this but at the programming, however, it is not a to painting’s autonomy, endurance same time it also speaks to ideas, survey exhibition as such. It does not and, possibly, its strength – although discourses and concerns in the seek to be definitive. even now this is a contested world as we expect all artworks to interpretation. What is clear is that do. Contemporary painting’s self- Instead this two-part exhibition, painting continues to produce critical scrutiny of its own material presented over two months, brings new paintings, new methods and and contextual conditions occurs together the work of seventy- systems, and in doing so reflects simultaneously to its embodiment nine artists whose practices the world around it in a way that of the experience and sight of the demonstrate the scope of recent distinguishes it from other mediums. world in which it operates. In this painting in Australia; not simply way it is an urgent condition, not from a range of geographic and Painting takes time. Time for thinking, only in conversation with itself but generational contexts but through time in the studio, time working in conversation with its time. Each of distinctive positions, approaches, and reworking, time spent with the the artists in Painting. More Painting methodologies and lineages. The medium. Painting rewards time taken asks us as viewers to follow the exhibition presents one version for looking. A painting can represent particularity of their practice and to for four weeks, and then another, a both long durations and short periods understand their thinking in pictorial, recurring structure that acknowledges of activity. It can be indexical, diaristic material and conceptual terms.

6 | 7 The Australian Centre for mural that is at once monumental Contemporary Art (ACCA) has a long and immersive. Comprising a history of engagement with painting. pattern of three reccurring motifs, Before moving to its current location his work, Sorry to kill the vibe, but in an architecturally-designed time does exist 2016, accentuates complex in Southbank in 2002, the compositional elements of line ACCA’s smaller-scaled domestic and space while making present galleries in the Domain hosted the artist’s hand. Intended as a a range of painting exhibitions background armature on which and exhibitions about painting.2 the group component of Painting. Its current home, however, poses More Painting is displayed, its all- challenges for the display of the over quality alters the diverging medium. architectural perspectives of the room in a way that allows a range of In Painting. More Painting the paintings to co-exist. seven solo studies included in each chapter of the exhibition – fourteen Songailo’s work also interrupts the in total – take advantage of ACCA’s memory of the white institutional more conventionally scaled side walls on which most of the exhibited galleries. Each artist is afforded a paintings have previously been space in which to present a key work shown. Its schematic-like quality or body of works selected from the creates a volume in which these last ten years. These studies allow paintings temporarily exist together. the audience to consider the artists’ Its geometric forms are dynamic practice closely, observing distinct – pointing, linking and reaching approaches and concerns that have towards each other and other defined their work to date. These artworks across the room to form a paintings are discussed in further network, or matrix, of sorts. detail throughout this publication and the artists’ relationships to The group component of Painting. painting are expanded upon by Jan More Painting brings together Bryant in her text, The Painterly. a broad range of dedicated and rigorous practices to explore the In contrast, ACCA’s main gallery ways in which artists continue is defined by its vast scale and to reinvent painting within strict complex perspectival qualities: a limitations, and in response to literal kunsthalle. How to make a new perceptual conditions brought painting show in this space posed about by the digital and virtual interesting curatorial challenges that realms. Displayed in a linear hang in turn drew on the organisation’s and ordered alphabetically, with the history of working with artists on first chapter including the works of new commissions to address the artists’ surnames beginning A-M, unique spatial characteristics of this and the second chapter including gallery. those from N-Z, the work of sixty- four early, mid and senior-career For Painting. More Painting ACCA painters are brought together. worked with artist Sam Songailo Their specific works are presented to realise a monochromatic wall throughout this publication.

8 | 9 This temporary gathering of distinct 1 Victoria Lynn’s inaugural TarraWarra Biennial, Parallel Lives: Australian Painting Today, was held in 2006 and surveyed and sometimes competing positions contemporary painting through an expansive list of artists that included Richard Bell, Kate Beynon, Jon Cattapan, Nadine offers viewers the chance to draw Christensen, Dale Frank, David Griggs, Brent Harris, Natalya on the many diverse conceptual, Hughes, Aldo Iacobelli, Raafat Ishak, Joanna Lamb, Peter Maloney, Stieg Persson, Rusty Peters, Ben Pushman, Paul polemic and stylistic connections that Uhlmann and Anne Wallace. In 2010 the Art Gallery of NSW presented Wilderness: Balnaves Contemporary Painting that exist between generations. Linkages focused on painting and its relationship to landscape and emerge: there are artists interested nature with works by Del Kathryn Barton, Andrew Browne, Daniel Boyd, Stephen Bush, Tony Clark, Julie Fragar, Louise in image-making, semiotics, process Hearman, Fiona Lowry, Nigel Milsom, James Morrison, Alex Pittendrigh, Mary Scott, Megan Walch and Michael Zavros. and in the material behaviour of The Ian Potter Museum of Art, at the University of Melbourne, paint itself; others in the dialectic also has a history of contemporary painting exhibitions: Painting: An Arcane Technology (2001), curated by Natalie King and the painterly; some in the coded and Bala Starr included the work of artists Hany Armanious, Nadine Christensen, Adam Cullen, Diena Georgetti, Matthys subcultures of place; and several more Gerber, Brent Harris, Louise Hearman, David Jolly, Gareth concerned with cultural languages Sansom, Eve Sullivan, Anne Wallace and Constanze Zikos; It’s a Beautiful Day. New Painting in Australia: 2 (2002) curated by related to land and history. The range Bala Starr included Peter Booth, Mutlu Çerkez, Julie Dowling, Matthys Gerber, Brent Harris, Raafat Ishak, David Jolly, Tim is vast and demands close looking at Maguire, Tim McMonagle, Derek O’Connor, Vivienne Shark individual works before considering LeWitt and Anne Wallace; and Model Pictures (2011) which included James Lynch, Amanda Marburg, Rob McHaffie and the breadth of positions and allowing Moya McKenna. 2 ACCA’s inaugural exhibition was an installation of site- the connections to come forth. specific works by Melbourne painters Howard Arkley, Juan Davila and David Larwill. Each artist was given a room in the un-renovated building in Dallas Brooks Drive and invited to The group section of Painting. paint as they desired. Since then ACCA has presented the work of a variety of painters, including Tony Clark, Richard Larter, More Painting also provides a space Keith Haring, Imants Tillers, Peter Tyndall, John Dunkley-Smith, in which to explore the specific Stephen Bush, Jenny Watson, Margaret Morgan, Greg Creek, John Nixon and Jelena Telecki. dialogues that painters share as colleagues, as well as with artists that came before them. It seeks to illustrate the idea of a network of Australian painters. Artists have been selected to demonstrate a range of contemporary painting positions, and also for the ways in which their work takes part in cycles of influence and exchange. This relational quality is perhaps more interesting to artists and less tangible to new audiences of painting, yet it is key to how artists develop and sustain practices. It is significant to the formation of community. Songailo’s mural, and the individual works by the sixty- four participating artists displayed in relation to it, brings this notion of network into focus. Collectively they suggest that every painting is part of a bigger picture, and that all painting is connected.

10 | 11 QUENTIN SPRAGUE Contemporary Art’s main gallery. If recent painting at the Australian attention to its other iterations. It The exhibition’s self-reflexive format Contemporary Art, the phrase ‘post- this hang, which is backgrounded Centre for Contemporary Art, is provides two discrete exhibitions, only feeds this effect: it provides an Tumblr painting’ – as in a movement Six False Starts For by a large wall painting by the not a survey. A survey suggests a yet it suggests more still: in evoking armature upon which the curatorial like colour-field abstraction or Melbourne-based artist Sam certain kind of approach: not only painting in general terms it can’t phrasing can shift. At its mid-point appropriation – came up. An Essay On Painting. Songailo, acts like the exhibition’s does it purport to be objective, but it help but draw under its frame the it is re-hung: visit twice, and you More Painting1 engine room, the ‘solo presentations’, functions to secure selected practices practices and works not included, may well see two different, albeit Most would have some idea what as they are referred to, are something within history. A survey makes an even as it asks us to look at these related, exhibitions. Each might seem it refers to. A Tumblr aesthetic,

like the power generated. argument – implicit or otherwise – for practices and these works. interchangeable, but this is part of the marked by the endless scroll, is one 1. the importance of certain practices point. To make a definitive gesture, of transience: one image readily 3. becomes another, and then another Although it displays an ambitious, Because of this format we can’t help above others. as one would expect from a more still. The emphasis shifts from content intergenerational scope, Painting. but think of process: not only in conventionally presented exhibition, But Painting. More Painting applies a The exhibition Painting. More to flow: from the message itself, to the More Painting, an exhibition that terms of painting, but in relation to is to misunderstand the field of different curatorial method. For one, Painting by default poses a question technological medium of its delivery. features the work of seventy-nine the exhibition itself. The curatorial engagement. it’s far more subjective; it embeds that has been passed around art Although at some level we understand painters, cannot be understood to voice that underpins it is both a certain apprehension at its very worlds for some time, and remains In this, Painting. More Painting that this flow is somewhere archived make a definitive statement about suppressed and pronounced: there core. The challenge here, one senses, prominent even if one could be positions itself in distinction to the in its entirety, and thus permanent, painting. Sure, its borders have been are, of course, a clear set of choices is not what to say about painting, forgiven for thinking it had been other kind of exhibition it could our own memories of it are usually carefully set – a decade of practice in play – certain artists included, but how to construct the terms of answered some time ago (or if it have been. It is, for example, neither achingly brief. is considered, the focus is on living others not, for example – but at one engagement in a way that allows hadn’t then at least the pressing objective, nor historical. To be either artists, ‘painting’ is conceived in level these seem interchangeable, the specific character of painting to need to do so had by now faded): it would need to act far more blindly. As a motif for our times, many material terms – but the exhibition even arbitrary. More important is remain. To look broadly at painting what is painting? For one, it would need to operate would argue that this is an apt one. neither acts to historicise the how the logic of the exhibition’s one must somehow embrace the on an assumption that to ‘survey’ Under the internet’s ultra-mediated practices it contains, nor stages construction encourages one to uncertainty of the painter: the sense The answer presented at the specific painters as a means to make regime, images find themselves an argument for painting in terms think through the material at hand. that every painting could in fact be Australian Centre for Contemporary an argument about painting generally simultaneously at a premium and an that couldn’t be applied to art more If current painting can be pictured a different painting; that every work Art stretches between seventy-nine is possible. It’s not. Regardless of its all-time low. Visual representations generally. as a flow, Painting. More Painting simultaneously reaches forwards and artists and two interrelated curatorial clear material parameters, painting are absolutely dominant, but – attempts to capture it, as a dam backwards, anticipating and echoing ‘chapters’, drawing on cumulative is an almost impossibly varied perhaps perversely – their power If anything, Painting. More Painting might a river: the flow itself is stilled in equal measure. effect rather than individual undertaking. An exhibition like to move the viewer has been seeks the opposite. It shows painting but its strength is more clearly felt. example. It is an answer of Painting. More Painting, then, may in diminished to the point of fading as a practice passed between many Because of this, Painting. equivalences. As Kazimir Malevich’s fact be best characterised as a kind away entirely. Images have never practitioners; a kind of social activity We might ask what this approach More Painting makes apparent Black Square 1915 once proved, to of ‘anti-survey’. It takes on a survey’s been easier to produce, but nor have turned by many hands towards imparts. It clearly assists us something that I’d argue shadows comment on all paintings a painting broad tropes, but subverts them in they ever been harder to hold onto. many ends. Painting contains in understanding something can only be defined in the widest of all exhibitions, but which is the detail. What we get instead is a multitudes, it tells us; to apprehend fundamental about painting, but it terms: paint, canvas and support. particularly pronounced within picture of a network; a social field For art historians and artists alike, it we must forego surety, we must also acts to obscure. In this exhibition In a similar fashion, Painting. More the thematic group model: an mapped out between many players, this ever-increasing proliferation forget what we think we know about painting is spread thin; it seems as Painting can’t help but impart a exhibition, especially an exhibition all of whom, in this case, identify as represents a boom-time. There’s painting. We must think about where dispersed as it is concentrated; its sense of overwhelming materiality: of contemporary art, is defined as painters. so much to think about, so many it begins and ends, about the point edges overlap, at times it may even colour and form, for example, are much by its omissions as by its implications. If a vast void has been where it might become another seem to contradict itself. If we think writ large (think, for instance, of inclusions; by what it doesn’t say as Because of this the question of what created by the internet’s constant practice entirely. about painting, we realise, we must Sam Songailo’s vast wall painting in much as by what it does. This may painting is begins to shift: we wonder chatter, new ideas must fill it. But also think about contemporary art. We ACCA’s main gallery, which acts as a best be seen as a kind of negative instead where it begins to push it’s also surely a cause for anxiety. Look at the exhibition’s overarching must consider how each might open a kind of meta-painting that captures space that traces an exhibition’s against other practices, where its Art world discourse has always format, for example. Painting. More space for the other. all other paintings on display); so edges, and gives a sense of the outer limits may best be secured. been about elevating images from Painting unfolds in two interrelated exhibition, or exhibitions it could too the sense that although many 2. the mass of production, about versions, each of which presents have been, but now is not. of the painters included think well 4. identifying them as part of a master- up to seven painters in depth beyond painting’s borders it is To begin, a simple point: narrative, definitive or otherwise. alongside a broad-scale alphabetised Like a painting gestures towards nonetheless the general terms – the During initial discussions about To do this now, however, is to ‘panorama’ of individual works its alternate versions, so too does paint, the canvas, the support – that this essay between myself and Painting. More Painting, the two- fundamentally misunderstand the massed in the Australian Centre for chapter exhibition of current and Painting. More Painting draw map here the common ground. staff at the Australian Centre for

12 | 13 rules of the new game. Once, an in an atemporal world, an exhibition discourse, or one idea. Return to More Painting, at The Australian After all, long before we consider its some time now the smart money has essay like this may have been about at New York’s Museum of Modern her catalogue essay’s first sentence, Centre for Contemporary Art, function elsewhere, like any medium been on embracing the fact that art shoring up the curatorial premise Art, the curator Laura Hoptman and in particular that small section encourages us to double down on painting must first adapt to the doesn’t last, seeing it not as a pitch of the exhibition to which it refers. began an essay on current painting of text separated from its body this conclusion. Whereas The forever demands of its maker: it must prove for timelessness but simply as part It would make an argument for with the following sentence: by dashes: ‘perhaps the refusal’. now focused on a carefully selected itself malleable; that as general as it of culture’s broader spread, part of painting, much like the exhibition Immediately there is a telling group of practitioners – seventeen in is, it can be turned to specific ends. a process of near-constant renewal. itself does. It would suggest why What characterizes our cultural sense of uncertainty. It might first total – Painting. More Painting opens Before painting circulates in the Contemporary art – utterly ruthless certain practices endure regardless, moment at the beginning of this cause us to picture the painter its engagement outwards. It brings world at large it must first play out in its focus on constant change – or perhaps because, of the image- new millennium is the inability (for although Hoptman is thinking together the work of no less than in subjective terms. only underscores this. Artists find saturated climate we find ourselves – or perhaps the refusal – of broadly we can’t help in context seventy-nine painters. A handful are themselves bit-players in a narrative in. Painting would be identified as a a great many of our cultural but see the ‘artefacts’ to which she considered in some detail, but the In this light, painting might best be that by definition must be about vital activity, its use-value secure in artifacts to define the times in refers as paintings) as a figure who majority remain barely glimpsed: conceived as a series of endless- something else entirely. the culture at large. which we live. is maintaining a critical distance one work must act as a signifier seeming propositions that unfold, at from the culture at large; that they for the practice that carries it, least at first, within the parameters The painter’s self-made task is to My contention here, however, is that Painting – long marked by a pattern are enacting a conscious decision which in most cases is proven an of the studio. The logic it follows is of narrow this field, or not. Some it’s not. In a digital world painting of near constant return – was at this to not embed their work in their impossible undertaking. It’s the mass a specific kind. If (as many painters practices emphasise that they have is marked, if anything, by a striking moment once again claiming critical time. But the key, of course, is the of activity, rather than individual would surely argue) it is a form of to be everything all at once; that obsolescence. It is an old technology territory; although it had never really way in which Hoptman’s sentence perspectives, that thus comes to labour, it is a labour not at all like they must encompass all positions – perhaps the oldest – whose use- gone away, a narrative of triumph allows this idea to tussle with the fore. If Painting. More Painting the labour that occurs elsewhere. because increasingly we are aware value now must seem archaic at against the odds had again taken another, contradictory one: she is gives us a series of still points in the For one, the painter sets the terms of that all positions exist. For others, best. To paint is to accept something hold. Evidence lay everywhere, only suggesting – perhaps during a form of ‘solo presentations’ staged practice. They are working for no-one: this is a soulless undertaking, a kind of the medium’s impossibility to but The forever now provided a review of an earlier draft in which under the exhibition’s broader what they do, and how often they do of fatal cynicism that strips a practice enact an effect beyond the borders particularly blunt example: it was the unqualified statement she frame, it does so only to emphasise it, is up to them. In setting the terms, of meaning. For them there is only of its own discourse. Yet the the first time since 1958 that MoMA leads with seems far too certain painting’s insistent diversity. The the painter can also define what ever one investigation, constantly compulsion remains. Painting. More had staged a large contemporary for the material at hand – that this diffuseness here may for some seem kind of things they work on, and refined across the years, honed to Painting, a survey at the Australian painting survey. is a refusal. It may equally be an overwhelming: for every evident how. Some painters take a relatively an increasingly fine degree. From Centre for Contemporary Art which inability. She can’t be sure, and ‘type’ of painting – for every position straightforward route; the value of the outside, the differences that Because of this it’s hard not features works by seventy-nine therefore nor can we. a painter might take – there is the painting can thus be measured exist within such practices can seem to sense a certain anxiety in painters, can’t help but underscore another. against the time put into it, or in almost impossibly minute, but this this through sheer diversity and Hoptman’s opening gambit. There’s For anyone engaging with relation to the painting or paintings must be the point. The investigation volume. What is it about painting a lot at stake: against a backdrop of contemporary painting this It follows that the uncertainty that came before. Others less so: it locates finely grained detail: you see that continues to engage our contemporaneity – a period most uncertainty seems important to touched on above is particularly has long been unremarkable for a now what before you could not. attention? Why now, when its often defined in terms of plurality – a acknowledge. It goes to the heart of prominent. The question raised by painter to not even touch their work. medium-specific survey cuts firmly claim to uniqueness has long how we might read paintings not Painting. More Painting, although The labour is still there, but in a 1 The structure of this essay is taken from Janet Malcolm’s against the grain. How might such an profile on the American painter David Salle, ‘Forty-one false been superseded by the ubiquity as singular objects, or as individual essentially the same as that raised different way. starts’, first published in The New Yorker, 11 July, 1994. of every kind of position staged approach be justified? What can it tell practices bordered by carefully by Hoptman’s exhibition, is due all at once, by the emergence on us about the current moment that a defined parameters, but in more to volume far more pronounced: One assumes that such processes a near-daily basis not only of new more inclusive, broad-scale survey of general terms. How does painting Does this quality – this diffuseness hold their own promise, that they technologies, but new means of contemporary art might not? function in the contemporary world, – represent a refusal or an inability? provide a painter the means to experiencing images, of circulating we might ask: what does it do? Is it evidence of a critical position, or translate the world around them Hoptman’s position, that the notion of and consuming them? simply an unavoidable symptom of in a variety of different ways. As atemporality (essentially the character One thing that’s clear is that our times? with artists generally, painters both Why is it that painting – so clumsy, of many histories manifesting all at painting, as a collective activity, is capture and construct images; they so apparently useless – still ‘works’? once) is particularly pronounced in more diffuse than ever. Sometimes 6. produce and consume them; they contemporary painting, underpins this is evident in one practice, or must attempt to create lasting affects 5. much of her answer. It’s this, she even one painting, but it is especially I want to first ask what painting even as this is proven time and argues, that lends current painting so when multiple painters are drawn does, or how it functions, for again as a quixotic undertaking. For In 2014, in the catalogue for The its marked instability, its refusal together. The exhibition Painting. painters. most, if not all, it’s impossible. For forever now: contemporary painting to collectively gather beneath one

