Australian Art Review

Fortyfivedownstairs: Gallery 9 Contemporary Painting

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Gallery 9 is fulfilling its original intention to exhibit Sydney and overseas based artists in Melbourne, in the same way the Gallery exhibits Melbourne based artists in its Sydney premises with group exhibition Contemporary Painting.

Contemporary Painting presents the latest works of six artists whose individual practices involve, although not solely, painting. Collectively there is great diversity amongst these artists’ works and each artist in the exhibition was selected to present the multifarious approaches to painting being explored by contemporary artists.

The exhibition will include figurative paintings by Jelena Telecki, semi abstracts by Julian Hooper and Tonee Messiah, conceptual abstract work by what and Simon Blau as well as non-objective painted objects by Suzie Idiens.

Exhibition runs Tues 7 to Sat 18 May 2013 at fortyfivedownstairs

Selina Teece Pwerle

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This collection of works by Selina Teece Pwerle relates to the stories from Antarrengeny, her father’s country which lies in Alyawarr country north of Utopia, Central Australia. Born in 1977 Selina spent her childhood surrounded by artists and developed her own style at a young age. As well as the stories from Antarrengeny, the artist finds inspiration from other designs from her country and she likes to experiment with colour and design, her paintings varying from the intricate dot patterns she uses to illustrate the landscape of her country, to the bold linear style she favours to represent body paint design.

Exhibition opens Saturday 20 April 2013 at 2pm and continues until 8 May 2013

Image: Selina Teece Pwerle, Untitled, Acrylic on Linen, 108 x 81cm

Greg Ades: Artist in Residence

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 09:11:00 +0000

For three months fortyfivedownstairs will be hosting Greg Ades as its artist in residence. Positioned in a studio space at the back of the large gallery Greg will be working in the space on material for his upcoming exhibition from 16-27 July.

“Usually you work isolated in the studio with a rough plan of the final show, but when you put it up and look at it there arises new possibilities in the work. In a sense thoughts go through you regarding what could have been, however working next to the space I think will produce that otherwise might not happen ordinarily until the show is over,” says Greg.

Greg currently teaches at Latrobe College of Art and Design and is involved with Port Melbourne Primary School as a teacher’s aid. Greg also works closely with, and was the Director of, Artists for Kids Culture; an organisation that seeks to provide arts and cultural opportunities to kids experiencing disadvantage in their lives due to factors including poverty, health or social issues or cultural dislocation.

Artist talks, discussions and studio visits available by prior arrangement via contact with the Gallery Manager.

Out of Africa - Photographic Exhibition

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

‘Out of Africa’: a powerful collection of African tribal portraits, revealing the timeless beauty of a people and landscape through the lens of a passionately-engaged artist.

Louisa Seton was raised in Nairobi, Kenya, surrounded by a rich tapestry of cultural diversity that has informed her creative expression.

“Since I was a child, the elegance of the tribal people filled me with admiration, an admiration that compelled me as an adult to photograph their noble beauty.” Louisa’s love of adventure - and her ease with traversing different cultures - is very evident in this series of images, which takes viewers on a romantic journey into the most remote environs of Kenya. The collection acts as a visual gateway into an immersive world that relays to the viewer a desire (on the part of both subject and artist) to reconnect this ‘timeless’ Africa with a future that celebrates life and its endlessly-shifting rhythms.

Thanks to this perspective, Louisa’s photographs give us a unique glimpse of another way of life that exists for native Africans, far removed from the influences of the Western world.

Over the past decade, Louisa has been involved in several solo and joint exhibitions in London and Sydney. Her last exhibition that took place at the Bondi Pavilion was a resounding success, with Patron of the Arts, James Erskine (of Liverpool Street Gallery in Sydney) buying up the entire collection.

Louisa presently lives and works as a freelance photographer in Sydney.

Bondi Pavilion Gallery, Queen Elizabeth Drive, Bondi Beach

Launch night: Wednesday 17th April - 6-9pm

Exhibition runs 16th April - 28th April 2013 10am - 5pm

Kate McMillan | In The Shadow Of The Past, This World Knots Tight

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Australian artist Kate McMillan presents two new sculptural works in her second solo exhibition at Venn Gallery. Both works continue a trajectory of McMillan's practice that she has pursued for over a decade, one that is marked by a number of pivotal installations that use domestic furniture, photography, found and made objects.

