Eva Breuer Art Dealer

Judy Cassab

2011-06-29T11:53:00.001+10:00

Judy Cassab

Exhibition: Focus on Judy Cassab
On view from Friday 1 July 2011

Eva Breuer Art Dealer
83 Moncur Street Woollahra

Judy Cassab was recently awarded the Gold Cross of Merit by the Republic of Hungary for her lifetime of work by the Hungarian Ambassador.
In honour of Judy's award, Eva Breuer Art Dealer is holding a small survey show, Focus on Judy Cassab, which will showcase landscapes, interiors and portraits executed over her lifetime.
Judy quickly became an eminent portrait painter - being the only woman to win the Archibald Prize twice, first in 1961 and again in 1968 and also winning the The Australian Women's weekly Portrait Prize twice in the 1950s. Alongside portraiture, Judy also became enamoured with the Australian landscape and subsequently developed a unique abstracted view of the outback, producing vibrant depictions of her new home.
Judy Cassab is one of Australia’s most celebrated living artists. She was born in Vienna in 1920 and with her young family immigrated to Australia in 1950.
Judy’s paintings are held in all major collections in Australia and around the world including the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Judy is still painting today at the age of 91.
Further information and images: Please contact Michelle Seth

PH: 02 93620297
email: art@evabreuerartdealer.com.au

Judy Cassab (b. 1920)

Waterfall 2008

oil on board

60 x 44.5cm

signed 'Cassab 08' lower right

Provenance: The artist

no.10680

Eva Breuer Art Dealer

www.evabreuerartdealer.com.au

Christopher McVinish: Silent Observations

2011-06-23T11:28:00.000+10:00

Christopher McVinish: Silent Observations
Opening July 30 at Eva Breuer Art Dealer

Silent Observations continues McVinish's investigation of the landscape and the figure in the landscape. In these new paintings the scenes depicted are at once familiar but at the same time contain an element of psychological drama. The landscapes and their solitary inhabitants address viewers role as filmic voyeur. We are invited to become a participant in the story being portrayed, to attach our own history to the painting. Through the painting we enter into our own story looking for the unexpected, some piece of information that will unveil the mysterious world before us.

Christopher McVinish
Towards Oberon 2011
oil on linen
92 x 101 cm
no. 12224

view more works by Christopher McVinish

Vince Vozzo - Naissance: Drawings for sculpture

2011-06-20T15:52:00.000+10:00

Exhibition 2011
Naissance - Drawings for sculpture
10-22 September 2011 Opening Saturday 10 September 3-5 pm
“Drawing is the beginning of everything - the beginning of ideas.”

Past, Present, Future 2004

sandstone

25 x 400 x 25 cm

Apocalyptic paradigm shift 2008

acrylic on canvas

92 x 771 cm

It is arguable that the sculpted female form is the most powerful symbol to have been created by Man. The image of Woman historically and today, embodies notions of fecundity, fertility, birth, power and temptation. The ancient Venus Figurines Venus of Lespugue (Musée de l'Homme, Paris); Slovakia’s Venus of Hradok and the important Venus of Willendorf have for millennia given hope, inspired, fascinated and intrigued. In contemporary times in Australia artists such as Bertram Mackennal (1863-1931) Guy Boyd (1923-1988), Lyndon Dadswell (1908-1986) and Tom Bass (1916-2010) have found inspiration in the feminine. But where did that form begin? What are these totems borne out of? They are borne out of drawing.
Born in Cabramatta, the son of Italian migrants, Vince Vozzo is among the most important contemporary Australian figurative sculptors. Vozzo insists that, “Drawing is the beginning of everything - the beginning of ideas” and it is from the tumbling figures in drawings such as his Apocalyptic paradigm shift 2008, that his marble and stone Venus’s are born. Selected by Italian curator Vittorio Sgarbi for the Venice Biennale 2011 Apocalyptic paradigm shift is a Bosch inspired complex panorama of bats, angels, Greek gods, mules, serpents, and levitating houses – a womb, cradling the geneses of future objects. Henry Moore said that drawing was an outlet for his ideas and within Vozzo’s drawings the viewer is constantly aware of thousands of these ideas waiting to be extracted from the block.