14 | 15 16 | 17 JUSTIN PATON Katharina Grosse when she really rips inquiry’. But it is also something imposed upon all critics, historians us. And lucky is the painting that before. It means arguing, as images it up. But the painting that reaches us you do, as in ‘I’m painting’, and and curators, if only to disabuse us someone wants to live with. stream past on all sides, that this Necessity and glut: is usually the size of a person. It lives no one who talks about painting of the notion that the thinking in one image should stay. somewhere in the space between should do so without occasionally a painting can be separated from • notes on painting • the size of someone’s head and the attempting to make a painting. its making. ‘Tell us about the ideas ‘Just because painting failed span of someone’s arms. It is not for The initial and overwhelming behind your work’ painters are often Duchamp, didn’t mean that painting The methods for making an image ‘the audience’ or ‘the sector’ or ‘the sensation of feebleness is bracing asked, as if the painting is merely Painting isn’t dead but it gets up and itself had failed’. Trevor Winkfield stay are an open secret. They are demographic’ or that suspiciously and immensely instructive, as one a door behind which the thoughts risks death every day. ‘I nearly died there to be gleaned from the stayers docile crowd of ciphers known as strives to summon sense from blobs that generated it are stowed. But the • out there’ performers say when no of the past, which wait for us in ‘viewers’. When you come as close of muddy colour using a ridiculous thoughts that matter most are not one laughs at their jokes or stops It is obligatory now when writing museums. To learn some of them, to the painting as the painter stood stick topped with bristles. Persist, lined up beforehand to be put into about painting to furrow one’s brow I recommend making a series of talking during their songs, and that’s however, and humiliation yields to to make it, it is for you and you only. or clipped onto the painting. The about the rise of the digital – about appointments with Hans Memling’s the kind of dying that painting runs another instructive sensation – one Painting is radically intimate. thoughts that matter most emerge the unstoppable flood of electronic The Man of Sorrows in the arms of the risk of all the time. Painting that real painters often mention from the painting, like heat rising off images and the bottomlessness of the Virgin, a 550-year-old painting doesn’t need you to dress in black • semi-superstitiously in their studio a compost heap. our appetite for them. Accordingly, that argues afresh for its existence and stand around for the funeral, conversations. This is the feeling The tricky part is conveying how this I suppose I ought to feel anxious every time I visit it at the National as if this is The End forever. What it that the surface in front of you is • intimacy exists within a sense of about the preschool kid I saw on Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. needs is for you to turn up at the club beginning to develop needs, that it is decorum or distance. Though we are Inspiration is real, but the the bus one recent morning, who It is a painting I feel so obscurely and hope it doesn’t die tonight. And responding to the attention you are standing where the painter stood and metaphors it needs are horticultural was trying to swipe the cover attached to that I’m not sure what I when it does die out there, sweating paying to it by telling you what kind looking at the surface they touched, rather than meteorological. It of her picture book because she can say about it, but what I noticed under the stage lights, it needs you of picture it wants to be. Even when though we are seeing the strokes they doesn’t strike like lightning from the thought it was a touch screen. Here last time, which I had not before, to care and hope enough to show up you are doing nothing more than made and inwardly rehearsing the heavens: it blooms behind you like was a scene apparently designed is the pull between descent and again tomorrow (because nothing is attempting the simplest copy, every gestures that generated them, though an unwatched plant. And the ground to dismay any friend of painting: rising. Everything in the painting sweeter than a comeback). Instead of stroke demands a counterstroke, we may be close enough to smell it grows in is work. a premonition of a world where tells you Christ is gripped by gravity dirges and memorials delivered by every colour requires an adjustment the materials they smelled as they unmoving images are regarded and mortality. There’s the slump of gloomy popes and poohbahs, what of another, and because the medium • worked, it is crucial to this intimacy as a frustrating irrelevance. At his head, the trails of his blood, his painting needs is hecklers, groupies, is fluid, viscous, sticky, volatile, that the painter has left the scene – Yes, Painter X is better, greater, the same time, however, it was a sallow body positioned low in the buffs, aficionados, nerds, family a quiet urgency also enters the that they have ceded authority to this more important than Painter Y. But scene that made the situation for composition. But what compelled members and fans. equation. You are building your image unlikely stand-in, a piece of fabric or Painter Y may have qualities that painting marvellously clear. Now afresh last time was the fabric in real time from matter that slips • board spread with colour. This letting Painter X does not. And beware that everyone carries with them wrapped around him, fabric that go, oddly, is what permits art to visit and slides as you wield it, and only seemed, the longer I looked, to fall But there are only so many seats in by agreeing to be like the medium, to those observers for whom the and sees the world through these places normal conversations don’t go. back like the petals of an opening a club. Shouldn’t painting be playing yield and respond, will the painting greatness of the greats is merely responsive screens, the stillness of There are things that the performer flower from a figure that was rising. I to bigger audiences? So runs the continue to grow. No painter has an excuse to be perpetually painting seems stranger and more will say while they are performing, don’t say conclusively that he’s rising objection and the answer is Dear God, described this strange transfer of disappointed with everything scandalous than ever before. For distanced from us by the stage and its or falling. In the painting both things no, painting shouldn’t. The need to power more eloquently than Philip else. One of the joys of looking eyes accustomed to swiping and lights, that they would not say to us happen. And the presence of both please on an industrial scale has had Guston, who spoke of returning to the at painting today, in the wake scrolling, a painting is effectively a directly. Painting, likewise, does not possibilities on one centuries-old unhappy consequences for sculpture, studio in the morning and peeking in of the collapse of the faith in stalled iPad – a permanent glitch, talk straight to us. It agrees to let us surface is what makes the painting turning formerly needling and nimble with trepidation at the golems he had artistic progress, is encountering a surface that perversely refuses listen in. necessary. artists into bloated stadium rockers. helped to life the night before. the work of the minor masters, to yield up other images. This does the artists’ artists, the character not mean that painting is obsolete. It’s the bullfrog theory of cultural • • engagement: When in doubt, inflate. • actors in art’s big movie. Pollock But it does mean it just got harder. Painting needs all of us not to wish ‘For me, what is there left to do … is a genius, an unlatcher, a kicker Painting in the age of the internet Painting is possible today, but is it that kind of ‘success’ upon it. There only to sing small’. Paul Cézanne Of course, we copyists and down of doors, etc., but have you does not mean deploying digital necessary? The question is a good amateurs are not going to emerge seen what happens when Milton squiggles and Photoshoppy fades one to ask of painting in the age of are rare painters who seem most • themselves in front of a sizeable from our efforts with paintings like Avery puts a chalky green beside – the tics and tricks of hedge-fund the Art Fair, when the death of the crowd: I think of Anselm Kiefer when Painting is a ‘problem’, a ‘history’, a Philip Guston’s. Nonetheless, the pink? The paintings we revere on formalism. It means making the medium seems less of a threat than he unstops the whole orchestra or ‘project’, a ‘discourse’, a ‘formation’, thrilling and humiliating exercise museum walls are not necessarily stillness and singularity of the complacent overproduction. To walk a ‘mode of production’, a ‘field of of actually painting should be the paintings we’d take home with painting’s surface count as never through the big fairs in Hong Kong

18 | 19 or London is to see many examples ‘… sometimes a painting can those wishful terms that reveals can make it happen. It is Guston I of what might be called placeholder operate within its borders, sitting more about the speaker than the find myself thinking of again, the paintings – paintings that exist to quietly on the wall, and other times thing spoken of. But because it lumpen eloquence of the 1970s occupy the place that painting is it can infect the whole room and the is old, slow, difficult, stubborn, paintings – the way he puts one expected to occupy in these settings. person standing in front of it; it can marginal and uncontemporary, thing bluntly beside another and has Placeholder paintings pay us the jump outside of itself’. Dana Schutz painting is well placed to express you believe in the world thus made. dubious compliment of giving us a sense of estrangement from Here is a pyramid, he says, and here what they think we want. Like other • and discontentment with some of beside it is a shoe. And because of products of the Instagram age, what Then there is strangeness. By the prevailing conditions of our how he paints them, the pyramid is a they desire most of all is to to be strangeness I don’t mean the time. In our culture of outcomes, face and the shoe is a torso and the Liked. Away with them. Hard as it obviously surreal, fantastical or deliverables, efficiencies, red earth they rest on is a rising tide. is to define, what one wants to find outlandish. I’m thinking instead of instantaneity, spectacle and • instead is the necessary painting: the the way painting simultaneously calculated obsolescence, painting painting that the painter needed to clarifies and makes mysterious. that is slow, inquisitive, persistent Painting is yours to make. make and which you needed to see. We’re familiar with the idea that, by and doubting reminds us there are describing the world well, painting other ways of being and seeing. • brings us closer to it, drawing Painting may not be much in the end: More than beauty, quality, sublimity, attention to what we hadn’t noticed. a delay, a lovely tremble, a minor consistency or perfection, a sense But the paradox of the painting heresy, a stammer in the speech of of necessity is what I want most is that, while drawing the world Culture. But it is not nothing. from a painting today, and it lives close, it also supplants or replaces • for me in four qualities especially. or resists it. That is the oddity and First is modesty, a sober evaluation fascination of Giorgio Morandi’s And it is yours. As the maverick of painting’s power and scale in paintings: the way they seem at once American portraitist Alice Neel put it, the world. The necessary painting to take hold of their objects yet also ‘The minute I sat in front of a canvas begins in full knowledge of all the to push them away, smearing and I was happy. Because it was a world, things painting can’t do or hasn’t blending their outlines in a paste and I could do what I liked with it’. realised. Productively disillusioned of muted tones. As they encounter I realise there is a risk of recycling and cheerfully disenchanted, it gets again the familiar shapes of his romantic stereotypes or exaggerating up and gets on with the job. Second vases, pitchers and boxes, Morandi’s the freedom of artists – not least at is a certain nakedness of physical wandering, wondering brushstrokes a moment when a working life as an means, a recourse to ‘the bare seem to be asking: What is the artist is becoming harder to achieve. necessities’. Rather than borrow world? Can we possess it? How But if you can find the time and the or emulate fluency, the necessary constant is it, how changeable, how resources, if you can secure the part- painting will speak plainly and attainable? Even when we limit our time job and make space in the small awkwardly. Third and crucially, the gaze to a few boxes and jars, what hours, if you can nab a patron or necessary painting is a painting that are we certain we can place our faith wrangle a residency or simply get up could have failed. It grew uniquely in? There is something consoling in early and get to work on the kitchen and its final shape is one that the Morandi’s deep attachment to these table, then in front of your canvas painter could not have foreseen. And few pieces of the quotidian world. you can be (as painter Rebecca because it was discovered in good But his painting is also a way to hold Morris writes) the master of your faith rather than predetermined and the world at bay, the better to think own universe. Consider the horrors merely executed, its appearance about it. of directing a film or erecting a vast registers, for both the painter public sculpture – the HR issues, the and the viewer, as a surprise and • accountancy bills, the endless battle something of a gift. I don’t think we can say on this with compromise. But in front of basis that painting is a ‘critical’ a canvas you preside over a world • medium – ‘critical’ being one of where anything can happen if you

20 | 21 22 | 23 JAN BRYANT but that it was overly complicit with laid down on the canvas] … When investigation into what constitutes experienced directly. And yet, it is example, a painting’s substructure the interests of the market.4 This I paint, in my heart I’m feeling it. the ‘painterly’, as a specific quality of worth saying again that painting’s (its memory) of wetness, as The Painterly was in the context of the decisive Maybe that spirit’s there, maybe painting, be a productive mechanism reproduction and dissemination well as the particularity of its influence that conceptualist and post- Malilu is teaching me … because I for such reflection? through the unforeseeable pathways surface, and the specificity of its When I see this light irradiate a minimalist modes of making were love that country. When I was a little of the internet and other digital texture (its touchability) — digital picture, I feel so rewarded that I having on art communities around girl I just felt the pull, the feeling Painting and the painterly spaces, where colour and size representations are nonetheless would go on making pictures with the world. Minyma Malilunya. I feel ‘wiru’ adjustment tools are on hand, a good source of information. the same joy if no one but myself [beautiful] inside that country’. To introduce this nebulous and leads to a strange transformation For even if in the end the digital felt as I do about them. Take note There was a further complication evasive term, ‘the painterly’, is an of a painting into a manipulable delivers only bare form, it enables that this awesome manifestation for ‘Painting’ during this period: it While the continuing influence attempt to isolate what might be pixelated surface. This has the effect representations of painting to be of life that, (deluded or not), I was implicated in criticisms about of postcolonial and decolonising particular to painting, and to nothing to radically transform what this thing disseminated widely, mitigating love in a picture, this enhanced the kind of art history we had discourses has witnessed the other than painting, while also once was, this painting. painting’s exclusivity — its presence presence, this supercharged life inherited. A narrowly focused history opening up of a more inclusive acknowledging that such a thread in a situated space and time. you mean when you say reality, of art, enclosed within European field of contemporary painting in of thought is not an attempt to strip For Karl Wiebke, ‘A painting is has nothing to do with the objects epistemologies, was canonised by Australia (and globally), it is not painting of its interconnectedness not a picture’. This wonderfully This is not to fetishise paint as a represented, rather it is distinct a small group of ‘master’ historians my point in raising this history in with other practices and histories. simple thought belies the actual material above other materials, and from them, pre-existent, surging who tied judgement to lines of 2016 to repeat the complex play Nor is it to reinstate the kinds complexity of its claim and the rich by extension the painter over other up like an electric flow, without artistic ‘refinement’,5 placing painting of discourses that flowed in and of essentialist judgements that implications that can be mined from artists, nor is it a way to idealise the your ever knowing where it comes at the top of a hierarchy of art around the subject of painting last Clement Greenberg applied to it. As painting is translated into a idea that an image must come into from… making.6 Somehow this also seemed century. Rather, it is to suggest that painting last century.8 For Matthys digital representation of itself, it being from a blank surface.9 David Jean Dubuffet1 to exclude or throw to the periphery criticisms about painting’s outmoded Gerber, for instance, there is no undergoes a process of reduction, Jolly and Ry David Bradley are whole groups of painters from other status were merely supplements interest in finding an essential which is also a form of loss. In other part of a long tradition of painters cultures and people who were not to the act of painting. What past relation in painting: of greater words, painting becomes a mere whose source material is found in Jean Dubuffet’s statement on men. A power struggle ensued in the criticisms blurred was the specificity concern is the figure of the painter picture of itself, an arrangement of analogue and digitally generated painting was written in France in second half of the last century over of what it is to paint and what it is who negotiates the complex process picture cells (pixels). As a numeric- photography, opening up a dialogue 1960. It speaks of the potential for what art could be and who could be to distinguish ‘the painterly’ from of painting’s relation to the world based medium, the digital is wholly with the pervasive circulation of achieving unspeakable affects in seen to be making it, questioning in the material specificities of other and its own history. This attempt to other to the chemical structure of images in our world. Photographic painting. Artists from Painting. More particular, painting’s sovereignty. mediums. Alongside this, there has find something peculiar to painting paint and is far removed from the stills are taken from events in Jolly’s Painting were asked to respond. been renewed critical interest in is not to treat it as an isolated and activities of painting, which, as Abdul life, to be revived through the act The inclusion of Indigenous artists in materials and aesthetics, applied to discrete practice, because painting Abdullah writes, is a ‘process of of painting. During the processes of Introduction Painting. More Painting challenges contemporary modes of making and operates for many artists today as delivering, placing, and shifting wet painting not only are the memories an understanding of painting drawn thinking. In the knotty exchanges only one material choice among mediums to communicate an idea’. of the original event altered, but Many painters in Australia in the solely from European-focused between painting’s production a plethora of possibilities, which There is a certain kind of madness in also the photographic affect of the latter part of last century were discourses and knowledges. It and its reception, these concerns are likely to flow from conceptual this activity, he observes, ‘a specific original image, now imbued with confident about painting’s place as recognises the integral place indicate a decisive shift away from demands. Taking these qualifications joy and a guilty pleasure, in the the specificities of paint. Bradley’s a robust activity and ‘were never that Indigenous artists hold in the ‘anti-aesthetic’ decades of last into consideration, if ‘the painterly’ capacity to overcome the obstacles paintings, on the other hand, were much concerned’ as Stephen Bram contemporary Australian art, without century.7 And while an intellectual is to be a useful way to understand of a blank surface’. generated from postcards found remarked, ‘with painting in itself: eliding the important differences and response to painting remains something about painting, then during a research trip to the New we all used painting as a means experiences that are found in the important — socially, collectively, its defining qualities will need To give the digital its due, however, York City Library. What began as to articulate relationships. The diversity of artists who identify as politically — questions about how it to be applied tentatively and its a digital version can tell us a lot postcards sent from Australia in the significance of the work was always Aboriginal today. Teresa Baker, from is experienced and reflections upon possibilities kept in play. about a painting, particularly about 1930s, now archived in dusty files, in the relationships, in the perception the Kanpi community, expresses how our senses are affected have its form, even if it is incapable of have been transformed into paintings of information expressed materially’.2 beautifully a very specific experience also come increasingly into play. Perhaps the painterly, therefore, communicating certain formal whose surfaces have taken on the Despite the positive environment of painting when she describes the Would this experience be different might be better approached and material qualities. In other feel and appearance of a digital that local painters enjoyed, debates influence of Malilu, her pre-eminent to the way we experience other art obliquely, beginning with painting’s words, I can see what a painting screen. Bradley recognised a parallel coming out of America in the same female spirit ancestor: ‘I’m thinking forms, such as film, for instance, relation to the immaterial-materiality is ‘about’, if not what it ‘is’. Thus, between this form of communication period claimed that painting was (when I am painting), oh this Malilu or the way we negotiate the spatial of digital. It is an old claim that even while recognising that a loss (the postcard as an open, public not only an outmoded medium,3 travelling here [referring to marks affects of sculpture? Might an painting needs to be seen and of certain values is inevitable — for message), and the way social media