David C Rowe | Images From The North

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Exhibition featuring David C Rowe at the Woolloongabba Art Gallery in Brisbane's inner South

Most of these images are aesthetic imitations of the landscape. Places created for the artist and the viewer to roam through as one would do at an amusement park or country fair. This may seem a rather primitive concept, but also remains a pleasure for the viewer to participate in the landscape as a stimulation for the imagination.

Opening: Friday 5 April 6.30pm – 9.30pm

Exhibition runs 2 April ~ 11 May 2013

Tom Freeman | Formative

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Formative is a collection of new paintings and sculptural works by Western Australian artist Tom Freeman. In this latest body of work, Freeman continues his interest in familial history, nostalgia and place, developing a carefully considered series that explores the possibilities of process and materials.

The works are all studies of the Kettering Library in the UK, where the artist’s grandfather began his role as librarian in 1953. Freeman documented the interior architecture of the library on a recent trip and these photographs inform the series of paintings and sculptural works.

Form, colour, process and surface as well as an array of materials including acrylic and oil paint, pine, plaster and beeswax have been explored in Formative.

Doreen Ferris | Cannot See The Forest For The Trees

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Exhibition featuring Doreen Ferris at the Wooloongabba Art Gallery in Brisbane's inner South.

Not by force, but by subtle embrace of pink pallets, soft reflections and naïve applications one is invited to question what is important in one’s life.

A percentage of sales goes to support Mater Children’s Hospital’s Mater Little Miracles.

Opening: Friday 5 April 6.30pm – 9.30pm

Exhibition runs 2 April ~ 27 April 2013

Gavin Brown | Urban Scrawl

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Gavin Brown’s latest body of work takes the viewer on an exploration of the ever changing and ever energetic urban environments that the artist calls his home town. The famous graffiti street art landscapes of Melbourne provide the inspiration for Urban Scrawl. The exhibition provides a reflection of the beautiful and at times brash abstract layering of disparate artworks that haunt Melbourne’s laneways and alleys to create the evolving patina that is the backdrop to our inner-city lives.

Gavin’s figurative characters and fanciful collages of spirit creations live in a world of reassembled paint, paste and paper. In these works, the fleeting fragility of graffiti street art is afforded a permanent record in oil and canvas. A scrawl of tags, paste ups and spray work are re-imagined into the artist’s own demi-monde, in which he invites his audience to cohabit.

Exhibition runs Tue 19 March to Sat 6 April 2013

http://www.fortyfivedownstairs.com/events/gavin-brown/

Delight in the Detail; Consumed By The Everyday

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Robyn Rich, Karen Lloyd Jones and Catherine Hull Sinclair are consumed by the minutia of everyday life. Their paintings express their preoccupation and love for things that are seldom seen as being of great value; the familiar, the discarded and the domestic. This thread of fascination is consistent in the approach of each artist, however each presents a distinct vision.

Robyn Rich examines both the beauty and the emotion that comes with everyday life. She is drawn to the simplicity of form of household objects, alongside which she explores the emotion and frustration we often feel towards our daily menial tasks.

Karen Lloyd Jones’s juxtaposition of unusual and conventional objects creates stories which transcend either object. The objects she uses as material for her paintings are carefully chosen for their beautiful or curious characteristics.

Catherine Hull Sinclair loves to paint the beauty of the natural world in all its states of decay, and to contrast it with the delicate and intricate designs of man-made objects. She explores in her art how nature is in a constant state of change.

Exhibition runs Tue 19 March to Sat 6 April 2013

http://www.fortyfivedownstairs.com/events/robyn-rich-karen-lloyd-jones-and-catherine-hull-sinclair/

Dreams in Captivity

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Ian Kingsford-Smith's Dreams in Captivity exhibition of paintings and etchings opens Wednesday 13th March at the Global Gallery, 5 Comber Street, Paddington, NSW 2021. The exhibition runs to Sunday 24th March and has free entry. This exhibition of Ian Kingsford-Smith’s exuberant and whimsical artworks explores the ways that memories are constructed and recalled in dreams. Within this series of paintings and prints he represents early memories and juxtaposes these with adopted memory; and what media and spoken memory play in the fragment of dreams. The border between personal and collective memory blurs within the artist’s research processes. He shapes faint memories – sifting them through family records and public archives – in an attempt to locate moments of recognition.