In stone we witness the genius of Vozzo’s method. It is in the innate “life” retained in the transfer from two to three dimensions that Vozzo is commanding and in the truthful manipulation of the stone. Small works like the Carrara marble Woman waiting I have the power and feminine authority of Venus of Willendorf. His Sydney sandstone, Woman waiting I has the proportions and fluid rhythm of Brancusi’s Bird in Space in the New National Gallery in Berlin. Vozzo creates the illusion that the object is soft, supple, light and malleable, but remains true to the stone, allowing the natural density and weight of the object to suggest the form. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” wrote John Keats and like his Grecian Urn, the beauty of Vozzo’s amphora-like figures are all we need to know.

Nicky McWilliam " Universities are letting Australian art down"

2011-06-20T15:49:00.000+10:00

Published: Sydney Morning Herald March 24, 2011

I recently advertised on an arts industry website for a part-time assistant for a commercial gallery in Sydney. There were more than 80 applicants, and all were either graduates of, or students attending, tertiary art schools. At interviews, there were works on the gallery walls by significant Australian artists including John Coburn, Gary Shead, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Brett Whiteley and Grace Cossington Smith. Only a handful of interviewees could identify any of the artists or works. Interviewees showed little knowledge of or interest in Australian art and art history; most said their courses offered Australian art only as an adjunct or secondary field of knowledge.

I discussed my concerns with an art history student, Vi Girgis, and we began to investigate: is there a new generation of graduates in the arts who have little understanding of and appreciation for Australian cultural and artistic heritage? If so, why?

An online survey of the graduate and postgraduate art history and theory courses at Australian universities revealed that not one of them had a mandatory undergraduate course in Australian art history. Only the University of Adelaide offers a one-year postgraduate course: studies in Australian art. There are elective options at Melbourne University, the University of South Australia and the Australian National University.

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It is possible to complete a graduate and even postgraduate degree in fine art, visual art, arts administration or art theory at an Australian university without acquiring even the most basic knowledge about Australian art or art history. This dishonours the profound wealth of Australian art and the indigenous history and social comment that inspired it.

It falls to art institutions and galleries to spend time and resources training and refocusing graduates, who may well be ill-equipped to represent the Australian art world in the international market.

Christie's in London recently held a sale of modern and contemporary Australian art. The 40 lots realised £541,737 ($877,540). Last August Georgina Pemberton, formerly head of Australian paintings at Sotheby's in Australia, was appointed a director of Agnew's, one of London's leading international art dealerships. Her first exhibition was devoted to paintings by Sidney Nolan, of which nearly all sold.

Why, then, is the international interest in Australian art not mirrored here? Academics at various universities referred me to a 2006 issue of Artlink, which was devoted to the dwindling academic interest in the study of Australian art. In it, Professor Ian McLean, of the University of Western Australia, explained: ''Most Australian art historians teach and research European and US art … in the 1970s … Australian art was the last thing we students were interested in.''

Daniel Thomas, emeritus director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, recalls that ''art teachers 40 or 50 years ago in Sydney seemed to know or care little about Australian art of the past when they conducted students around their local art museum''.

Professor Sasha Grishin, from the ANU, laments that ''courses devoted to Australian art sometimes fail to attract large numbers of undergraduate students''.

This lack of interest is not a new phenomenon, but a dysfunctional cultural cringe trumpeting the superiority of European-American art over Australian. The variety, depth and high standards of art practices are a strong foundation for not only the successful practice of art making and theorising, but also a deep appreciation for the art, culture and heritage of this country. It is incomprehensible that this is not a fundamental focus of universities teaching art history.

Elizabeth Grierson, head of the school of art at RMIT University, has suggested a new way of looking at art institutions that would turn the focus away from the northern hemisphere. An art school, she says, should operate ''as a knowledge-generating site with a role and responsibility to the community of which it is a part. As such it contributes to, shapes and reflects the cultural and historical values of a given community.''