24 | 25 works today. ‘That postcards can still ‘without you ever knowing where ‘There is a great difference felt When I spoke with Vivienne Binns, time of the work, the time of its The differing methods, practices and be sent today is slightly anachronistic, it comes from’. It is an unspeakable between the affection for a subject we discussed at some length how making. And yet, painting is capable cultural knowledges of the individual an out-of-time/timeliness that also moment of life, this painterly of painting and the desires I stability/fragility plays out in the act of surpassing historical time. This is painters should not be thought of belongs to painting as it persists moment, which comes to the painter harbour to work on the painting. of painting: Dubuffet’s ‘supercharged life’, and as fixed or completed, but rather, as amidst digital signals’. at unexpected times and sometimes And after the working on, the Helen Johnson’s ‘stripe of life’. It is a becoming in continual flux, and in unexpected ways. It is also the completion of a work doesn’t ‘I discovered years ago to my the sense of vitality inscribed on the Painting. More Painting as a cut into Enhanced presence moment when the language of enhance or give further weight amazement that one can reach a surface of the painting that persists the ongoing continuum of each artist’s painting ‘breaks its rigid signification’. to what has been painted, or to point in the work where there’s through time. practice. Some paintings comply with the series of thoughts that have nothing to be done that is wrong. the language of ‘the dominant It is a moment clarified by Angela helped to seal it. These are distinct Each step taken then, is integrally ‘My painter self’13 Karl Wiebke considers ‘painting as a organisation of life’,10 and are Brennan when she writes: ‘These from the atmospherics or this part of the whole’. materialised form of being, with the incapable of upsetting the ordering days, people seem embarrassed supercharged nature that enables a To speak about the figure of the help of light, paint and some matter of paint on a surface. Others aim to talk about ‘enhanced presence’ painter to paint, on and on … This This also aligns with Angela painter (the other) carries a risk of to paint on’. He understands ‘being’ for an affect that is more ‘poetic’, and ‘supercharged life’ in relation is not to belittle my relationship Brennan who wrote: (mis)representation. It also threatens as something constant, something for a ‘liberated language’, to to painting. But to me it seems to the subject, in most cases it is — albeit inadvertently and far too that endures, but it endures within quote the Situationists (1957–72), that the life of a painting is distinct more intuitive a process than the ‘There is inbuilt architecture soon in our historical moment — the incompleteness of time. In other language that is able to recover ontologically. It has a mind of its actual painting process…’ to the painting. Anything can to reinstate romantic myths about words, the constant is the stability ‘its richness, language breaking its own and, in some sense, this has happen if you are plugged into painters that were effectively of being, while the flux comes from rigid significations … The “poetic”, nothing at all to do with anything To what might painters be referring this. But you only get to that challenged (overcome) last century. the painter’s engagement with the therefore, depends on the richest outside of itself, including the artist when they say that a painting comes state when you are immersed, It becomes a matter of treading very vitalities of life and matter. Whereas, possibilities for living and changing and anything represented’. Brennan into itself, and is ‘done’? Helen engaged and right into it. That’s carefully and around very different for Lisa Radford, the relationship life at a given stage of socioeconomic shares with Dubuffet the idea that Johnson describes it as being ‘like a when the paint speaks. Not worldviews and knowledges. between the painter and the process structure’.11 To say, therefore, that a painting is both connected to window that opens up, within which the look or the image but how of painting is ‘openness to the some paintings acquiesce to the the artist, but also, at some point, you can push at the painting and it the paint is acting. As such, a Nyapanyapa Yunupingu is a Yolngu elemental nature of liquid paint and order of the day is to confer upon becomes strangely removed. can retain that energy, but I think it is painting paints itself. I’m never woman from north-east Arnhem to the elemental nature of subjectivity others a certain responsibility (a possible to overwork any painting and sure what is going to happen Land. She uses the painting methods and experience’. Formed in response burden perhaps) to be more than That a painting can possess vitality, ruin it, easily’. In contrast, Dubuffet next, but the painting knows. If of her ancestors, but without to social interaction and conditioning, this, to be more than mere pictorial a life, separate from the life of wrote, ‘When this happens (I have I knew then the painting could reference to her clan stories. This is ‘subjectivity can be a shaky, unstable information circulating through the the painter and separate from the often remarked, and always to my not exist’. a position that consciously blends sense of oneself, and is not to be channels of a receptive art market. viewer, a life that exists alongside surprise, that the effect is a very traditional methods with content confused with the continuity of ‘being’ these lived realities, is a point Helen stable one, contrary to what you The observation that materials taken from her own life, from her in the terms Wiebke describes. As the Negotiating his way through the Johnson also makes: ‘With some might think, so that, once it appears, have an independent existence everyday experiences. Flowing from painter commences a new work, she soupy, sodden days of France’s of my paintings it is a clear instant you can change and push around was also a claim made for film by this is a style that is very much her begins in a state of conformism (of collaboration with Germany during when the work becomes itself and all the elements of a picture without Jean Luc Godard, as he battled (nay own and quite distinct from other the past, and of her own sense of self). the war (and its after effects), the you know it’s done and that it’s weakening it), the effect persists…’12 mourned) the coming of digital Yolngu artists. When speaking of She proceeds in doubt, and with great painter Jean Dubuffet, adding dirt, ready to detach from you and be in For some of our painters, this point in the last century. He suggested her Yirrkala drawings, Yunupingu care. The writer, Maurice Blanchot, scratches and other marks to his the world, like it comes on strong. of ‘completion’ — which might better that memory resides in a filmic describes this deliberate move away explained that poetry consists of ‘the painting, described the moment Others flirt with the idea of coming be thought of not as an end point, but image in complicated ways, not from traditional stories: ‘I didn’t do peculiarity of turning toward, which when a painting begins to ‘radiate into that state but then it peters out, more of a pause within the continuity just as a record of subject matter, trees, rocks or anything else, not at is also a detour. Whoever would life’ as ‘enhanced presence’. It is or the next day it’s not located where of a body of work — is a fragile not just as traces of the maker, but all. I only made designs. I haven’t advance must turn aside. This makes also what Helen Johnson describes you thought it was (because it has condition, easily upset, while others, as itself, as living material, and made any mistakes, none’.14 Rather for a curious kind of crab’s progress. so wonderfully as ‘a stripe of life drifted from that initial infant ego- in accord with Dubuffet, consider this that this preserver of time is all the than re-interpreting traditional Would it also be the movement moment’, the point when a painting driven delight at having produced state as an enduring and stable one. more significant because of the stories, there is a concentration on of seeking?’16 This ‘movement agitates sense perception in something new)’. It is something Cairns calls ‘a matter- sensational response it can induce in the painting process, which may of seeking’, entangled with the unspeakable ways. This intensified, of-factness’ that brings him to a state a viewer. Although it operates very include a material exploration of conflicting emotions and sensations bearing down on the fullness of Mitch Cairns has commented about of stillness: ‘I often feel very still when differently to film, painting too has the sensation of earth pigments, of making, entails a becoming-other, present-ness, surges ‘up like an the relation of subject matter to these looking over a day’s work, I’m just sensate potential, a way of affecting counterpoised with the hard lines of throwing subjectivity into doubt, into electric flow’, as Dubuffet writes, qualities of painting (this ideal): looking. The after effect is oddly sober’ our senses by locking us into the marker pen.15 movement and change.

26 | 27 Working within the constant This comes with the qualification 1 Jean Dubuffet, ‘Statements and documents: Artists on art and reality, on their work, and on values’, Daedalus, vol. 89, movement of life, as Vivienne Binns that a discussion of the painterly no. 1, Winter, 1960, p. 95. 2 All artist quotes were taken from email or phone exchanges describes her engagement with forms only a small part of a much with painters from Painting. More Painting over the past two painting, is a durational and visceral wider (and necessarily contested) months. 3 For example, see Louis Aragon, ‘The challenge to painting’ process. At times there is a pushing field of activity. This involves seeing (1930), reproduced in Aragon et al, The Surrealists look at art, Lapis Press, Venice, California, 1990; or Douglas Crimp, ‘The forward to see what happens, and, at a painting in the context of a wide end of painting’, October, vol. 16, Spring, 1981, pp. 69–86. others a collapsing back, a becoming range of considerations, such as 4 See Benjamin Buchloh: ‘the new language of painting — now wrenched from its original symbolic function — has become inert, even a potential stopping point. its political, social, philosophical or reified as ‘style’ and thus no longer fulfils any purpose but to refer to itself as an aesthetic commodity within a dysfunctional Activating the movement between wider aesthetic implications. In a discourse’, ‘Figures of authority, ciphers of regression’, pushing and collapsing are diverse contemporary context, there would October, vol. 16, Spring, 1981, p. 44. 5 The methodologies of Irwin Panofsky and Clement Greenberg but inevitably conflicting emotions be no single concept of painting are two examples of European art history that tied work to specific structures of time and notions of authenticity that (including doubt, trepidation, that would be adequate to meet have been contested in recent decades. foolhardiness, certainty…), as well as the miscellany of our painters’ 6 This became crystallised in the work of art historian Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), and to a lesser extent Alfred Barr a mixture of conscious, intellectual diverse methods or singular ways (1902–1981), the first Director of MoMA. They propagated an internationalist perspective that was later viewed as American- decision-making and moments of of negotiating the world. However, centric and exclusionary under postmodernist discourses at immersive intuition (a timelessness). appreciating the painterly in painting the end the century. 7 Hal Foster: ‘“Anti-aesthetic” … signals that the very What I have called ‘foolhardiness’, is posited as a way try to understand notion of the aesthetic, its network of ideas, is in question here … the anti-aesthetic marks a cultural position on the Binns describes as ‘a leap into the the specificity of the medium and present: are categories afforded by the aesthetic still valid?’. void’. This can also be described as a its differences to other art forms, ‘Postmodernism: A preface’, in The anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern culture, Bay Press, California,1983, p. xv. moment of risk, for it is here, peering a way to dig down, if you like, into 8 ‘Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part without support into a black hole, the material quality of artwork to anything not itself’. Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and that Vivienne suspends judgement: against the tendency to reduce all Kitsch’, originally published in Partisan Review, New York, VI, no. 5, Fall, 1939. that is, she resists asking whether media to the universal category of 9 Gilles Deleuze speaks of painting as a catastrophe beginning necessarily with cliché, in ‘Painting sets writing ablaze’, a painting is right or wrong, and ‘contemporary art’. interview with Hervé Guibert for Le Monde, 3 December, 1981, pushes forward regardless. She reprinted in David Lapoujade (ed.), Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike found that once she stopped judging Taormina, Semiotexte, New York & Los Angeles, 2007, p. 183. 10 Situationist International, ‘All the King’s men’, Internationale she ‘responded to the work in a Situationniste, no.8, trans. Ken Knabb, Paris, Jan. 1963. , accessed 22 June, 2016. 11 ibid, italics in original break this momentum, this risky 12 ibid 13 ‘My painter-self’ is a term kindly donated by Angela pushing forward, and to ‘lose your Brennan who uses it to distinguish her interest in painting nerve and then value judgements from that of the historian, particularly in the love she has for the crazy little oddities overlooked or dismissed in the come back’. recording of much art history. 14 Yirrkala drawings: Nyapanyapa Yunupingu, Gallery channel, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2015, , accessed 10 June, 2016. 15 ‘Nyapanyapa Yunupingu: Lawarra Maypa’, ARTAND, painting is encapsulated in Diena Sydney, 2015, , Georgetti’s simple but cannily loaded accessed 10 June, 2016. aphorism: ‘It is truly hard to make 16 Maurice Blanchot, The infinite conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis & a painting, and nearly impossible London, 2003, p. 32. to make art’. In this wonderfully elliptical statement, we are left to imagine the successes and failures, the crab-like tactics that operate within the movements of painting.

The ruminations in this essay are an attempt to understand how we might experience ‘painterliness’ as something particular to painting.

28 | 29 30 | 31 Painting. More Painting Sorry to kill the vibe, Commissioned specifically for ACCA’s Painting. More Painting but time does exist 2016 main exhibition hall, Songailo’s Mural Commission wall painting Sorry to kill the vibe, but time does Solo Studies Courtesy the artist exist 2016 is a highly immersive, monochromatic wall painting of three SAM SONGAILO Sam Songailo’s practice is based in repeating motifs. These geometric Abdul Abdullah painting and often includes large- forms are dynamic: pointing, Born 1979, Townsville, scale installations. He is deeply linking and reaching towards Teresa Baker Queensland influenced by digital technology each other and across the room. Vivienne Binns and electronic music, adopting Realised on a monumental scale, Lives and works in algorithms and concepts from these the work magnifies the expansive Ry David Bradley Melbourne disciplines to shape his approach nature of painting, accentuating Stephen Bram to both architectural and pictorial the compositional elements of line space. Originally exhibiting works and space in a form that recalls Angela Brennan on canvas, Songailo was motivated both the modernist grid and digital Mitch Cairns to address the entire space of the networks. Songailo holds a Bachelor exhibition environment through of Visual Communication (Graphic Diena Georgetti painting. He has said: ‘I decided I Design) from the University of South Matthys Gerber wanted to make my work inescapable Australia, Adelaide. Since 2008 he has and ever-present. Instead of exhibited extensively in independent Helen Johnson having to mentally project into gallery spaces in Adelaide, Sydney David Jolly the picture plane, visitors to the and Melbourne. HM show would be inside the painting’. Lisa Radford Karl Wiebke Nyapanyapa Yunupingu

32 | 33 ABDUL ABDULLAH Multidisciplinary artist Abdul Abdul- lah’s work centres on the subjective Born 1986, Perth experience of marginality. His work gives emphasis to the unique per- Lives and works in spective of the ‘Other’ and seeks to Sydney counter stereotypical representations that are often portrayed in the me- dia. A seventh generation Australian Enjoy your day 2016 Muslim with Malaysian heritage, oil and resin on canvas Abdullah’s new suite of paintings, 100.0 x 100.0 cm Enjoy your day, Nothing to see here [p.34] and Look the other way, all 2016, are based on found and sourced media Imperial graffiti 2016 images of soldiers, police officers pen on tiles and other figures representing 30.0 x 30.0 cm institutional power, overlayed with graffiti-like motifs. The purposeful Look the other way 2016 disjuncture between two visual styles oil and resin on canvas – the authoritative effect of painterly 100.0 x 100.0 cm realism and the spontaneous sub- [p.35a] jective gesture of graffiti – generates a sense of irony that disputes the Nothing to see here 2016 supposed authority held by official oil and resin on canvas representations and underlines the 100.0 x 100.0 cm contested relations between the in- [p.35b] dividual and state. Abdullah holds a Bachelor of Arts from Curtin Universi- Courtesy the artist and ty, Perth, and is currently completing Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne a Masters of Fine Arts by Research at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. SB

34 | 35 TERESA BAKER Tjukurpa Kutjara 2012 The paintings of Pitjantjatjara artist synthetic polymer paint on canvas Teresa Baker are fundamentally Born 1977 in 200.0 x 120.0 cm linked to place and its vital Collection: Marie Jackson, Melbourne connection to spirituality, identity Alice Springs, [p.38] and self-knowledge. In Minyma Northern Territory Malilunya 2015, Minyma Malilunya Minyma Malilunya 2013 2013 and Tjukurpa Kutjara 2012 Pitjantjatjara synthetic polymer paint on canvas Baker depicts Tjukurpa (or Dreaming Lives and works in 200.0 x 120.0 cm stories) including that of the Provenance: Tjungu Palya SA ancestral woman Malilu and the Emu Alice Springs, Private Collection, Sydney Dreaming. Baker inherited the right Northern Territory and [p.37] to paint these stories after the death of her grandfather, Jimmy Baker, one Kanpi and Watarru, Minyma Malilunya 2015 of Australia’s foremost Indigenous South Australia synthetic polymer paint on canvas artists. Formally, Baker’s paintings 198.0 x 117.0 cm can be read in both macro and micro Monash University Collection, terms. Rendered in a dense field Melbourne of vivid reds, her intricate patterns Purchased by the Faculty of Arts 2016 ostensibly delineate a topographical [p.39] network through which Malilu moves. The substrates of sky and land converge around each other, divided only by the volition of the female spirit as she shapes the world around her. Baker grew up in Kanpi in northwestern South Australia. She began painting in 2005 at Tjungu Palya art centre where she was first taught by her grandfather. Baker was a finalist in this year’s Blake Prize as well as the 2013 Kate Challis RAKA Award. SB/HM

36 | 37 38 | 39 VIVIENNE BINNS Many things together 2005 In 1967 Vivienne Binns burst onto synthetic polymer paint on canvas the Australian art scene with her Born 1940, Wyong, 88.4 x 260.0 cm first exhibition, Vivienne Binns: Courtesy the artist and paintings and constructions, held at New South Wales Milani Gallery, Brisbane Watters Gallery in the inner-Sydney Lives and works in [p.42] suburb of Darlinghurst. Among the paintings included were Vag dens Canberra This moment then 2013 1967 and Phallic monument 1966 – synthetic polymer paint on canvas startling in their visual and sexual 100.2 x 130.0 cm vitality – and now seminal works Courtesy the artist in the history of both Australian [p.41] painting and feminist art. Binns’ career since has encompassed Minding clouds 2016 pioneering explorations of acrylic, masonite on canvas conceptual, performance, community 90.0 x 296.0 cm and feminist art practices, traversing Courtesy the artist and various media including textiles, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne craft, painting, assemblage and [p.43a] enamelling. More recently, her attention has returned to painting – a medium through which she continues her long-term investigation into the relationship between art, society and culture. Here, three disparate works, created over a ten-year period, are brought into conversation: revealing both diverging and enduring concerns for Binns. Many things together 2005 displays Binns’ interest in the treatment of surface and pattern, which originated in her fascination with tapa – the bark cloth traditionally made on a number of islands in the Pacific region. While This moment then 2013 – a captured moment of afternoon light in the artist’s studio – differs in the flatness of its execution, Minding clouds 2016, re-presents Binns’ ongoing experimentation with an abstract textural surface, interspersed with realistic pictorial vignettes. Binns graduated from the National Art School, Sydney, in 1962. AK