Further information can be found at www.globalgallery.com.au

The Laverty Collection | Bonhams

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Laverty Collection auction will be one of the most important single owner sales to be held in Australia, and as a mark of its significance highlights from the collection will travel to London, New York and Melbourne for viewings ahead of its auction on 24 March 2013 at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Over forty years of intimate engagement with the Australian art world, the Lavertys have built an outstanding collection, ranging from the dynamism, spontaneity and stunning originality of Australia’s best Indigenous artists, to the cool conceptualism, stimulating abstracts, and slow-burning surrealism of Australia’s leading contemporary artists.

Exhibition runs Friday 15 March 10am to 4pm Saturday 16 March 10am to 4pm Sunday 17 March 10am to 5pm

http://www.fortyfivedownstairs.com/events/the-laverty-collection/

Richard Bell: Lessons on Etiquette and Manners

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Richard Bell is a member of the Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang communities; he was born in 1953 in Charleville, Queensland, and lives and works in Brisbane. Lessons on Etiquette and Manners is the artist’s first in-depth presentation in Melbourne.

Working with humour and agit-prop activism, Bell’s writings, paintings and videos instruct his audience on the assumptions and false histories surrounding race politics in Australia.

Bell turns the practice of appropriation back on Western art, miming the pop art styles of Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns, and the paint drips of Jackson Pollock. Overlaid with texts that challenge the status quo, his paintings interrogate common ideas about Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians’ relationships to each other, to their country’s history and to art itself.

Bell’s practice extends to his public persona, infamous for the incendiary slogans of his T-shirts and his provocative appearances on panel discussions, and at major art events around the country. Bell presents here a new installation, based on the original Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972, in which he has invited radical political leaders to speak over the course of the exhibition.

Exhibition runs 5 February - 13 April 2013

The art world's shifting sands

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 09:00:00 +0000

Conventions have always (subliminally) ruled the art world, but conventions mutate. White wine is the usual choice for gallery openings, unless, like Rex Irwin Art Dealer, you generously stretch to gin and tonic. But in the 1950s, it was sherry - usually sweet - which exercised newspaper cartoonists regularly. Tongue-in-cheek articles appeared regularly in the broadsheets. "Art is smart nowadays, so go to the opening of every exhibition - there are at least three a fortnight. You won't know a Dobell from a Drysdale, but you can bone up on the critics' reviews. Anyway, you don't have to look at the pictures - just be there and be decorative."

As aAR is celebrating its tenth anniversary, it is timely to ponder how the art world around us (local and global) has shifted - rather like Sahara dunes after a wind storm. Whole arenas of practice once separate from each other have found themselves fused in unlikely bondings. Auction houses which once confined themselves to the reselling of goods people wished to divest themselves of now mount their own exhibitions, sometimes by artists who have decided to sidestep the traditional solo show at a commercial art gallery.

As art has become - in some quarters - a fashionable commodity, large and prestigious companies (fashion, jewellery, property developers, legal firms and so forth) have linked themselves to this vaporous ideal by becoming major sponsors of prestigious exhibitions in our state galleries. Wealthy collectors now lend entire exhibitions to state galleries, allow them to do a circuit of selected regional galleries, or even open their own private galleries to display their collections to the general public.

The art world is swollen with generous prizes - and not just for painting and sculpture, but for applied design, jewellery, ceramics and glass. Photographic prizes, in particular, reflect efflorescence of photography and video installation as viable art forms.

The prominence of contemporary Chinese art (with its unmistakeable and often overwhelming influences from western art) has caused some commercial galleries to deal in it almost to the exclusion of the local product. An even more striking example is the White Rabbit Gallery in Chippendale, which opened in 2009 and exhibits Chinese art post 2000, none of which is for sale.

The art-digesting public, not to mention local art criticism, have become infinitely more sophisticated than they were in earlier decades. Example? When the Notanda Gallery opened in Rowe Street, Sydney, with an exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints by the international eminences Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Graham Sutherland, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, with some reluctance, acquired a Moore for a mere ten guineas, while The Bulletin (a weekly magazine which ceased production in 2008) made short work of a Graham Sutherland drawing: "... two pink oysters propped up instead of pillows on a yellow bedspread - 15 guineas". The gallery became a bookshop.