Australian culture deeply appreciates the history and participants of sport, entertainment, fashion and gastronomy. It is time for tertiary institutions to promote critical appraisal of Australian art and its participants by making Australian art mandatory knowledge for students of art theory.

Nicky McWilliam is a lawyer and fine arts graduate who is a director of her late mother's gallery, Eva Breuer Art Dealer.

Vale - Brenda Humble (1933-2011)

2011-06-20T15:44:00.000+10:00

Brenda Humble c.1958

Brenda Humble

Figure 19 1994

Oil on canvasboard

17.5 x 12.5cm

no.7136

Brenda Humble (1933-2001) The face of the people

Brenda Humble graduated from the from the National Art School with a Diploma of Painting in 1960. As an artist she was continually fascinated by faces. In 1982 she was awarded the Portia Geach Memorial Prize for her portrait of Virginia Hall and the walls of her home and studio were filled with the brightly coloured likenesses of friends and neighbours.

As an activist she was the face of the people. As Community Development Officer for the inner Sydney Regional Council for Social Development, Brenda was the face of activism for the thousands of faceless residents in the inner Sydney suburbs of Redfern, Woolloomooloo, Surry Hills and King Cross whose homes were threatened and in some instances completely taken from them by the ivory tower social engineers of the 1970s.

In conjunction with the Brenda Humble Estate, "Brenda Humble: The face of the people" celebrates Brenda's life with an exhibition of 50 exquisite small drawings of faces on card sourced from her Redfern studio where she lived and painted for thirty years. Often working in a variety of mediums we see in each drawing Humble studying the faces of the broken hearted, the perplexed , the attentive, the bashful, the smug, the sleepy, the sickly, the cute and myriad other individual faces from the community for which she fought so hard and loved so much. Deceptively simple, these drawings show Humble's mastery of the subject and her unique brand of humanism with which each face is brought to life.

Brenda Humble is Represented in Artbank Collection, Sydney; New Parliament House, Canberra; Reserve Bank of Australia Collection; University of NSW; IBM Collection, Sydney; Mackay City Library, Queensland as well as private and corporate collections in Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK and the USA.

http://www.evabreuerartdealer.com.au/humble.html

2011-05-18T13:22:00.003+10:00

New in the gallery

Arthur Boyd

The Artist in the River c.1985

oil on canvas

123.5 x 198 cm

Framed size: 144 x 220 cm

Signed: Arthur Boyd lower left

Provenance: Telstra Corporation Collection

http://www.evabreuerartdealer.com.au

Don Rankin

2011-05-14T12:15:00.000+10:00

Don Rankin: The Poppy Project
Opening this afternoon, Saturday 14 May 2011
Drinks with the artist 3-5pm
Eva Breuer Art Dealer, 83 Moncur Street Woollahra

Visit exhibition preview here

Artist Panels

2010-09-10T13:11:00.000+10:00

Madeleine Winch's panel, detail (above) & installed (below)

Sam Wade's panels, details (above) & installed (below)

Stephen Nothling's panels, details (above) & installed (below)

Elisabeth Kruger @ the Drill Hall Gallery

2010-09-10T12:03:00.000+10:00

Vince Vozzo Sculpting

2010-09-10T09:22:00.000+10:00

Vince Vozzo completing NewMan for Sculpture by the Sea 2010

Opening: Victor Rubin 2010

2010-09-09T17:46:00.001+10:00

Vince Vozzo Card

2010-09-09T15:06:00.001+10:00

Vince Vozzo will be exhibiting at the 2010 Sculpture by the Sea.