40 | 41 42 | 43 RY DAVID BRADLEY NTBD #4 and NTBD #12 2015 Ry David Bradley’s recent works synthetic polymer paint and blur the lines between painting, Born 1979, Melbourne dye-transfer on synthetic suede, photography, digital printing and synthetic silk touch-sensitive computer screens. Lives and works in 2 panels: 182.0 x 112.0 cm (each) His two-sided paintings NTBD #6, London Courtesy the artist and #13, #4 and #12, all 2015, present Tristian Koenig Gallery, Melbourne archival images from the New York [pp.46-7c&d] Public Library’s Picture Collection that have undergone a computerised NTBD #6 and NTBD #13 2015 editing process before being printed synthetic polymer paint and onto synthetic suede using a dye- dye-transfer on synthetic suede, transfer technique. Informed by the synthetic silk interplay of mobile photography, 2 panels: 182.0 x 112.0 cm (each) digital abstraction and the bitmap Collection: Diana Palmer, Sydney structure of pixelated image file [pp.46-7a&b] formats, Bradley confers art historical significance onto the aesthetics of the internet as a logical development in the painterly canon. Noting his desire to interrogate ‘the relationship between images and paintings, particularly images that are derived from the network’, Bradley’s works bring together the virtual and the ‘archaically’ physical to elicit an interplay between materiality and immateriality. The resulting paintings problematise notions of image preservation and cultural heritage, proposing the possibility of alternative interpretations of our collective inheritance. Bradley completed a Master of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, in 2013. SB

44 | 45 46 | 47 STEPHEN BRAM Untitled (two point perspective) 2016 Throughout his practice Stephen synthetic polymer paint on canvas Bram has rigorously explored the Born 1961, Melbourne 150.0 x 500.0 x 4.0 cm play and tension between flat, Courtesy the artist and Anna geometric abstract painting and the Lives and works in Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne representation of architectural space. Melbourne [p.49] His early works from the late 1980s (before the advent of the internet and computer-aided design) adopted the structure of the modernist grid, which inevitably related to the flatness of modernist painting but also stressed the continuity of painting with the architectural space beyond the frame of the work. Panoramic in format, Bram’s Untitled (two point perspective) 2016, is a recent example of the artist’s large, almost cinematically- scaled paintings, which dramatise a series of productive tensions within pictorial space: the relations between flatness and depth, illusion and plasticity, painting and architecture, and pre- and post- digital means of perceiving space (the analogue and the virtual). It is a work that we might metaphorically enter (in an illusionistic way) but as we do we come across the plastic realities of flat painterly shapes arranged as a matter-of- fact on the surface of the picture plane. Bram holds a Bachelor of Art from the Chisholm Institute of Technology, Melbourne (1985), a Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne (1987), as well as a Master of Arts (Research) from RMIT University, Melbourne (1996). During 1998–99 he studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich after being awarded the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship. MD

48 | 49 ANGELA BRENNAN Like a visitor to Earth 2016 A certain pleasure principle oil on canvas prevails in Angela Brennan’s free Born 1960, Ballarat 178.0 x 180.0 cm and abundant painterly practice, [p.53] manifest in pulsing, billowing Lives and works in abstract paintings which highlight Melbourne The essence is in the detour 2016 the inherently sensual and ineffable oil on linen character of aesthetic engagement. 181.0 x 181.0 cm Drawn to expansive, expressive [p.52] colour, Brennan’s paintings give form to thoughts and feelings: Trees, bodies, sky and water 2016 fields of colour are defined by an oil on linen experimental approach to mark- 170.0 x 180.0 cm making – bold contours, feathered, [p.51] scumbled, scrawled – which allow for a variety of sensations and desires to Courtesy the artist; consort and coexist. Niagara Galleries, Melbourne; and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Angela Brennan’s early work was celebrated for the ways in which her then somewhat eccentric abstraction loosened up the formalist strictures of late-modernist painting, introducing a feminine subjectivity, playfulness or jouissance into the frame. In her recent work Brennan continues to explore the significance of form, fragment and detail, with reference to the work of medieval painters and Byzantine decorative arts, among other influences. With a penchant for the unorthodox and uncanny, she juxtaposes pattern and decorative motifs to create anachronistic stylistic clashes invoking energy and surprise. Rather than relying on a pre-planned schemata, Brennan’s aesthetic is wholly intuitive; the paint, linen and brushes govern themselves but at the same time connect to a reality beyond the painting. MD

50 | 51 52 | 53 MITCH CAIRNS Geranium pots (adjacent garden Mitch Cairns’ paintings are square) 2016 characterised by a deft and Born 1984, Camden, oil on linen economic handling of line and tone 153.0 x 167.0 cm that demonstrates a sophisticated New South Wales [p.57] visual literacy and an inimitable Lives and works in sense of humour. The angular Geranium pots (art fair painting) 2016 planes and flatness of his forms Sydney oil on linen combine the influence of Synthetic 61.5 x 76.5 cm Cubism and vernacular graphic [p.56a] illustration. In Geranium pots 2016, Cairns unifies a series of paintings Geranium pots (combine painting) of varying pictorial content and 2016 size with bands of painted bricks oil on linen that drawing our attention to their 153.0 x 167.0 cm display, frame and ground the [p.55] image. Referencing personal items and magazine advertisements, the Geranium pots (panadol painting) range of subject matter in these 2016 works are rendered as if vignettes, oil on linen bound together by a unifying 61.5 x 76.5 cm structure and yet loosely connected, [p.56c] Cairns’ Geranium pots suggest a visual equivalence to concrete Geranium pots (piano advert) 2016 poetry, another of the artists’ oil on linen interests. SB/HM 61.5 x 76.5 cm [p.56b]

Geranium pots (swan classic) 2016 oil on linen 61.5 x 76.5 cm

Courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney

54 | 55 56 | 57 DIENA GEORGETTI Armour 2016 The image libraries now available synthetic polymer paint on on photo-sharing websites, such as Born 1966, Alice canvas in custom frame Pinterest, provide Diena Georgetti 97.0 x 58.0 cm (unframed) with an endless archive from which Springs [p.60] to collate maverick fragments Lives and works in from diverse art-historical genres, History 2016 including 1950s abstraction, Op Art Brisbane synthetic polymer paint on and the art of religious visionaries. canvas in custom frame These are then reconvened and 100.0 x 73.0 (unframed) reimagined in new compositions, [p.61] in much the same way that a poet might play with words and language Raider 2016 to convey emotion, create new synthetic polymer paint on sensations, and promote visual ideas canvas in custom frame which burn indelibly into our mind 130.0 x 59.0 cm (unframed) and retina. [p.59] Georgetti’s recent works are Courtesy the artist and composed by aggregating fragments The Commercial, Sydney of works by artists that have gone before her, and from memories of paintings glimpsed in the ambient corners of everyday life – in the background of films and television shows, and in the architectural décors found in magazines and books. Learning from the past, and freely consorting with her precursors, Georgetti adopts different personas: ‘I can be a man, post-war, French or Icelandic’.

There is both a symbolic and haptic logic to these works, which realise the visual and material qualities of painting at a deeply sensual level. Georgetti also believes in the idea of painting as talismanic object, full of magical properties, and able summon the fullest range of painterly affect: power, comfort, the spiritual and erotic. MD

58 | 59 60 | 61 MATTHYS GERBER Pump 2013 Matthys Gerber has developed a oil on canvas fluid and irrepressible approach to Born 1956, Delft, 190.0 x 300.0 cm painting – across genre hierarchies [p.64] and stylistic categories – with a The Netherlands; practice that is both analytical and arrived Australia 1971 Catwalk 2016 libidinous. Gerber’s work explores oil on canvas the language of images, and the Lives and works in 270.0 x 190.0 cm material realities of painting itself, Sydney [p.63] through a panoply of visual styles: the concrete reality of abstract art, Courtesy the artist and the materialist actuality of painterly Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney flows, and illusionistic manoeuvres drawn from figurative painting’s representational codes.

With technical dexterity, Gerber’s work enacts an anthology of paint- erly style, with formal relationships and contrasts that operate within and between paintings, and back and forth in time. We might discern the anti-classical tenor of Rococo, Surrealism, psychedelia and kitsch; or visual affinities with the syncopa- tions and sonorous resonances of experimental music; or an allegiance to analytical modes of abstraction – alongside more maverick proposi- tions. The fecundity of his language, and the delirious nature of painterly flows, sprays and pours, revels in the sensual pleasures of painterly process. Through a beguiling and at times bewildering eclecticism, Gerber is able to activate and anal- yse painting’s inherent qualities and characteristics, to explore the history, potential and possibilities for paint- ing in the twenty-first century. MD

62 | 63 64 | 65 HELEN JOHNSON History painting 2016 First exhibited in the Glasgow acrylic on canvas International in 2016, Helen Johnson’s Born 1979, Melbourne 310.0 x 240.0 cm new body of paintings, including Collection: Adam and Mariana History painting and My word, Lives and works in Clayton, Dublin both 2016, might be considered in Melbourne [p.68 verso; p.69] the traditions of history paintings and political banners; they present My word 2016 layered reflections on the histories acrylic on canvas of colonisation, violence, gender and 230.0 x 180.0 cm pedagogy, among other subjects. Collection: Claire Dewar, Dallas The suspended presentation of these [p.67] works, which elevate the status of the reverse side of the canvas, allow for notational marks and discourses to be appended to the picture-making process, connecting image and language, and personal reflection upon the political nature of painting and representation. Johnson has referred to the discipline of painting ‘as a loaded medium operating on new terms in a post- medium condition’. Her recent work reflects a move towards an expansive consideration of painting as a force for social critique. Rather than viewing the vehement debates around painting as an encumbrance, Johnson embraces these conflicts as dynamic grounds for further exploration into the medium and its attendant histories. Johnson completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) at RMIT University, Melbourne, in 2002 and in 2014 was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (Fine Art) from Monash University, Melbourne. Johnson’s book length study, titled Painting is a critical form, was published in 2015 by 3-Ply, Victoria. SB

66 | 67 68 | 69 DAVID JOLLY Before history as poem or David Jolly’s paintings draw on the mythic chant 10 2010 specificity of time and place, merging Born 1972, Melbourne oil on glass documentary and realist traditions to 72.0 x 56.0 cm capture the nuanced particularities Lives and works in Courtesy the artist and of memory. Working primarily from Melbourne Sutton Gallery, Melbourne his own photographs, Jolly translates [p.72] these images onto glass using an approach that reverses the usual Before history as poem or Before history as poem or convention of image construction in mythic chant 1 2009–10 mythic chant 11 2010 painting: foreground details are first oil on glass oil on glass laid onto the glass with the mid and 72.0 x 56.0 cm 72.0 x 56.0 cm background details rendered around Collection: Ricardo de Souza and Private Collection, Melbourne and on top of them. Jolly’s technique Terry Harding, Canberra [p.73d] results in the painting being read through the flat, screen like surface Before history as poem or Before history as poem or of the glass’s recto and, although mythic chant 2 2009–10 mythic chant 12 2010 they are rarely seen, the built up back oil on glass oil on glass of the verso. Jolly’s series Before 72.0 x 56.0 cm 72.0 x 56.0 cm history as poem or mythic chant Collection: Ricardo de Souza and Private Collection, Melbourne 2009–10 documents a journey made Terry Harding, Canberra [p.73e] by friends to a rave concert outside of Melbourne. The series begins with Before history as poem or Before history as poem or an illustration of the first frame of mythic chant 3 2009–10 mythic chant 14 2010 a 35mm camera roll followed by a oil on glass oil on glass sequence of images that capture the 72.0 x 56.0 cm 72.0 x 56.0 cm view from a car windscreen at night Collection: Ricardo de Souza and Private Collection, Melbourne as they travel to their destination. This Terry Harding, Canberra series of lights in the darkness moves [p.73a] Before history as poem or to the bush setting of the gathering as mythic chant 15 2010 it transitions through night into early Before history as poem or oil on glass morning. The materiality of Jolly’s mythic chant 9 2010 72.0 x 56.0 cm technique bridges the relationship oil on glass Collection: Paul and Wendy between photography and painting 72.0 x 56.0 cm Bonnici, Melbourne succinctly; the original photograph Private Collection, Melbourne [p.71] frames and captures the memory [p.73b] in an instant while its translation through painting allows this memory to be relived in the temporal space of the studio. Jolly completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne (1992). In 2015 the Australian War Memorial commissioned him to produce work based on a visit to Gallipoli for the ANZAC Centenary. SB/HM

70 | 71 72 | 73 Furniture painting Lisa Radford’s paintings might at LISA RADFORD (737 Croydon #4) 2010 first deceive the spectator in their Born 1976, Melbourne synthetic polymer paint on board ostensible fixation on the micro and 22.5 x 30.0 cm intimate elaboration of decorative Collection: Jenny Zhe Chang, motifs. It is via this sensitivity to Furniture painting 2010 Melbourne detail, however, that she forges a synthetic polymer paint on board [pp.76-7g] subtle yet discerning commentary 22.5 x 30.0 cm on wider social tendencies and Private Collection, Melbourne Furniture painting (Belgrave) 2010 the aesthetics of everyday public [p.75] synthetic polymer paint on board space. Radford’s Furniture paintings 22.5 x 30.0 cm 2010 critically explore the logic and Furniture painting (737 Croydon) 2010 Collection: Simon McGlinn, aesthetics of utilitarian design by synthetic polymer paint on board Melbourne honing in on the kitsch appearance 22.5 x 30.0 cm [pp.76-7c] of mass-produced textiles used for Collection: Marita Dyson and Stuart public transport seating, hotel carpets Flanagan, Melbourne Furniture painting (Canberra) 2010 and civic building furnishings. The [pp.76-7h] synthetic polymer paint on board bright colours and repetition of gaudy 22.5 x 30.0 cm motifs speak of a maladroit attempt Furniture painting (737 Croydon) 2010 Private Collection, Melbourne by designers to define and regulate synthetic polymer paint on board [pp.76-7i] public space. In reconfiguring these 22.5 x 30.0 cm motifs, Radford seeks to question Collection: Jon Campbell, Melbourne Furniture painting (Hotel Hollywood) the inherent qualities of collective [pp.76-7d] 2010 space, while drawing a tongue-in- synthetic polymer paint on board cheek visual link between the high art Furniture painting (737 Croydon) 2010 22.5 x 30.0 cm of abstraction and the patterns and synthetic polymer paint on board Courtesy the artist colours of public design. The intimate 22.5 x 30.0 cm [pp.76-7a] scale of these works, and dynamic Courtesy the artist activation of the pictorial field, also [pp.76-7f] Furniture painting (Tube) 2010 speak of the imagining of new worlds synthetic polymer paint on board through a painting practice pursued 22.5 x 30.0 cm in the interest of social exchange and Private Collection, Melbourne communication. Radford completed [pp.76-7e] a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, in 1999, and is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University, Melbourne. She has served as a board member of Melbourne artist- run initiative TCB Art Inc. during 2000–14 and was a member of the collaborative art group DAMP from 1999 to 2010. She is currently a lecturer in the painting department at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. SB

74 | 75 76 | 77 KARL WIEBKE Vertical movements / horizontal Karl Wiebke’s practice exemplifies brushstrokes 1 2016 a rigorous process-based approach Born 1944, Detmold, synthetic polymer paint on linen to art that seeks to investigate the 150.0 x 100.0 cm inherent nature of painting. Wiebke’s Germany; arrived [pp.80-1a] methodology is founded on art Australia 1981 historical precedents, permitting Vertical movements / horizontal a systematic yet experimental Lives and works in brushstrokes 2 2016 inquiry into the place, purpose and Melbourne synthetic polymer paint on linen function of the medium. Closely 150.0 x 300.0 cm considering the tenets of the [pp.80-1c] Concrete art movement, Wiebke is devoted to an art entirely divorced Vertical movements / horizontal from observed reality, once stating, brushstrokes 3 2016 ‘I make work which stands for synthetic polymer paint on linen itself and doesn’t refer to anything 150.0 x 300.0 cm outside itself’. Wiebke’s series Vertical [pp.80-1b] movements / horizontal brushstrokes 2016 extends the artist’s focus on Vertical movements / horizontal generative procedures, depicting brushstrokes 6 2016 a fluid sequence of vertical lines synthetic polymer paint on linen created with horizontal brushstrokes. 150.0 x 120.0 cm These bands of colour bleed into [p.79] each other, at once suggestive of movement in their undulating forms Courtesy the artist and and stasis in their intrinsic linearity. Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney Trained as both a goldsmith and a painter, Wiebke studied Fine Art at the Hochschule für bildende Kunste, Hamburg, Germany, between 1972–76 alongside noteworthy artists such as Martin Kippenberger. He relocated to Australia in 1981 and has exhibited continuously since. His work is widely represented in various collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth. SB/HM

78 | 79 80 | 81 NYAPANYAPA White painting #3 2009 Yolngu artist Nyapanyapa Yunupingu natural earth pigments on bark has been widely celebrated for YUNUPINGU 98.0 x 53.0 cm her distinctive and singular vision. Private Collection, Melbourne Her paintings, which forego the Born c. 1945, dense Yolngu clan designs known Yirrkala, Mangutji #6 with square 2010 as miny’tji, are in marked contrast natural earth pigments on bark to the majority of contemporary Northern Territory 93.0 x 80.0 cm Yolngu art that is underpinned by Gumatj Collection: Anthony Scott, Melbourne ancestral narratives. Turning instead to personal and, at times, wholly Lives and works in Pink and White Painting #2 2010 abstract content, her works have Yirrkala natural earth pigments on bark been referred to as mayilimiriw, a 69.0 × 68.0 cm Yolngu Matha word that loosely Courtesy the artist and translates as ‘meaningless’ and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney captures something of the works [p.83] difficult translation between Yolngu and non-Yolngu worlds. Although Leaves and circles 2011 most evident in her series of entirely natural earth pigments on bark white paintings, this quality extends 171.0 x 92.0 cm throughout Yunupingu’s practice: QUT Art Collection, Brisbane her depiction of bush foods, leaves Purchased 2011 and rough geometric forms generate a lively pictorial space in which Untitled 2015 different formal motifs interact. Born natural earth pigments on bark in Yirrkala in the Northern Territory, 93.0 x 49.0 cm Yunupingu was taught to paint by her Private Collection, Sydney father, Munggurrawuy Yunupingu, [p.84] a cultural leader and renowned artist. She began painting on bark Untitled 2015 in 2007 and has amassed a prolific natural earth pigments on bark and inventive oeuvre in which the 122.0 x 83.0 cm rhythms, sensations and narratives Collection: Sarah and of contemporary life are captured Jürgen Jentsch, Sydney through energetic line work and [p.85] colour. SB/HM