Painter Bob Dickerson recalled: "It was a different world then ... artists were all very friendly to each other, because nobody had much money." There was more interest in debating contemporary art's place in the world and finding a vocabulary for disseminating opinions about it than fixating on the value of works or pursuing them as investments.

The artist-run initiatives (ARIs), such as Factory 49 and SNO (Sydney Non Objective), remain one of the most fertile phenomena in the art world; and contemporary Aboriginal art, which created such excitement here and globally, remains one of the brightest lights on the art world stage. Alas, recent legislation that takes a negative view of art as a component of privately managed superannuation funds has seen this market diminish for now.

Around the world, museums are replicating themselves. For example, in December 2012, the Louvre opened a perfect jewel of a museum in the French northern city of Lens and a new wing of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam opened in September last year. In London, four New York commercial galleries have opened spaces in Mayfair, and Cork Street is nervous. Finally, Russian oligarchs are now significant players at the top end of the art market, which has remained buoyant in spite of uncertain economies elsewhere.

Lethbridge 10 000 Small Scale Art Award

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Entries now open – 2013 Lethbridge 10 000 Small Scale Art Award

Now in its fourth year, the Lethbridge 10 000 is an exciting art competition open to national and international artists for small-scale artworks. Entrants may submit 2D artworks up to 60cm in any direction. The judging is based on three equally evaluated criteria of creativity, originality and skill. $10 000 will be awarded to the winner.

For full details and online entry, please visit www.lethbridgegallery.com

Entries close 3 May 2013

Rhys Lee | Cracked Pots

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Venn Gallery presents Cracked Pots, a solo exhibition of new works by Melbourne-based artist Rhys Lee. The exhibition is Lee’s first presentation of work in Western Australia and features a large 10m painting that has been developed in the gallery space, along with numerous works on paper displaying his distinctive style of free-form portraiture.

Known for his skillful use of colour and haunting imagery, Lee’s work exudes an ethereal quality that is expressed through heavy brushstrokes and textured visceral forms. In Cracked Pots, Lee explores fissures in the human condition and looks to uncover these lines of breakage to show the crazed or unhinged parts of the psyche. The resulting artworks are dark and elusive studies that reveal a disparate range of characters and strange beings.

Exhibition runs 8 February – 22 March 2013

The incomparable Lorna Fencer

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Lorna Fencer belongs to an elite group of indigenous artistswho inspired and defined what has become one of the most exciting art movements of the 20th Century and beyond. Not only did she stand beside such master artists as Clifford Possum and Johnny Warangkula, but along with Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Lorna pioneered the women’s art movement, departing from the traditional iconography Aboriginal men painted to a more personal and artistic expression. Her strong personality, her energy and her independent nature were all reflected in her paintings - extremely bold, free, expressive, abstract and experimental artworks that were larger than life.

Opening drinks: 2pm Saturday, 2 March 2013. Show continues until 21 March

Image: Lorna Fencer, Jajurtuma Jukurrpa - Caterpillar Dreaming, 2002 Acrylic on Canvas, 140 x 172cm

Gay Hawkes | Art Auction

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Artist Gay Hawkes, who has exhibited at fortyfivedownstairs on several occasions over the years, has suffered the loss not only of her home, and studio but her entire archive in the disastrous fires at Dunalley in Tasmania. Her artist friends and admirers have joined us to organise a fund raising event to help rebuild her studio, buy tools and start work again.

An evening of art and music which will be compered by Gay’s great admirer Moira Finucane, star of the wonderful Burlesque Hour. The sounds of Vardos and Rachel Guy will accompany the event. Over 30 artists have promised works including Jacqui Stockdale, Sam Leach, Simon Cuthburt, Sally Curry, Naomi Howard and Eve Howard.

Event runs Tuesday 26 February 2013

http://www.fortyfivedownstairs.com/events/art-auction-for-gay-hawkes/

The 18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

All our relations wove the popular thematic thread connections, conversation and exchange across The Art Gallery of NSW, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cockatoo Island and Pier 2/3. This concept is informed by the partnership of curators — Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster — and an emphasis on collaborative, cross-disciplinary and participatory practices that call for active viewers. This year’s show encompassed over 100 artists from forty-four countries. 220 works incorporate a variety of surprising media, performances and installations at Carriageworks, Biennale Bar at Pier 2/3 and a busy education and public program. All our relations invited audiences to engage with specific local social, political and environmental issues within the context of Sydney and this international platform. Employing storytelling to underline a postmodern ‘global proposal’ of contemporary art to illustrate how we as individuals, and our streams of creative thought, are interconnected as never before.