Rosemary Valadon 2010 Invite

2010-09-09T14:56:00.000+10:00

Press Release: Rosemary's Garden - under the apricot tree

2010-09-09T10:48:00.000+10:00

Eva Breuer Art Dealer is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of new paintings by Rosemary Valadon, Rosemary’s Garden - under the apricot tree. Following a sell-out show in 2009 of beautiful and delicate teacups, Valadon’s new paintings invite the viewer into her garden, which she describes as an "embracing environment for sharing with friends and family." Having gone through major health issues this year, Valadon has found "nourishment and solace in the things around [her]: the quiet moments in the garden, the fading light of the sunset, the tea ceremony, the call of the birds." Valadon established her garden in 2005 when she made Hill End her home. Boasting the "best apricots in town," under the apricot tree is a place for "meditative moments."

As part of the AGNSW prestigious Hill End Artists-in-Residence Program, Valadon spent a short time in a cottage once occupied by the artists Jean Bellette and Paul Haefliger. She continues the artistic legacy of Hill End which was established in the late forties by well-known artists including Donald Friend, David Strachan, Margaret Olley and Russell Drysdale.

Rosemary Valadon’s works are held in numerous public and corporate collections around the country including the National Portrait Gallery, Macquarie University, Muswellbrook Art Prize Collection and BHP Billiton. She has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize, Sulman Prize and Mosman Art Prize multiple times and has won the Portia Geach Memorial Award and Blake Religious Art Prize.

Artist Spotlight: Vince Vozzo

2010-09-08T10:10:00.000+10:00

Who (or what) do you consider your artistic inspiration?

I have many inspirations one is reading philosophy and looking at great works of art. Or just having a break from my work and walking down to Newtown for a coffee. Another one is walking my dog to Sydney park and going on top of the highest peak staring at the planes taking off from Sydney airport.

Do you listen to music while you work, and if so, what is most often playing?

I don't listen to music while I work any more, I am in complete silence. Although I love all sorts of music, I really love guitar sounds like Santana and Jeff Beck.

Who of your peers do you respect the most?

There's a few American artist I like, I can't name them at the moment. I seem to like artists of the last century like Picasso, Brancusi, Giacometti and the list go's on.

Do you have any habits/rituals or strange superstitions when painting?

I try to work 7 days a week, always have an afternoon break and walk to Newtown for coffee, it keeps me sane.

When did you decide to become an artist?

I didn't decide to become an artist, it chose me.. I always remember my first stonecarving. I didn't have a clue what I was doing, all I know is from my very first carving it was like I gave birth, from that day I was a sculptor.

What is your favourite colour?

Blue

Do you have a favourite painting or work of art? If so, what is it?

There's to many works of art I like to mention, but what I will say is if I don't feel creative I just look at Picasso's work and I can do anything.

Gallery News 7 September: John Seed, Song Ling, James Cant

2010-09-07T13:20:00.006+10:00

Click here to view Gallery News from 7 September

New in the Gallery: Seed, Ling, Valadon
Important Australian Paintings: Cant, Perceval, Boyd, Wakelin, Plate
Sale Section: Lynn, Murch
Upcoming Exhibition: Valadon, Wade, Vozzo, Irving
Featured Graphic: Coburn

The Sun-Herald: Victor Rubin

2010-09-07T13:01:00.002+10:00

Art Almanac: Slow Burn

2010-09-07T13:00:00.002+10:00

Time Out Sydney: Slow Burn

2010-09-07T12:59:00.002+10:00

Wentworth Courier: Slow Burn

2010-09-07T12:58:00.002+10:00

The Sun-Herald: Slow Burn Press

2010-09-07T12:57:00.000+10:00

Gallery News 31 August: Charles Blackman, Song Ling, John Coburn

2010-08-31T13:02:00.015+10:00

Click here to view Gallery News from 31 August

New in the Gallery: Blackman, Ling
Important Australian Paintings: Coburn, Shead,Boyd, Dunlop
Affordable Artwork: Blair, Boyd
Artist Panels: Nothling, Wade
Upcoming Exhibition: Valadon, Irving
Featured Graphic: Williams

Daily Telegraph: Slow Burn

2010-07-23T10:28:00.002+10:00

Financial Review: Slow Burn

2010-07-23T10:26:00.002+10:00

Sydney Morning Herald: Slow Burn

2010-07-23T10:24:00.001+10:00