82 | 83 84 | 85 Painting. More Painting Panorama: A–M 30 July – 28 August 2016

86 | 87 COLLEEN AHERN SEAN BAILEY Born 1971, Leeton, Born 1977, Adelaide New South Wales Lives and works in Lives and works in Melbourne Melbourne Immix 2015 synthetic polymer paint on plywood, Five foot one 2014 artist frame oil on board 84.0 x 62.5 cm 30.0 x 30.0 cm Courtesy the artist and Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne Neon Parc, Melbourne Sean Bailey’s paintings are gestural Colleen Ahern’s visual arts practice and largely abstract. Meaning is is enmeshed in the world of music. obfuscated under the artist’s quick, Five foot one 2014 is a painting broad strokes as he covers collage based on a photographic portrait in layers of paint, manifesting his of the famed American musician, interests in the arcane and esoteric. Iggy Pop, which features on the Immix 2015 demonstrates the reverse side of his 1979 album, New deftness and decisiveness of Bailey’s values. Ahern’s painting is exhibited hand with a nebulous swathe of at a height of 5’1”, in reference grey that is barely contained by the to his song of the same name. perimeter of the frame and spills Ahern’s paintings are motivated to obscure a crisp yellow form. by her desire to connect with the The painting’s unmistakeable black subjects of her musical fandom. ground is overshadowed by the Like earlier works that capture colour and movement it has boxed musical performances presented into the corner, somehow slipping on television shows such as ABC’s past unnoticed at first glance. Bailey RAGE, this painting references the graduated in 2005 with a Bachelor various platforms through which of Fine Arts from the Victorian we engage with our musical heroes College of the Arts, Melbourne, and also the distance between us and was a studio artist at Gertrude and them; the distance that allows Contemporary from 2013–15. A them to remain accessible yet fixture in Melbourne’s experimental untouchable, out of physical reach music scene, Bailey has played but close enough to gaze upon and in groups such as Paeces, Wasted to listen to without restraint. Ahern Truth and Lakes, while also running graduated from the Victorian College independent label Inverted Crux. KB of the Arts, Melbourne, in 1999 and has since exhibited regularly in Melbourne. HM/DL

88 | 89 KAREN BLACK DANIEL BOYD Born 1961, Brisbane Born 1982, Cairns Lives and works in Kudjila/Gangalu Brisbane Lives and works in Sydney Guard the opening gate 2013 oil on wood Untitled (BFK) 2015 67.0 x 116.0 cm oil, charcoal and archival glue on Private Collection, Melbourne polyester 183.0 x 137.5 cm Brisbane-based artist Karen Black Private Collection, Sydney interrogates the dramaturgical implications of contemporary painting Daniel Boyd’s work confronts the through narratives of despair, loss diverging perspectives, narratives, and violence. Formally her paintings truths and untruths embedded in – the colours of which are mixed Australia’s colonial history. His on the surface of the picture plane majestic, technically dexterous itself – teeter between figuration and history paintings (made from oil abstraction to constitute a vivid mise- paint and archival glue) engage with en-scène where tumult and disarray and reinterpret the complexities dominate. Entering the visual arts of Indigenous and European- after a successful career in costume Australian history. Untitled (BFK) design, Black’s background in the 2015 is characteristic of Boyd’s performing arts is palpable in her recent paintings. A compelling dot- paintings, many of which adopt the like structure activates the visual structure of a proscenium space in power and cultural language of his which painterly dramas unfold. Black Indigenous heritage but also invokes admits, ‘I do set up the paintings the idea of the dot-matrix and pixels as if they were stage plays … I pit commonly found in print and digital characters against each other’. It is in media. This aspect underscores the this way that we can understand archival, historically-grounded, and Guard the opening gate 2013, which evidentiary nature of his subject references the tragic sinking of the matter and allows his work to SIEV221 off the cliffs of Christmas engage a complex range of visual Island in 2010, which was both and historical cultural references. witnessed by helpless onlookers Boyd holds a Bachelor of Arts from and telecast to the nation. Black the Australian National University, completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Canberra, and has exhibited widely Griffith University in 2011. She has both nationally and internationally received numerous prizes and awards since 2005. MD including the Art & Australia/Credit Suisse Contemporary Art Prize (2013) and Griffith University Art Gallery’s GAS Award (2011). SB

90 | 91 KIRSTY BUDGE JANET BURCHILL Born 1981, Auckland, Born 1955, Melbourne New Zealand; Lives and works in arrived Australia 2005 Melbourne Lives and works in The Collected works of Emily Melbourne Dickinson (515 circumference) 2016 synthetic polymer paint on hessian Always late to the party 2016 6 panels: 276.0 x 124.0 cm (overall) oil on canvas Courtesy the artist and 205.0 x 150.0 cm Neon Parc, Melbourne Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne While Janet Burchill’s practice, often working in collaboration with Kirsty Budge’s paintings frequently Jennifer McCamley, spans a vast incorporate humour, personal range of mediums and theoretical observation and imaginary underpinnings, it is possible to situations, aligned with painterly isolate certain recurrent interests echoes of Modernist and Primitivist within her work. A focus on antecedents. Characterised by a Modernism and its contemporary muted palette and layering of bodily implications along with a feminist forms composed from art historical analysis of the complexities of fragments, Budge accompanies her language and semantics are paintings with endearingly playful recurring motifs, and appear again titles which reconcile historical in The Collected works of Emily motifs with contemporary experience Dickinson (515 circumference) 2016, and its idiosyncratic tendencies. an ongoing painting series begun Budge’s recent paintings continue in 2010. In this painting, Dickinson these interests, with Always late to is figured as a proto-Modernist, and the party 2016 displaying an abstract her poems, with their posthumous sensibility reminiscent of early titling system, are translated in Synthetic Cubism, combined with visual form. The sparseness and the softness of organic biomorphic distinctive punctuation of Dickinson’s shapes. The scale of the work poems are further echoed in the looms over the viewer, its all-over condensed directness of Burchill’s composition emphasising a complex aesthetic. Burchill obtained a interplay between between narrative, Bachelor of Arts (Visual Art, space and figuration. Originally Sculpture and Film) from Sydney from Auckland, New Zealand, Budge College of the Arts in 1983, and has completed a Bachelor of Fine Art worked collaboratively with Jennifer (Painting) at the Victorian College of McCamley since the mid 1980s. SB the Arts, Melbourne, in 2014. KB

92 | 93 JON CAMPBELL NADINE Born 1961, Belfast, CHRISTENSEN Ireland; arrived Born 1969, Traralgon, Australia 1964 Victoria Lives and works in Lives and works in Melbourne Melbourne

Fuck yeah (Matisse) 2015 Untitled (Vanity) 2016 synthetic polymer and enamel synthetic polymer paint on board paint on cotton duck 120.0 x 150.0 cm 41.0 x 56.0 cm Courtesy the artist; Hugo Michell Courtesy the artist and Darren Gallery, Adelaide; and Sarah Scout Knight Gallery, Sydney Presents, Melbourne

Jon Campbell’s largely text-based Melbourne-based artist Nadine works, along with related music and Christensen’s paintings often present performance projects, audaciously a flattened perspective where elevate Australian vernacular unanchored objects and forms float language to the status of art, joyously inexplicably atop landscapes devoid exclaiming the inherent playfulness of horizons. This montage effect is and pop-cultural significance of local disorientating, colliding nature and dialectic inflections. In Fuck yeah architecture in layers of disconnected (Matisse) 2015, Campbell manipulates realities. Christensen’s most recent figure and ground to simultaneously paintings have seen the introduction conceal and reveal the text, creating of highly textured elements that a vacillation between abstraction float amongst their surroundings. and figuration, design and Geological in texture, they seem communication. The work colourfully more anchored to the ground than celebrates the late paper cut-outs the sky, interrupting the artifice of of Henri Matisse with an economy the picture plane with painterly and ornamentation in an act of materiality. Christensen studied homage dowsed in sardonic wit. painting at Monash University, Born in Belfast, Campbell relocated Melbourne, and the Victorian to Melbourne in 1964. He graduated College of the Arts, Melbourne, from RMIT University, Melbourne, and was a studio artist at Gertrude in 1982 with a Bachelor of Fine Art Contemporary (1998–99) and (Painting) and completed a Graduate founding member of seminal artist- Diploma (Painting) at the Victorian run space CLUBSprojects inc. KB College of the Arts, Melbourne, in 1985, where he has since worked in the painting department as an influential lecturer. SB

94 | 95 TIMOTHY COOK JUAN DAVILA Born 1958, Born 1946, Santiago, Melville Island, Chile; arrived Northern Territory Australia 1974 Tiwi Lives and works in Lives and works in Melbourne Milikapiti, Being-in-the-world 2015 Melville Island oil on canvas 200.0 x 255.0 cm Kulama 2012 Courtesy the artist and Kalli Rolfe Natural ochre and pigment on linen Contemporary Art, Melbourne 150.0 x 220.0 cm Courtesy the artist and Seva Frangos Chilean-born, Melbourne-based Art, Perth/Singapore Juan Davila has remained one of Australia’s most consequential Timothy Cook’s paintings display a artists for over four decades. In his deep connection to the history and recent work Davila has turned to new culture of the Tiwi Islands, where subjects – ecological destruction; the he has lived his entire life. While representation of desire and phantasy; drawing from a classical Tiwi style, and the idea of jouissance as an his striking works also reveal his own excessive, paradoxical pleasure. aesthetic innovations: seductively Being-in-the-world 2015 depicts minimal compositions that recount a delirious haze of warm blues, aspects of the Tiwi ritual life of his fleshy pinks and earthy browns, youth and its place in the island’s interrupted by a ‘play’ symbol at its contemporary culture. Kulama 2012 centre, and, in the corner, a selfie – a subject that recurs throughout stick poised to address the viewer. Cook’s oeuvre – recounts one of A critique of the situation whereby the two major Tiwi ceremonies, experience is increasingly mediated an initiation for young Tiwi men through technology, where reality coinciding with the harvest of wild is virtual, and citizens are recast yams. The Catholic mission, whose as consumers, Davila’s painting long-established influence on the Tiwi confounds viewers’ attempts to ‘play Islands is now in a declining phase, is the image’ when viewed on screen. represented by a cross in the centre Instead it rests furtively as a work of the composition, while large, that requires considered attention concentric circles simultaneously and concentration in the real. Davila delineate the ceremonial ground and attended the University of Chile, the full moon in a star-filled sky. Cook studying Law (1965–69) and Fine Arts began exhibiting in the late 1990s (1970–72). His work has been the and his work is widely celebrated and subject of major career retrospective collected. In 2012 he was awarded the exhibitions at the Museum of prestigious National Aboriginal and Contemporary Art, Sydney (2006), Torres Strait Islander Art Award. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne AL/HM (2007) and Centro Cultural Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile (2016). MD

96 | 97 DAVID EGAN HAMISHI FARAH Born 1989, Perth Born 1991, Melbourne Lives and works in Lives and works in Melbourne Melbourne

Stale under rates booth 2016 Trying to connect 2014 gesso and flowers on canvas synthetic polymer paint on board 2 panels: 152.0 x 111.0 cm (overall) 124.0 x 84.0 cm Courtesy the artist Collection: Helen Mariampolski and Ian Williams, Melbourne David Egan works across painting, textiles, performance and installation, Hamishi Farah’s ultra saturated bringing together a range of paintings reference imagery from interests in subjects including an eclectic array of cultural and botany, ornamentation, decoration popular signifiers, much like an online and the colonial history of pattern. search engine. Farah was born in the Stale under rates booth 2016 takes early nineties, and his practice has the form of two canvases, each been situated within the context of presenting a top-down view of a post-internet art. Trying to connect single formal dining table setting and 2014 is one of a series of paintings hung horizontally directly atop one that depict meticulously painted another, as if for two diners to face renditions of digital images sourced one another. A section of text appears from the internet. The composition on each canvas describing two of the work is polished and formally rooms: the office of an accountant on considered, with a layering of images top, and a domestic bedroom below. – like windows within windows – Like the two canvases themselves, structuring a proliferation of motifs. these spaces are pitted against one The cascading, scroll-like composition another, connected by a sewerage suggests a digital flow of images pipe that carries the waste of the and cultural signifiers, exploring accountant. A wry nod is made to the economy of image production the overlap between the by-product and what it means to live in a digital of the finance worker’s body and the world. Farah was studio artist at language of his industry: words like Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, block, flow, and liquidity. Painted from 2014-16, and has exhibited in using plant matter rubbed directly Australia and internationally. LC onto the surface of the canvas, which will deteriorate over time, the fading nature of the painting mirrors the impermanence of its subject matter. Egan graduated with Fine Art degree from Curtin University, Perth, in 2011 and completed Honours at Monash University, Melbourne, in 2013. KB/AK

98 | 99 NYARAPAYI GILES IRENE HANENBERGH Born c. 1940, Tjukurla, Born 1966, Erica, Western Australia Netherlands; arrived Ngaanyatjarra Australia 1999 Lives and works in Lives and works in Tjukurla Melbourne

Wamurrungu 2016 Hank 2014 synthetic polymer paint on canvas oil on canvas 118 . 5 x 8 8 . 0 c m 41.0 x 31.0 cm Courtesy the artist; Hanging Valley, Private Collection, Melbourne Melbourne; and Tjarlirli Art, Tjukurla Courtesy the artist and Neon Parc, Melbourne As a respected elder of the Tjukurla community, Nyarapayi Giles’ Irene Hanenbergh is known for her paintings consolidate an intimate mythical landscapes made up of knowledge of her country with a swirling forms of paint that conjure singular approach to colour and dramatic scenes and dreamscapes. painterly bodily materiality. Born Hanenburgh’s paintings draw on in the late 1930s in the Gibson the traditions of Romanticism and Desert at Karrku (an important the Baroque, creating intricate, Indigenous cultural site) Giles brings gestural pictures that pay homage her profound knowledge of the to the sublime power of nature – inma (ceremonies) and tjukurrpa and the painterly process itself. (dreaming stories) to her work, which Utilising a distinct palette of blues, is often identified by a proliferation greens, pinks and yellows applied of concentric circles referencing the in tangled layers of brush strokes – tjukurrpa of Karrku. These circular amongst a sea of black and flashes forms signify the emu’s ochre- of white – Hanenbergh alludes to laden feathers as it reaches down figurative scenes without revealing and digs in the pit to locate the too much. The modest scale of Hank precious ochre. Giles’ Wamurrungu 2014 encourages the viewer to peer 2016, although devoid of her typical closely into the scene, establishing circular motifs, replicates her an intimate connection with the engagement with country. The use painting. Fittingly, Hanenbergh often of radiant synthetic pastel colours refers to her paintings as ‘portals’; creates a tension with the content offering the viewer a window of the painting – a reference to the into another, perhaps internal or landscape – while the progressive subconscious, world. Hanenbergh modulation of line lends a unique studied in Greece and London dynamism to the work. SB before moving to Melbourne, where she completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, in 2010. LC

100 | 101 MELINDA HARPER LOUISE HEARMAN Born 1965, Darwin Born 1963, Melbourne Lives and works in Lives and works in Melbourne Melbourne

Untitled 2014 Untitled 1397 2015 oil on canvas oil on masonite 153.0 x 122.0 cm 25.0 x 36.0 cm Courtesy the artist and Courtesy the artist and Tolarno NKN Gallery, Melbourne Galleries, Melbourne

Melinda Harper’s practice reflects an With her skilful rendering of light ongoing fascination with the sensory and dark, Louise Hearman creates relations between pure colour and otherworldy moments in which abstract form. Inspired by geometric ordinary subjects appear mysterious painting, decorative arts and textiles, or strange. Best known for her and the work of modernist women hyper-real portraiture, Hearman artists such as Sonia Delaunay, works subconsciously to reveal Harper’s work also continues a rich the complexity and curiosity of the lineage of abstract geometric painting human spirit. Untitled 1397 2015 in Australia – an under-appreciated draws the viewer close to consider trajectory that stems from Grace an intimate, almost voyeuristic, Crowley, Frank Hinder and Ralph view over the shoulder of a male Balson onwards. Harper constructs figure. Unaware of our attention, her paintings intuitively, marking out the subject looks wistfully into the the edges of the canvas with masking distance, seeking revelation as does tape and working slowly as the paint the viewer. Of what he is seeing or dries, allowing the composition thinking we cannot be sure yet the to build organically through the bright light cast onto the side of his painterly process. Representative of face brings small, revelatory details Harper’s intuitive approach, Untitled of his identity into focus: the white 2014 shows vibrant, complimentary shirt of his professional attire, the colours arranged in a patchwork greying strands of his hair, and the design across the flat surface of the fine lines of his ageing skin. Since canvas, suggesting kaleidoscopic tiles graduating in 1984 with a Bachelor that shift and undulate hypnotically in of Fine Arts from the Victorian waves of motion – producing intense College of Arts, Melbourne, Hearman optical effects and loosening the has exhibited widely. She was flatness of the picture plane. awarded the 2016 Archibald Prize for Harper completed a Bachelor of Fine her portrait of Australian entertainer Art (Painting) at Victoria College, Barry Humphries. GD Melbourne, in 1985. She was a leading member of the influential artist group Store 5 in Melbourne 1989–93, and a lecturer in painting at the Victorian College of the Arts, 1993–95. LC

102 | 103 RAAFAT ISHAK JOSEY KIDD-CROWE Born 1967, Cairo, Egypt; Born 1987, Newcastle, arrived Australia 1982 New South Wales Lives and works in Lives and works in Melbourne Melbourne

Paw paw 2011 Goog boy 2015 oil on linen oil on jute 42.5 x 30.0 cm 115 . 0 x 9 0 . 0 c m Courtesy the artist and Private Collection, Sydney Sutton Gallery, Melbourne Josey Kidd-Crowe’s paintings have With deft painterly precision, Raafat a unique, dual quality. They are at Ishak’s compositions emerge from once naïve in appearance and yet an interrogation of migration, place knowing and sophisticated in their and identity. Paw paw 2011 was reference to the history of painting. first exhibited as part of Ishak’s Goog boy 2015 is based on Pablo solo exhibition Congratulatory Picasso’s The young painter 1972, notes on ubiquity and debacle 2011, one of Picasso’s late works in a collection of nine works each which the elderly Franco-Spanish deconstructing Marcel Duchamp’s artist summoned crude, primitive painting Nude descending a staircase, mark-making to conjure expressive no. 2 1912. Against a background forms with utmost simplicity. of architectural motifs, Paw paw With its flattened picture plane depicts a central figure in motion and raw, painterly handling, Kidd- with a surprising flower arrangement Crowe’s childlike aesthetic of loose, located at its core. Titled in reference meandering, painterly swirls can to the eponymous fruit, Ishak’s be seen as both an act of painterly painting interrupts the dominant homage and a defining self-portrait western canon of Cubism with an of a young artist self-consciously exotic bloom that alludes to notions engaged in the act of painting and of displacement and the construction exploration of aesthetic freedom. of self in new lands. Ishak completed Kidd-Crowe graduated with a a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) Bachelor of Fine Art in 2009 from La at the Victorian College of the Arts, Trobe University, Mildura, and has Melbourne, in 1990, followed by a exhibited since 2006. GD Post Graduate Diploma in Architecture (History and Conservation Practice) from the University of Melbourne in 2004. He completed a PhD in Fine Arts at Monash University in 2014. GD/HM

104 | 105 FIONA LOWRY TRAVIS MACDONALD Born 1974, Sydney Born 1990, Lives and works in Bunnythorpe, New Zealand; Sydney arrived Australia 1994 apart from the pulling and hauling Lives and works in stands what I am 2010 Melbourne synthetic polymer and gouache on canvas Picnic table 2015 218.5 x 152.5 cm oil on linen Private Collection, Canberra 76.0 x 51.0 cm Courtesy the artist and Fiona Lowry creates work related Niagara Galleries, Melbourne to memory and history, using photographic research and airbrush Travis MacDonald’s paintings techniques. Lowry’s use of dream-like evolve from his collection of articles pastel colours belies the darker subject and photographs of wide-ranging matter of her paintings, which often subjects including history, music, appropriate the Australian landscape conspiracy theories and current as a historical backdrop for sinister affairs. Working from these source happenings. Lowry draws inspiration materials MacDonald creates from a range of cultural and religious paintings that merge the personal references, including songs by Nick and universal, presenting blurred Cave, the writings of the Old Testament memories that suggest broader and the art and philosophy of William narratives. Rendered on linen using Blake. The title of her painting apart a dark and subdued palette, his from the pulling and hauling stands painting Picnic table 2015 is at once what I am 2010, refers to a line in familiar and yet ambiguous in its the epic poem Song of myself by location and time. In it a weathered acclaimed American writer Walt yellow umbrella casts a shadow Whitman. Lowry’s application of paint over a picnic table cemented to the with an airbrush allows the surface of mossy dirt and grass beneath. The the painting to seemingly move in and work is at once a painting of place out of focus, with no single entry point and non-place: a place observed, an for the viewer. The viewer’s gaze is image remembered, or a moment instead led to the cascading spectacle imagined, that resonates with the of a waterfall. Often used as a cultural viewer’s own experiences and trope in fairytales and folklore, the memories. MacDonald completed a waterfall could here be read as a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian metaphor for nature’s capacity to College of the Arts, Melbourne, in be both a seductive and destructive 2011. ED force, whilst also referencing painterly flow. Lowry completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) at the Sydney College of the Arts and is currently completing a Masters degree at the same institution. ED

106 | 107 ROBERT GIAN MANIK MACPHERSON Born 1985, Perth Born 1937, Brisbane Lives and works in Lives and works in Melbourne Brisbane Untitled 2 2014 oil on canvas MAYFAIR; ‘ROPE A DOPE’ HERE’S 258.0 x 218.0 cm ONE FOR YOU SAMMY 2002–7 Courtesy the artist and Artereal Dulux Weathershield synthetic Gallery, Sydney polymer paint on Masonite 3 panels: 122.0 x 91.0 cm each Gian Manik’s recent work involves Courtesy the artist and Yuill|Crowley, detailed painted images of distorted Sydney reflections on mirrored surfaces. He uses the term ‘vibration’ to describe The evocative, if perplexing, title the conceptual context of his practice, of Robert Macpherson’s MAYFAIR; which explores liminal spaces and ‘ROPE A DOPE’ HERE’S ONE FOR YOU the tensions between abstraction SAMMY 2002–07 belies the apparent and representation through a simplicity of the painting’s execution. manipulation of media. Manik Across three panels, in white house- photographs abstracted reflective hold paint boldly applied upon a matte surfaces, like crumpled aluminium black background, three words ap- foil, before rendering these forms pear – ‘rope-a-dope’ – a boxing tactic in paint on large canvases. In the for which one player feigns fatigue complex slippage between painting, or weakness in order to eventually photography and the perceptual overcome his opponent. This work play of light upon reflective surfaces, forms part of a larger ‘Mayfair’ se- Manik’s work underscores painting’s ries, made in reference to the ama- twin role as both representation and teur hand-painted signs, advertising pure materiality. Manik completed a various local produce, that are found Bachelor of Arts, Visual Arts (Honours) along roadsides in the artist’s home at Curtin University of Technology, state of Queensland. The relationship Perth, and a Master of Fine Arts at between image, text and painting Monash University, Melbourne. He has formed an important element of has undertaken residencies at the Macpherson’s practice throughout his Gunnery Artspace, Sydney, 2009, and long career as an artist; combining his at the Perth Institute of Contemporary interests in the formal qualities of min- Arts, 2008. ED imalism with the intellectual concerns of conceptual art, as well as humour and everyday, vernacular expression. Removed from their original context when placed within the gallery space, these words take on new meaning, elevating the mundane to the extraor- dinary and challenging the distinction between image and text, painting and writing, sign and art object. AK

108 | 109 SAMSON MARTIN HELEN MAUDSLEY Born 1985, Melbourne Born 1927, Melbourne Lives and works in Lives and works in Melbourne Melbourne

Harmolodics 2015 The rose petal scrolls, become oil and synthetic polymer paint on the scrolls of our ancient past; hessian of the law; of wigs, still worn. 220.0 x 140.0 cm The hands of now, of doing. Joyce Nissan Collection, Melbourne The pear that is flesh and heart. Courtesy the artist and Tristian The conflict with arrogance. Koenig Gallery, Melbourne Also, the flicker of life, and the question mark 2014 Samson Martin’s current paintings oil on canvas explore the tenuous lines between 74.5 x 80.5 cm art and craft, as well as painting and Courtesy the artist and Niagara sculpture. Embracing elements of Galleries, Melbourne weaving and decorative design in his work, Martin adopts a repetitive Helen Maudsley’s work has often craftsmanship akin to laborious folk been aligned with psycho-aesthetics, art practices. In Harmolodics 2015 the and the sense of an interior world painting’s surface is built by weaving is evident in her highly personal together strips of hessian, granting visual language of abstract forms it a physicality that plays on the and muted colours. Maudsley’s traditional idea of the canvas as mere poetic titling of her work reflects her support. Each individual fibre of the affinity with the surreal and subjective substrate is then meticulously painted whilst the composition of the work using miniscule polychromatic underlines the artist’s keen interest brushstrokes to reveal a painstaking in the spatial dynamics of the picture display of labour. Martin graduated plane and framing. The painting with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) describes a curious architectural from Monash University, Melbourne space in which objects appear to in 2008, completing his Honours move freely. From this tangle of degree in 2009. ZT forms, distinct shapes emerge – a human hand, a paper scroll, an architectural column and upturned bell – putting the onus on the viewer to imagine relationships between them. Maudsley has exhibited regularly since 1957, following studies at the National Gallery Art School, Melbourne, between 1945–47 and later completing a Graduate Diploma in Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. SB

110 | 111 MOYA MCKENNA TIM MCMONAGLE Born 1973, Guildford, Born 1971, Auckland, England; arrived New Zealand; Australia 1975 arrived Australia 1971 Lives and works in Lives and works in Melbourne Melbourne

One journey 2007 Ken Pearler 2009 oil on canvas oil on linen and mixed media 40.0 x 45.0 cm 153.0 x 153.0 cm Benjamin Armstrong Collection, Joyce Nissan Collection, Melbourne Melbourne Tim McMonagle’s figurative paintings Moya McKenna’s paintings draw from often draw from everyday subject various corporeal and photographic matter which he transforms through materials that she amasses within the medium of paint into whimsical her studio. In the tradition of still life, parallel worlds. McMonagle’s McKenna employs the discipline of figures are brought to life on the painting to examine the effects of canvas with both an economy and light, shadow, colour and contrast, abundance of paint that affords the and to achieve a sense of animated artist freedom to direct the gaze of painterly form. Whilst earlier works the viewer to specific elements of depict arrangemed objects by the composition. Ken Pearler 2009 McKenna in the studio, One journey continues McMonagle’s characteristic 2007 adopts an approach akin to use of undulating soft washes and collage, layering seemingly incoherent thick impasto smears of oil paint to images into one illusive frame. capture the successful plight of a Painted in oil using a wet-on-wet fisherman. The seeming slightness technique, also known as alla prima, of McMonagle’s surfaces belies McKenna achieves a liveliness of the complexity of their production the painted surface which brings the and the delicate nuance of each disparate motifs into an animated, mark; the artist is highly attuned to coherent composition. Graphic shifts compositional balance and the lyrical in scale and perspective, combined dynamism he achieves in his work with her unusual, often tertiary colour is the labour of numerous sketches selection, gives McKenna’s work a and repeated attempts to achieve distinctive presence, evocative of the desired effects. McMonagle’s memory and the emotional energy of portrait is without a face, perhaps an the psyche. McKenna graduated with a indication that the figure is merely Bachelor of Fine Art from the Victorian a vehicle for painterly embodiment College of the Arts, Melbourne, in rather than a portrait or likeness. 1998. Her work has been included McMonagle completed a Bachelor of in significant exhibitions such as Fine Art from the Victorian College of Primavera, Museum of Contemporary the Arts, Melbourne, in 1994. ZT/HM Art, Sydney (2008) and Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2013–14). ZT/HM

112 | 113 NIGEL MILSOM TULLY MOORE Born 1975, Albury, Born 1981, Orange, New South Wales New South Wales Lives and works in Lives and works in Newcastle, Melbourne New South Wales Make it be that the pm stops looking like me 2016 Untitled (Judo house part 2) 2009 oil on board and clay oil on canvas 137.0 x 90.0 cm 195.0 x 136.0 cm Courtesy the artist Courtesy the artist and Yuill|Crowley Gallery, Sydney Politics, popular culture and humour collide in Tully Moore’s Make it Nigel Milsom’s figurative be that the pm stops looking like paintings are rendered in a stark me 2016: a portrait of twenty-six monochromatic palate. Captured at a of the twenty-eight exclusively larger than life scale, Untitled (Judo white, male Prime Ministers in house part 2) 2009 depicts two martial Australia’s constitutional history arts fighters engaged in contest. The to date. In a separate frame, above intense, concentrated velocity of this fragmented composition of their action is captured in Milsom’s faces, sits a portrait of Julia Gillard use of high contrast, and in gestural – the singular exception to this brushstrokes that obscure the otherwise homogenous political background so that the two bodies line-up. Moore’s practice often converge into one confounding, begins on the streets, in graphic almost sculptural form. With a lighter motifs and imagery discovered hand, he convincingly details the on walks around the city. Here, folds of their crisp white uniforms, in the shape of a gaudy mass in giving volume and mass to their the centre of the painting, he has presence. Here Milsom demonstrates appropriated a stylised outline of his deft ability to render drapery, male genitalia; applying it – as with attesting to his interest in classical graffiti – so as to literally deface sculpture, a canon of art history that this collection of faces. Make it has been influential to him. Milsom be that the pm stops looking like graduated with a Bachelor of Visual me is characteristic of enduring Arts from the University of Newcastle concerns within Moore’s art practice: in 1998 and later completed a Master combining representational imagery of Fine Art from College of Fine Arts, with illusionary elements and the University of New South Wales, visual language of popular culture Sydney in 2002. Since then he has to satirise and criticise ideology and exhibited widely, winning the Sulman authority. Moore graduated with Prize in 2012 and the Doug Moran an Honours degree in Fine Art from National Portrait prize in 2013. In the Victorian College of the Arts, 2015, Milsom infamously won the Melbourne, in 2008. AK prestigious Archibald Prize for his portrait of revered barrister and close friend, Charles Waterstreet. HM

114 | 115 Painting. More Painting Panorama: N–Z 2 – 25 September 2016

116 | 117 JAN NELSON ELIZABETH NEWMAN Born 1955, Melbourne Born 1962, Melbourne Lives and works in Lives and works in Melbourne Melbourne

Black river running 2016 Painting 2009 oil on linen oil and collage on linen 55.0 x 50.0 cm 100.0 x 80.0 cm Courtesy the artist and Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne Neon Parc, Melbourne

In her series Walking in the tall Alongside a parallel occupation grass, begun in 2001, Jan Nelson as a practicing psychoanalyst, combines digital photographic editing Elizabeth Newman has maintained and painterly process to achieve a longstanding practice of abstract technically refined, photo-realist paintings, text and textile works, paintings. Nelson’s hand-rendered developed with an economy of reproduction of the photographic means and an ethics of restraint. image in the traditional medium Reluctant to fill the world with of oil paint is contrasted against evermore signs, Newman has the placement of her subject on embraced the idea an ascetic artistic a superflat, digitally modelled practice, in which spaces of silence, polychromatic ground, characteristic reflection, freedom and sensibility of screen culture. A temporal schism are framed, in counterpoint to the is also evoked in Nelson’s subject invasiveness of late-capitalist image matter, with the object of the young production and discourse that girl’s contemplative gaze – the cup increasingly colonise subjectivity. In she holds – functioning as a totem Painting 2009, grey, white and green of childhood that contrasts with her rectangular fields float alongside a distinctly grownup fashion-styling. fugitive collage of a Baroque lake and The portrait offers the viewer a garden upon an aqueous painterly window into the tentative self- field. These hovering fields of non- image experimentation common in objectivity inevitably suggest an adolescence and in screen-based, idiosyncratic subjectivity. Questioning networked society. It may also lead the authority of images, and the the viewer to adopt the reflective idea of mastery, Newman’s Painting mode of the subject, contemplating is characterised by tentative mark their own life’s progress in a making, fragility and doubt – with the contemporary state of being. Nelson edges of the work left untouched, as graduated from the Victorian College if to suggest that the work remains of the Arts in 1983 and has been unfinished, to be continued. Modest the recipient of numerous awards in scale and temperament, like much including The Arthur Guy Painting of Newman’s practice, it is replete Prize, 2009, and the John McCaughey with soul, anecdote, feeling and Memorial Art Prize, 2004. AA poetic sensation, elaborated in a determinedly minor key. MD

118 | 119 JONATHAN NICHOLS JONNY NIESCHE Born 1956, Canberra Born 1972, Sydney Lives and works in Lives and works in Singapore Sydney

Atman 2008 Ritornello 2015 oil on linen voile, steel and synthetic 60.0 x 71.0 cm polymer paint Private Collection, Melbourne 120.0 cm x 170.0 cm Courtesy the artist and The protagonists in Jonathan STATION, Melbourne Nichols’ paintings appear repeatedly in his work, often over a number Sydney-based artist Jonny Niesche of years, curiously untouched by explores the outlying territories time. Nichols’ unorthodox, oblique of painting through a glam yet compositional choices – like freeze- hard-edged mode of image/object frames extracted from everyday construction. The artist’s post- life – draw on photographic source minimal works, typically abstract material and the chance composition and materially fetishistic, employ of the vernacular snapshot. In Atman glitter, mirrors and sheer, translucent 2008, a titular reference to the word custom-dyed fabrics stretched over for soul or essential self in Hindu, welded steel armatures. In Ritornello Jain and Buddhist religions, a child 2015 – a term borrowed from opera is portrayed from above, faceless to signal a return or refrain – Niesche beneath a spray of long, fair hair. revisits English artist David Hockney’s As if captured casually in passing, iconic 1967 painting A bigger splash. this anonymous figure occupies a Emptied of the sensuality of the non-specific space characterised by ‘Californian Modernist’ original – the painterly handling, light-flare and house, the plants, even the ‘splash’ the play between photography and itself is gone – Niesche’s version is painting. The choice of composition evenly geometric, with an irregular subverts the conventional depiction rhombus remaining to conjure the of the photographic subject, instead source painting’s diving board over embodying through anonymity an water. Niesche’s pastel-vaporwave avatar for projections of ego and voile-gradient orients the viewer at a personality. By obscuring the face cool distance from Hockney’s warm, from view, Nichols allows us to bright sun. Instead, the viewer sees psychically complete the essence of the early morning or end of light, just his subject, an obscure opportunity this side of night. Niesche completed to imagine another soul. Nichols Honours and Masters degrees in completed a Bachelor of Visual Art Fine Art at the University of Sydney at the National Institute of the Arts, (2008 and 2013 respectively), and also Australian National University, attended a Masters program with Canberra, in 1988, and a Graduate Heimo Zobernig at the Academy of Diploma of Professional Art at the Fine Arts, Vienna, in 2012. AA College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales, Sydney, in 1989. AA

120 | 121 JOHN NIXON & ROSE NOLAN UNKNOWN ARTIST Born 1959, Melbourne Born 1949, Sydney Lives and works in Lives and works in Melbourne Melbourne Not so sure this works (first anxiety red-on-white version) 2007 Purple circle/flowers synthetic polymer paint on cardboard (Copenhagen/Melbourne) 2014 76.0 x 50.0 cm enamel on MDF on oil on Courtesy the artist and Anna canvas board Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 38.5 x 30.5 cm Courtesy the artist and Rose Nolan primarily locates her work Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney within the expanded field of painting, notwithstanding a multidisciplinary In a recent series of paintings devised approach which also encompasses as collaborations with unknown artists, sculpture, installation, photography John Nixon has applied his interest in and text. Since the late 1990s she has monochrome painting, the Readymade consistently limited her palette to and Constructivism to found still- red and white in reference to diverse life, landscape and portrait paintings cultural influences that include the sourced from auctions and flea tradition of the white monochrome, markets. Influenced in part by Kazimir political banners, Russian Malevich’s late-career turn toward revolutionary art, and the aesthetics the village vernacular in his Russian of advertising. Not so sure this works peasant paintings, Nixon sees himself (first anxiety red-on-white version) as working alongside the original 2007 continues the artist’s practice creators of these ‘found images’ of giving visual form to language, in a progressive and respectful reclaiming vernacular expressions dialogue with unknown, uncelebrated and utterances from the stream of artists. In Purple circle/flowers daily conversation, and redeploying (Copenhagen/Melbourne) 2014, Nixon them as textual readymades. judiciously isolates a single hue for Here the artist’s graphic distortion uncompromised attention from the reduces legibility, extending time underlying depiction of a bunch of spent with the deconstructed text Chrysanthemums. The viewer is as image, creating a lag, or pause, privileged to the dialogue between within comprehension. Redolent two unrelated artists, the outcome with doubt and disembodied of which constitutes a complex authorship, Not so sure this works enrichment of each contributor’s presents a permanently problematic, aesthetic position. John Nixon studied self-reflexive image – at once at the Preston Institute of Technology, acknowledging the vulnerability of the 1967–68 and at the National Gallery of experimental artist and providing a Victoria Art School, 1969–70. He was script for judgment by the viewer. AA awarded the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award in 1999 and an Australia Council Fellowship in 2001. AA

122 | 123 DANIEL NOONAN ALAIR PAMBEGAN Born 1974, Melbourne Born 1968, Aurukun, Lives and works in Queensland New York Wik-Mungkan Lives and works in Indexical feelings 2015 oil on linen Aurukun 137.0 x 107.0 cm Collection of James Mollison and Kalben (Flying fox story place 4) Vince Langford, Melbourne 2014 ochre on canvas Daniel Noonan is known for 122.5 x 102.0 cm distinctively elusive, complex and Art Gallery of South Australia, vibrational polychrome abstractions. Adelaide His work exists in a state of ethereal Acquisition through TARNANTHI | suspension, with cryptic forms Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and figures slowly unfolding over and Torres Strait Islander Art time – figures that are obscure supported by BHP Billiton 2015 and resist quick comprehension. Whilst his compositions are derived Alair Pambegan is a Wik-Mungkan from preliminary drawings along artist from the community of with an amalgam of words and Aurukun located on the west side of phrases scribbled on his studio Cape York in Northern Queensland. wall, Noonan sees painting as He produces paintings on canvas a primary manifestation of the using ochre from his country ‘real’, as opposed to a secondary combined with acrylic binder to representation. The specificity of the create striking linear and geometric title, Indexical feelings, suggests elements that refer to traditional both the representational and body-painting designs worn sensory possibilities of painterly during Wik-Mungkan ceremonies. practice. Noonan has a desire to Pambegan assumes important unlock a language of consciousness, cultural responsibility in his practice. as forms collide and guide the His work Kalben (flying fox story creation of the image, though its place 4) 2014 draws upon ancestral logic remains fascinatingly opaque responsibility for Kalben, the locale to the viewer. Noonan only wants to relating to the ancestral flying fox, make essential marks – an approach while commenting on colonisation which takes on a performative and the defiant defense of country aspect in the studio. Noonan by Indigenous people. The red, graduated from the Victorian College white and black colour relationship of the Arts, Melbourne, in 1997 and combined with repetitive graphic has been based in New York since elements are expressions of social 2005. AA/HM tradition, stories and responsibilities handed down to him from his late father, highly respected elder and nationally renowned artist, Arthur Koo’ekka Pambegan Jnr. ED

124 | 125 OSCAR PERRY STIEG PERSSON Born 1988, Kent, Born 1959, Melbourne England; arrived Lives and works in Australia 1992 Melbourne Lives and works Fragile Ys 2009 in Melbourne and oil and metallic paint on linen Daylesford, Victoria 229.0 x 183.0 cm Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne Bad things come easy / poke and a mop 2013 As an artist who came of age in the oil on plywood, logs, artist’s frame twilight of late modernist painting, 123.0 x 93.0 x 30.0 cm Stieg Persson has maintained a keen Courtesy the artist interest in the language and semantics of painting, and the role of decorative Oscar Perry looks to popular culture, traditions once considered anathema art history and the work of his fellow to the formalist conventions of artists as source material for his own modernist abstraction. Fragile Ys 2009 work, which encompasses painting, is composed from a complex spatial sculpture, video and performance. layering of Rococo-like painterly forms The highly specific references in which oscillate between painting and his work often function to maintain writing, with reference to rocaille, narrative but never confine the graffito, and scroll-like ecriture, as direction that his abstract paintings well as more recently discovered take. Perry combines paint with scientific models found in genetic three-dimensional elements in his coding related to gender assignment. work Bad things come easy / poke These are layered, one upon the other, and a mop 2013, inspired by Kung Fu in taut, swooping and swooning fighting. Two wooden poles protrude arrangement, immersing the viewer out of the painting, resembling within the depths and dynamism martial arts training sculptures, and of the picture plane, creating an acting as obstacles restricting Perry’s archaeological painting, imbued with painting movements and dictating a surplus economy of ornament, in a the direction of his strokes. Perry complex play which pits gestural and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts subjective decorative modes against (Painting) from the Victorian College the classical and decorous. Persson of the Arts, Melbourne, in 2009, graduated from the Victorian College and Honours (Painting) from RMIT of the Arts, Melbourne, in 1981. He University, Melbourne, in 2012. ED was awarded the inaugural Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery, in 2003, and is currently a PhD candidate, and teacher in the Drawing and Printmedia Department, at the Victorian College of the Arts. MD

126 | 127 TOM POLO ELIZABETH PULIE Born Sydney, 1985 Born 1968, Sydney Lives and works in Lives and works in Sydney Sydney

Side talk 2014 Signature painting 2008 synthetic polymer paint and flashe synthetic polymer paint, pencil, on canvas gouache on linen 60.0 x 50.0 cm 100.0 x 120.0 cm Joyce Nissan Collection, Melbourne RACV Art Collection, Healesville

Tom Polo employs portraiture, text Elizabeth Pulie consciously works and graphic image-making, aligned within the formal constraints of with a ready dose of humour, to painting to accentuate the inherent explore ideas around anxiety, constructedness of the picture failure and expectation within the plane. Self-reflexive and critical, human condition. Characterised by Pulie’s work often possesses a bold colours and loose figurative distinctive decorative sensibility, forms, his paintings reflect on self- as is visible in Signature painting deprecation, vulnerability, honesty 2008. Here a selection of diverse and doubt amidst a culture of patterns, seemingly seized from continual validation. Polo contrasts outmoded domestic contexts, are re- themes of uncertainty and self-doubt appropriated, and juxtaposed within with moments of confidence through a dynamic composition of circular the immediacy of painted gestures. looping lines. The graphic content In Side talk 2014, two half-formed signals the gendered nature of many faces are depicted in conversation, of Pulie’s representations, while the their expressions formed through highly lyrical composition allows bleeds and irregular shapes divided the foreground and background by patches of colour. Polo graduated to oscillate between positive and with a Master of Fine Art from the negative space. In this way Pulie’s College of Fine Arts, University of finely detailed rendering draws the New South Wales, Sydney, in 2011. In viewer’s eye across and around 2015 he was the recipient of the Brett the painting as if engaged in an Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship optical dance. Pulie graduated with and undertook a three-month a Bachelor of Visual Arts (1991) and residency at the Cité Internationale Master of Visual Arts (2000) from des Arts, Paris. ED Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney and has exhibited widely both in Australia and internationally since 1987. SB/HM

128 | 129 ADAM PYETT BEN QUILTY Born 1973, Melbourne Born 1973, Sydney Lives and works in Lives and works in Melbourne Robertson, New South Wales Silver Princess Gum flowers [2] 2015 oil on linen Straight white male, nose self 76.5 x 61.0 cm portrait 2014 Private Collection, Melbourne; oil on linen courtesy Sophie Gannon Gallery 130.0 x 110.0 cm Courtesy the artist A sustained discipline in painterly handling and observational Ben Quilty’s practice is characterised process allows Adam Pyett to by a gestural painting style, working create evocative works within with a palette knife to achieve the genre of still life – a tradition layered, bodily three-dimensional known in French as nature morte smears of paint on canvas. Much (dead nature) – bringing a work of his work is autobiographical, to life from inanimate painterly focusing on universal themes of materiality. Form, colour, texture and masculinity, mortality and national light are key to the freshness and identity, while exploring personal individuality of each of his paintings, questions relating to self and often centered on Australian native identity. Part of this exploration flowers, such as gums, wattle is his identification with the and bottlebrush. Silver Princess ‘straight, white male’ paradigm to Gum flowers [2] 2015 features communicate contemporary themes. pink pendant flowers with dotted Quilty studied feminist theory at yellow tips against a balanced still the University of Western Sydney in life arrangement of waxy leaves the late 1990s to better understand and cool greens which animate a his own position as a young male dynamic interplay between the life confronting masculinity roles he of a painting and the suggestion did not respect or understand. of mortality implicit in the still- An absurdist humour is apparent life memento mori tradition. Pyett in the self-portrait Straight white graduated with a Bachelor of Fine male, nose self portrait 2014; the Art (Painting) from Victorian College work subverts an image of the artist of the Arts, Melbourne, in 1994. ED in order to communicate his own awkwardness in identifying as a figure of artistic and patriarchal authority. Quilty has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, winning the 2014 Prudential Eye Award, 2011 Archibald Prize and 2009 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize. ED

130 | 131 LISA REID REKO RENNIE Born 1975, Melbourne Born 1974, Melbourne Lives and works in Kamilaroi Melbourne Lives and works in Melbourne Peter Fay 2007 synthetic polymer paint on canvas Warrior 2015 177.0 x 151.5 cm synthetic polymer paint on linen Arts Project Australia Permanent 120.0 x 120.0 cm Collection, Melbourne Courtesy the artist and Gift of Peter Fay Blackartprojects, Melbourne Working with everyday images Reko Rennie’s work reveals a sourced from family albums and complex interplay of cultural popular culture, Lisa Reid’s intuitive references, from the distinctive and meticulously detailed paintings geometric patterns of his Kamilaroi playfully explore personal and heritage, to urban graffiti, pop art family history. Reid’s clever division and the influence of his upbringing of space in the portrait painting, in suburban Footscray. Self-taught, Peter Fay 2007, captures the figure in Rennie explores ideas of personal action, diligently animated against identity, Indigenous history and raw canvas ground. The inclusion political activism in his work, of a self-portrait hanging in the often investigating Indigenous upper left of the painting sets up culture within contemporary a triangulated relationship with urban environments. Warrior the principal subject and table- 2015 continues his exploration of based sculpture in the foreground. cultural juxtapositions: the bright, Reid’s refined use of surface reverberating patterns on the right texture shows a deeply considered of the canvas are an extension of combination of haptic and tactile Rennie’s recurring use of a diamond painterly handling, through the play motif in reference to his connection of intricate detail against sparse to the Kamilaroi people of northern areas of flat materiality. Reid joined New South Wales; while the stick Arts Project Australia in 2000 and figure, with spear raised, is a nod has since exhibited nationally and both to early New York street art and internationally since 2002, extending the defiant war-cry dance performed her practice to include printmaking, by Indigenous Australian rules ceramics, animation and digital art. footballer, Adam Goodes. Rennie’s Her portrait of Peter Fay depicts a work has been exhibited widely in collector and patron well known for Australia and internationally and was his support of untrained artists and most recently projected upon the informal art practices. CO sails of the Sydney Opera House as part of the Vivid Festival in 2016. CO

132 | 133 ROBERT ROONEY GARETH SANSOM Born 1937, Melbourne Born 1939, Melbourne Lives and works in Lives and works Melbourne in Melbourne and Sorrento, Victoria Le Rire: The guilty one (Picq) 2006 synthetic polymer paint on canvas Amyl 2015–6 110 . 0 x 9 8 . 5 c m oil, enamel and latex on linen Courtesy the artist and 183.0 x 169.0 cm Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne Courtesy the artist and STATION, Melbourne Robert Rooney’s Le Rire: The guilty one (Picq) 2006 captures a Gareth Sansom’s paintings are moment of realisation between two imbued with a density of experience characters – an adult and a child. and highly allusive references to art Despite the implied guilt of the and cinema history, popular culture, painting’s title, and the generational and the performance of sexual hierarchy that exists between the identity. Amyl 2015–16 continues pair, it is not immediately apparent Sansom’s long-standing exploration – from the figures’ stylised body into painterly process and mark- language and facial expressions making, as ambiguous figurative alone – to which this accusation delineations wrestle with abstract applies. Are the eyes of the child entities to reveal the mysterious life ones of shame or scorn? Or the and energies of painting itself. The suggested shock of the adult caused central form recalls the grotesque by a discovery or by himself being figures and compositional structure discovered? Without the usual text of Sansom’s artistic forebear, to accompany a cartoon strip, the Francis Bacon; its painted latex medium from which this painting visage protruding uncannily from takes its cue, it is up to viewers an intensely coloured, otherworldly to deduce their own meaning realm. First exhibiting in the from this pregnant pause. Le Rire: late 1950s, Sansom was Head of The guilty one (Picq) 2006 is one Painting and subsequently Dean of five paintings by Rooney to of the School of Art at the Victorian reference the crisp outlines found College of the Arts, Melbourne, from in satirical cartoons by the artists 1977–91. He has been the recipient Picq, Tayvar and Nitro published in of numerous awards, including the a 1937 copy of the French journal Dobell Drawing Prize in 2012, the Le Rire (Laughter). The painting John McCaughey Memorial Prize reveals Rooney’s ongoing interest, in 2008 and the National Works on throughout his long and diverse Paper Award in 2006. SB practice, in working from found and secondary sources – often referencing the visual language of advertising, children’s book illustrations and cartoon strips to enact a playful deconstructive of images and language. AK

134 | 135 GEMMA SMITH KATE SMITH Born 1978, Sydney Born 1980, Lives and works in Cootamundra, New Sydney South Wales Lives and works in Brilliant branch 2014 synthetic polymer paint on canvas Bethungra, 138.5 x 118.5 cm New South Wales Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney Repeat (the plague) 2014 Drawing from the history of synthetic polymer paint on canvas abstraction, process and colour board field painting, Gemma Smith 20.5 x 40.8 cm explores the potential for colour and Courtesy the artist and gesture to challenge the otherwise Sutton Gallery, Melbourne flat surface of the picture plane. Revelling in the viscous flow of With humble means and with painting’s materiality, Smith’s use of recourse to readily available colour is bold and joyful, with large materials, Kate Smith’s practice sweeps of synthetic polymer paint displays a playful approach to accentuating painterly process and painting that embodies a sense of gesture. Smith’s sculptural forms, immediacy through its raw traits. an extension of her paintings, pay In Repeat (the plague) 2014 Smith’s homage to the work of Australian use of a modest canvas board hard-edge abstract artists, such format rejects the putative authority as Ron Robertson-Swann, whose of traditionally stretched canvas infamous public sculpture Vault whilst its informality and humility 1978 sits in the ACCA forecourt. challenges the values of painting Since 2009, Smith has moved away today by pitting ambient, precarious from the sharp, geometric planes poetics against mastery. The at once of her earlier work, embracing a bold and vulnerable gestures of more organic and gestural style, her brushstrokes evoke a fleeting described as Tangle paintings. In moment or emotional drama that is Brilliant branch 2014, the underlying amplified by the emptiness of the surface of the canvas appears to balance of the expansive picture have been erased by thick painterly plane. Smith graduated from the doodles, confusing the space School of Art, Australian National between figure and ground, and the University, Canberra, in 2005 with relations of line and colour. Smith a Bachelor of Arts (Visual) and was completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts awarded the ANU School of Art at Sydney College of the Arts in 1999 Peter Fay Graduate Award. She has and in 2004 completed an honours completed residencies at Gertrude year at Queensland University of Contemporary, Melbourne (2010), Technology, Brisbane. LC and Artspace, Sydney (2011). KL

136 | 137 NICOLA SMITH JOHN SPITERI Born 1981, Sydney Born 1967, Sydney Lives and works in Lives and works in Sydney Sydney

Je tu il elle 7 2015 Vagabond 2016 oil on linen oil and enamel on canvas 45.0 x 60.0 cm 168.0 x 122.0 cm Courtesy the artist and Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney Neon Parc, Melbourne

Exploring the relationship between John Spiteri’s practice has recently cinema and painting, Nicola Smith’s shifted from figurative, dream-like Je tu il elle 7 2015, is from a series of two and three-dimensional works to twelve oil paintings that re-purpose abstract paintings on linen with oil and re-imagine scenes from the and enamel, allowing the materiality 1974 film Je tu il elle (I, you, he, she) of the paint to become the focus. In by the late structuralist filmmaker Vagabond 2016, the energy of the Chantal Akerman. Written, directed painted surface draws the eye to by and starring Akerman, the film move constantly around the surface tells the story of an aimless young of the painting, the focus vibrating woman, attempting to recover at between background and foreground home from a breakup. Originally and between painterly process and shot in black and white, Smith has spatial composition. The earthy translated the scene into lively tones and translucent colours are colour, depicting the former lovers reminiscent of a landscape and as reconciled over a kitchen table. the name of the work implies we Smith’s interest in Akerman’s oeuvre are free to visually wander around stems in part from the filmmaker’s the composition without belonging characteristic use of long takes – a to a certain time or place. Spiteri temporal concern that is shared by completed a Bachelor of Education painting. In reconstructing these (Art) and Master of Fine Art at the existing scenes, translating them College of Fine Arts, University of from one medium to another, Smith New South Wales (1989 and 2001 also alludes to the relationship respectively). In 1995 and 2001 he between the real and illusory, attended a Masters program in another of the many concerns Associate Research at Goldsmiths shared by both cinema and painting. College, London. KL Smith received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National Art School, Sydney, in 2002 and completed her Honours year at the University of Tasmania, Hobart, in 2009. KL

138 | 139 MADONNA STAUNTON ESTHER STEWART Born 1938, Born 1988, Katherine, Murwillumbah, New Western Australia South Wales Lives and works Lives and works in in Melbourne and Brisbane Daylesford, Victoria

Profile no. 1 2012 Networking from bed 2016 synthetic polymer paint on canvas synthetic polymer on board 36.0 x 30.5 cm 151.0 x 121.0 cm Private Collection, Brisbane Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney Working across painting, collage and assemblage, in a career spanning Esther Stewart creates juxtapositions over five decades, Madonna Staunton of bold colour, shape and line that has made an indelible mark on encourage shifting perspectives the landscape of Australian art. and illusory effects. Drawing on Following an early career as a large- traditions of geometric painting and scale, abstract painter, Staunton graphic design, the title of Stewart’s embraced the intimacy of collage painting Networking from bed 2016 and assemblage upon the early onset implies an interior space, with the of arthritis. More recently, she has symmetry of the composition and returned to painting – combining the graphic black lines reminiscent of formal properties of her collages with an architectural plan or elevation. an enduring interest in philosophy This notion – of being able to and the internal psychological world. communicate with others from the In Profile no. 1 2012 a vase of flowers privacy and comfort of the bedroom is set against a flattened and slightly – of course also references a digital askew background. Staunton’s strong space, alluded to in the grid-like understanding and use of colour matrix of which gives the painting its is evident here in her confident structure. Stewart’s geometric planes rendering of this bold and abstracted and colour palette can here be seen still-life that can be read as either a to reference painting’s relationship literal depiction of a domestic interior, both to a modernist art history, as the play of paint upon the surface of well as our digital present, with the picture plane, or as a memento the new and various modes of mori reminding us of the passage of representation and perception that life and time. Staunton has had a long this brings. Stewart completed a and prolific career, with solo survey Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at exhibitions of her work held at the the Victorian College of the Arts, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Melbourne, in 2010, and graduated Modern Art, Brisbane (2014), Institute with a Masters of Cultural and Arts of Modern Art, Brisbane (2003) and Management from the University of QUT Art Museum, Brisbane (2002). KL Melbourne in 2013. SB

140 | 141 TYZA STEWART KRISTINA Born 1990, Brisbane TSOULIS-REAY Lives and works in Born 1979, Melbourne Brisbane Lives and works in Melbourne Over 2015 oil on panel Rearview 2016 185.0 x 70.3 cm oil on linen board Griffith University Art Collection, 21.0 x 16.3 cm Brisbane Courtesy the artist Purchased 2016 Often rendered on a small scale, Tyza Stewart’s paintings consider Kristina Tsoulis-Reay’s paintings ideas of identity and non-binary capture fleeting moments that gender through the repeated conjure forgotten childhood act of self-portraiture. Stewart’s memories of family holidays. portraits challenge dominant Working mostly from photographic understandings of gender fixity, in sources, both personal and found, preference for more ambiguous, fluid she develops layers of semi- representations. In Over 2015 we see translucent paint, instilling a sense a portrait of the artist in which only of the transitional, and the idea of the face, hands and feet are rendered fragile memory, through textures complete. The rest of the body is that appear to shimmer. Rearview constructed with a faint outline, 2016 is a complex image that creating a ghostly, ambiguous figure. explores the perceptual potential of Over, like much of Stewart’s work, windows, mirrors and interior space. raises questions about the visibility, Employing dramatic shifts in scale or lack thereof, of transsexual bodies – from macro to micro, and adult in the public sphere. Focussing to childhood perception – Rearview upon the head, locks of hair, hands, is about looking and memory, with wrist and feet, Stewart’s painting an equally compelling allusion to makes inevitable reference to the psychological and personal space. crucifixion, passion and suffering of Tsoulis-Reay completed her Masters Christ, whilst its openness provides of Fine Art at Monash University in the viewer with space to consider 2009 and has exhibited widely in the question gender, and to imagine Melbourne since 2002. CO alternative possibilities. Stewart graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) in 2012 from Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane. In 2016, Stewart was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. KL

142 | 143 TREVOR VICKERS JENNY WATSON Born 1943, Adelaide Born 1951, Melbourne Lives and works in Perth Lives and works in Brisbane Untitled 2014–15 synthetic polymer paint on canvas Moon, Sophie + Me 2013 91.5 x 106.5 cm synthetic polymer paint, oil, oilstick, Courtesy the artist and Charles pigment, pom poms on linen Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne 293.0 x 124.0 cm Courtesy the artist and Continuing to refine his practice over Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne a career spanning more than five decades, Trevor Vickers’ distinctive Autobiographical in nature, Jenny style of abstraction employs bold Watson’s paintings depict fragmented colour, elegant lines and basic narratives and memories with a wilful geometric shapes. Through his childlike energy. Watson often places application of colour, Vickers plays herself within her images, drawing with our perceptions – locating on her recollections from travel and lighter tones next to, or overlapping, everyday life, as well as an interest darker ones to create the illusion in feminism and domestic narratives, of a space that is visually rhythmic to create poetic expressions of the and never still. Untitled 2014–15 self. Moon, Sophie + Me 2013 depicts continues Vickers’ exploration a quintessential subject for Watson: of visual perception through his the artist in the company of a horse. graceful use of abstraction and the A lifelong love of horses has seen play of light and colour, which sees equine subjects feature in many of the vertical fields located in parallel artist’s paintings, both as figurative across the canvas, weaving the subject matter and through the eye throughout the space in a application of horse hair. Combining continuous optical hum. Vickers was imagery and text on fabric, the work included in the seminal exhibition is characteristic of Watson’s use of The Field at the National Gallery of materials as well as her tendency Victoria in 1968, which championed to share intimate details of her life Australian artists working with hard- with the viewer. Watson graduated edged abstraction and colour field from the National Gallery of Victoria painting. CO Art School in 1972 and has since held over ninety solo exhibitions in Australia and internationally. She was the first female artist to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale with a solo presentation in 1993, and was awarded an Australia Council Fellowship in 2005. AL

144 | 145 BRADD PETER WESTWOOD WESTMORELAND Born 1954, Sydney Born 1975, Melbourne Lives and works in Lives and works in Melbourne Melbourne The poor hospital 2012 oil on linen Spring morning 2015 92.0 x 128.0 cm oil on linen Courtesy the artist 180.0 x 140.0 cm Courtesy the artist and Niagara An interest in the unsettled nature Galleries, Melbourne of contemporary society and ideas of self in relation to complex power A keen appreciation for art history has structures is a repeated motif in helped Bradd Westmoreland evolve Peter Westwood’s work. With a his distinctive approach, which shifts practice devoted to questions of beguilingly between figuration and painting, Westwood is as much abstraction. The influence of canonical concerned with the sensory, figures including Picasso, Cézanne, experiential implications of painterly Matisse and El Greco are evident in practice – the idea of the work of Westmoreland’s imagined still life art ‘as immanent to experience, as and figure paintings, landscapes much an event as an object’ – as and renderings of emotional states. he is with representation itself. The Using a high-key palette comprised poor hospital 2012 presents a group mainly of primary and secondary of uniformed figures in a hospital colours, Westmoreland applies layers ward awash with institutional of paint in intuitive, gestural strokes, colours of yellow and pale blue. scratching and scrubbing back the Whilst the viewer is rendered an surface to create concentrations of impotent observer to the narrative colour, or areas of light and space. scene depicted, it is the image-form The gesture of the artist’s hand itself which compels our attention, lends Westmoreland’s work, a lively, in the painterly play of sweeping energised presence that imbues brushstrokes and the optical something of a felt, rather than vibration of contrasting colours seen, reality. In Spring morning and dynamic compositional space. 2015, a dynamic figure structures Westwood is Senior Lecturer and the composition according to its the Coordinator of the School of Art diagonal fold, warping painterly space Bachelor of Art Honours program at through abstract, biomorphic fields. RMIT University, Melbourne, where Many of Westmoreland’s subjects, he is also a PhD candidate. AL predominantly nudes, turn away from the viewer in introspection, creating a melancholic and voyeuristic feeling. Westmoreland completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, in 1995 and has exhibited regularly since 1997. LC/HM

146 | 147 KEN WHISSON NORA WOMPI Wantili to Kinya 2013 synthetic polymer paint on linen Born 1927, Lilydale, Born 1939, Karimarra, 300.0 x 125.0 cm Victoria Western Australia Courtesy the artists; Martumili Manyjilyjarra Artists; and Hanging Valley, Lives and works in Melbourne Lives and works in Sydney Kunawarritji Wantili to Kinyu 2013 was created by Nora Wompi, Nora Nungabar and Bush recollections with houses and Baugai Whylouter, and completed in faces 2013-14 NORA NUNGABAR collaboration with younger artists oil on linen Born 1920, near Lupuru, Marjorie Yates and Nola Ngalangka 120.0 x 100.0 cm Western Australia Taylor. Working together, the Courtesy the artist and Niagara women are able to demonstrate Galleries, Melbourne Manyjilyjarra how they represent their country Lives and works in through the shared act of painting Ken Whisson received his artistic Kunawarritji and knowledge transfer. According training from Russian émigré painter, to these Martumili artists: ‘This Danila Vassilieff, after studying briefly painting shouldn’t be read as a at Swinburne Technical College, BUGAI WHYOULTER straight map of waterholes and Melbourne. Vassilieff helped to focus Born 1940, Pukayiyirna sandhills, places. We don’t join it Whisson’s expressive painterly style up like white fellas might. We put it while introducing him to the artistic (Balfour Downs Station), down the way we see it, feel it, know coterie surrounding the Heide circle. Western Australia it and that’s not in a straight line’. Whisson relocated to Perugia, Italy, Manyjilyjarra Avoiding a purely diagrammatic in 1977 yet his work maintained representation of landscape, the an enduring link to the Australian Lives and works in artists understand topographic landscape. He recently returned to Kunawarritji references as part of a broader Sydney after three and half decades investigation into the spiritual of living abroad. The composition of essence and sensual evocation of Whisson’s paintings hinge on their with place. In this way Wantili to Kinyu precarious balance of graphic visual NORA NGALANGKA 2013 reflects the group’s deep components arranged discretely to TAYLOR engagement with their ancestral resemble schematic blueprints, which country, reflecting a journey from coalesce to create coherent spatial Born 1951, Wirrinyalkujarra, Wantili (near Parnngurr) to Kinyu narratives. This coming-together of Western Australia (near Kunawarritji) that documents parts reflects an intuitive urge to Manyjilyjarra both the physical and spiritual simultaneously record and create. attributes of their surrounds. SB As Whisson once stated: ‘Art is what Lives and works in happens at the end of the brush Parnngurr when it meets the canvas’. Achieving an optical energy from the frisson of colour and line, Bush recollections MARJORIE YATES with houses and faces 2013-14 Born 1950, Western Desert, disperses familiar representations Western Australia of the landscape against patches of vivid colour to formulate abstract Manyjilyjarra sensations of identity and place Lives and works in in the artist’s typically raw, optical illustrative style. SB Kunawarritji

148 PROJECT CREDITS CURATORS’ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ESSAYISTS ACCA BOARD WEEKEND GALLERY VISIONARY PATRON ENTHUSIAST Helen Selby & Jim Couttie CONTEMPORARY CIRCLE COORDINATORS Prescott Family Foundation Nicholas Brass & Zoe Ganim The Alderman Eugene Shafir Curators Our thanks go firstly to the seventy- Jan Bryant is a writer and John Denton Jessie Bullivant Morgan Phoa Family Fund Ingrid Braun Emma Anderson Nigel Simpson INAUGURAL ASSOCIATES Max Delany nine participating artists for their teacher. She works in the Chair Hanna Chetwin Anonymous Dominic & Natalie Dirupo Kerryn & Gary Anderson Sisters Beach House Michaela Davis Annika Kristensen provocative and inspiring artworks Faculty of Art, Design and Anna Parlane Mark Fraser Ruth Bain Angela Taylor Richard Janko Hannah Mathews and for the conversations about Architecture at Monash Uni- Lesley Alway Jacqui Shelton Rachel Griffiths Andrew Benjamin William Taylor Melissa Loughnan painting that we have shared along versity, Melbourne. Deputy Chair LEGEND & Andrew Taylor Claire Beynon Nga Tran Alrick Pagnon Curatorial Intern the way. We thank the numerous GALLERY ATTENDANTS Tania & Sam Brougham Jane Hemstrich Bialik College University High School Wesley Spencer Peter Doyle Stephanie Berlangieri private lenders and commercial Justin Paton is a curator and Arini Byng J. Andrew Cook Jan Minchin Maryann & Michael Brash Ravi Vasavan Chair, Finance Committee galleries who have generously widely published writer from Maya Chakraborty Vivien & Graham Knowles Mark & Louise Nelson Angela Brennan Hon. Heidi Victoria MLA ASSOCIATES Nicholas Chilvers ACCA installation team loaned works for the period of New Zealand. Since 2014 he John Dovaston Jane Morley Margaret Plant Janet Broughton Anna Waldmann Fenina Acance Beau Emmett the exhibition. Special thanks are has been Head Curator of Dean de Landre Jane Ryan & Nick Kharsas Judy Buchan The Walls Art Space Ariani Anwar Annemarie Kiely Lucy Mactier Patrick O’Brien also due to Charlotte Day, Director, International Art at the Art Alan & Carol Schwartz AM Robert Buckingham Rosemary Walls Kyp & Luisa Bosci Shelley Penn Sean Miles Ned Needham Monash University Museum of Art; Gallery of New South Wales, CHAMPION Dahle Suggett Belinda Buckley Jervis Ward Brigid Brock Bernard Salt Lauren Ravi Simon McGuinness Angela Goddard, Director, Griffith Sydney. Danielle & Daniel Besen Irene Sutton Dominique Burgoine Peter Westwood Alexya Campbell Steven Smith Ella Shi Brian Scales Artworks, Griffith University Art Foundation Jan van Schaik Cantilever Interiors Andrew Wilson blackartprojects Andrew Taylor Jacqueline Stojanovic Simone Tops Gallery and Griffith University Art Quentin Sprague is a writer Hana Vasak Marc Besen AC Sarah & Ted Watts John & Christine Brian Zulaikha Beth Fernon Danae Valenza Collection; Nick Mitzevich, Director, and curator based in Mel- & Eva Besen AO Chamberlain Anonymous (17) Kylie T Forbes ACCA STAFF and Nici Cumpston, Curator of bourne. FRONT OF HOUSE Morena Buffon Fiona Clyne Colin Golvan QC Editor Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander VOLUNTEERS & Santo Cilauro FRIEND Rebecca Coates & Dr Deborah Golvan Max Delany Joanna Bosse Art, Art Gallery of South Australia; Hanann Al Daqqa John Denton Betty Amsden OAM Jeni Cooper BENEFACTORS Jane Hayman Artistic Director & CEO and Vanessa Van Ooyen, Senior CATALOGUE ENTRY Annette Allman & Susan Cohn Paul Auckett Madeleine Coulombe Lesley Alway Nick Hays Photography Curator, QUT Art Museum & William WRITERS Peter & Leila Doyle Bird de la Coeur Architects Julia Cox & Paul Hewison Regina Hill Linda Mickleborough Maddy Anderson Andrew Curtis Robinson Gallery, Queensland Anna Schwartz Helen Brack Virgina Dahlenburg Danielle & Daniel Besen Adam Kaye Executive Director Oskar Arnold University of Technology who have AA: Andrew Atchison Eloise Breskvar & Morry Schwartz AO Karilyn Brown Daskysdalimit Pty Ltd Foundation Alana Kushnir Printer been instrumental in confirming SB: Stephanie Berlangieri Debra Lyon Louise Choi Michael Schwarz & David Sally Browne Fund Suzanne Dance Marc Besen AC & Shaun Cartoon Adams Print the loans of key works from public KB: Kim Brockett Finance & Eva Christoff Clouston Helen Clarke Diana Devlin & Eva Besen AO Jack Lang collections. We are grateful for the LC: Laura Couttie Operations Manager Ruth Cummins Robyn & Ross Wilson Jo Davenport Sue Dodd Anthony Briar Lloyd advice of numerous peers including GD: Grace Davenport Anna May Cunningham Detached Cultural Jennifer Doubell & Michele Boscia Ross Lowe Tony Albert, Joanna Bosse, Damiano MD: Max Delany Annika Kristensen Janelle DeGabriele Organisation C. Douglas Nicholas Brass Annabel Mactier Bertoli, Geoff Newton, Jonathan ED: Eliza Devlin Curator Anne Dribbisch GUARDIAN Sophie Gannon Fiction Film Company & Zoe Ganim Claire Mazzone Nichols, Quentin Sprague and Judith AL: Alison Lasek Aleisha Earp Lesley Alway & Paul Hewison The Late Neilma Gantner Elly & Nathan Fink Ingrid Braun Brigitt Nagle Ryan, Senior Curator of Indigenous AK: Annika Kristensen Alison Lasek Trinity Gurich BE Architecture Wendy Kozica & Alan Kozica Jessie French Tania & Sam Brougham These Are The Projects Art, National Gallery of Victoria. To KL: Kate Long Public Programs Manager Ross Lowe Anthony & Michele Boscia Andrew Landrigan Vida Maria Gaigalas Beth Brown & Tom Bruce AM We Do Together our essayists – Jan Bryant, Justin DL: Debra Lyon Esther Raworth Robyn & Graham Burke & Brian Peel A. Geczy Morena Buffon Adam Pustola Paton and Quentin Sprague – we HM: Hannah Mathews Grace Davenport Ryota Ryland Beth Brown & Tom Bruce AM In Memory of Bill Lasica Amy Grevis-James & Santo Cilauro RAIDSTUDIO thank you for your thoughtful and CO: Chelsea O’Brien Patron Program & Special Fiona Shewan Georgia Dacakis Nicholas Lolatgis Amanda Hall Robyn & Graham Burke Reko Rennie illuminating observations about ZT: Zoe Theodore Events Manager Madeline Simm Annette Dixon Raoul Marks Katrina Hall Morgan Phoa Family Fund Claire Richardson painting; and thank you to the Sofia Skobeleva Carole & John Dovaston The Mavis Fund Martin Hanns & Eliza Devlin Helen Clarke Lynda Roberts Kim Brockett Dalton Stewart ACCA staff for pitching in to put Rosemary Forbes Naomi Milgrom Foundation Simon & Jane Hayman John Denton Jane Roberts Corporate Partnerships Isobel Stuart together the artists’ texts. A huge & Ian Hocking Kenneth W Park Gavin John & Susan Cohn Matthew Taylor Coordinator Jacob Taylor thank you to our Curatorial Intern, Ginny & Leslie Green Drew Pettifer & Francesca Black Annette Dixon Anonymous (3) Keenan Thebus Stephanie Berlangieri, who has been Susan M Renouf Sue Rose Kestin Family Peter & Leila Doyle Zoe Theodore Camille Thomas an enormous help at all stages of Grants Coordinator & Genevieve Trail Gary Singer RAIDSTUDIO Annemarie Kiely Rosemary Forbes this project, as well as to our crew – Development Administrator Bas van de Kraats & Geoffrey Smith Steven Smith Natalie King & Ian Hocking Beau Emmett, Patrick O’Brien, Ned Alyxandra Westwood Jennifer Strauss AM Allan & Wendy Kozica Ginny & Leslie Green Needham, Simon McGuiness, Brian Eliza Devlin Agnes Whalan Nella Themelios Cecily Kuoc Jane Hemstritch Scales, Simone Tops and Danae Education Manager Grace White Rosita Trinca Natalie Lasek & Martin Vivien & Graham Knowles Valenza – for their good humour and Alex Williams NS & JS Turnbull Matthews Jan Minchin professionalism in the installation of Laura Couttie Gia Zhou John Wardle Architects Anaya Latter Jane Morley this exhibition. Visitor Services & Lyn Williams AM Georgina Lee Kenneth W Park — MD, AK & HM Volunteer Program Manager COFFEE CART BARISTAS Anonymous Damian Lentini Margaret Plant Jesse Dyer Nicholas Lolatgis Prescott Family Foundation Liam O’Brien Ander Rennick Deb Lyon Susan M Renouf Exhibitions Manager Jacqui Shelton John McNamara Allan & Eva Rutman Tash Mian Jane Ryan & Nick Kharsas Kate Long BAR MANAGER Gene-Lyn Ngian Anna Schwartz Venue Hire Manager Ross Lowe & Jeffrey Robinson & Morry Schwartz AO Chelsey O’Brien Chelsey O’Brien Alan & Carol Schwartz AM Online Communications Alice Pentland Michael Schwarz Coordinator Anouska Phizacklea & David Clouston Angela Pye & Jeremy Bakker Gary Singer Andrew Atchison Toby & Clare Ralph & Geoffrey Smith Artist Educator Andrew Rogers Jennifer Strauss AM Allan & Eva Rutman Dahle Suggett Hannah Mathews Ryles & Associates Irene Sutton Associate Curator Cathy Scott Robyn & Ross Wilson Katrina Sedgwick Anonymous Matt Hinkley Designer

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