The well-curated In Finite Blue Planet at the Art Gallery of NSW boasts a convincing eclectic body of work that is a highlight of this biennale. Processes of mapping were a strong theme — a fabulous example being Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili’s powerful eight-channel video installation The Mapping Journey Project (2008–2011). Khalili’s intelligent work challenged normative cartography by documenting an alternative map of the Mediterranean through ‘clandestine journeys’ of undocumented refugees, giving voice to minority languages as the faceless narrators poignantly trace their breathtaking journeys on maps in thick, black pen. In contrast, Thai artist Nipan Oranniwesna employed idealised and interconnected urban topography in his sweeping City of Ghost (2007–2012), assembled from cut-out city maps traced in baby powder to astonishing effect. Australian artist John Wolseley’s marvellous project Flight of Ventifacts: Mallee (2006–2012) took an organic approach to mapping and drawing, to articulate “subtle changes in the dynamics of wild fires” in Northern Victoria. Wolseley released sheets of paper (both blank and marked by burnt trees) into the wind. Weeks, or months later, the artist ‘harvests’ the crumpled stained pages and charts their journey. The curators play on this, as Wolseley’s pages are ‘blown’ throughout the AGNSW; scattered along a corridor, squashed down the side of an escalator or as a landscape of living paper in the lower galleries.

Highlights at the MCA’s Possible Composition included Taiwanese artist Lee Mingwei’s The Mending Project (2012), which explored relationships between self, other and environment by inviting viewers to bring fabric to be repaired by Mingwei in the gallery. Sydney-based Thai artist Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s sumptuous paper installation Not for Sure (2012) drew on her muralist skills to enable writing to “perform a counter-conversation”. Paper crafted from Thai plants, patterned with personal stories and local literature, is strung throughout the gallery like a maze of textured words and images. Also utilising the hand-made is Arin Rungjang’s The Living are Few but the Dead Are Many (2012), for which the Bangkok artist collaborated with orphans of the Rwandan genocide to explore their experiences through pottery workshops at a ceramic factory in Kigali. In a moving display, the earthenware vessels were exhibited alongside honest video portraits of the participants — using the act of making and sharing — to “contemplate how we perceive commonality not difference”. Rungjang expanded this process by engaging disadvantaged children in Sydney in related activities. Also working in ceramics, Park Young-Sooks and Yeesookyung’s collaboration is an exquisite dialogue between traditional and contemporary South Korea. Twelve of Young-Sooks flawless white porcelain Moon Jar (2012) curve around the gallery facing Yeesookyung’s Translated Vase – the Moon (2012), a round vessel constructed from shattered pieces of Young-Sook’s porcelain.

On Cockatoo Island there were strong works scattered throughout Stories, Senses and Spheres, although the overall curatorial thread didn’t achieve the difficult task of connecting the disparate corners and architecture of the site, and the upper island lacked vigour with many of the works feeling a little lost. More successful was the Lower Island’s Industrial Precinct, particularly the Turbine Hall, a powerful space that needs strong work to compete with its sublime scale and atmosphere. This was tackled by Dutch/UK duo Reiner Rietveld and Craigie Horsfield’s effective installation Confusion (2012) — the immensity of the soundscape pulsated through the cavernous hall, mingling with seagull screeches and fog drifting in from Fujiko Nakaya’s Cloud Installation (2012). Similarly, New Zealander Peter Robinson’s Snow Ball Blind Time (2008) is the first work I’ve experienced that visually challenged this space. The towering installation of meticulously carved white polystyrene chains entangle and smother the rusted shell. Further along, Canadian-based Phillip Beesley’s fantastical kinetic installation Hylozoic Series (2011) flickered with light and trembled with movement, as quivering white fronds curled up defensively and fascinated viewers wondered around in disbelief.

Located in one of the precinct’s smaller buildings was Colombian-born Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s and Sydney artist Ross Rudesch Harley’s collaborative piece The Museum of Copulatory Organs (2012). This extraordinary display included ‘micro-artworks’ and video footage, depicting undeniably beautiful specimens of insect genitalia. The still darkness of the space suggested the hush of a museum — lending secrecy, voyeurism and eroticism to the exhibit. Interesting participatory projects included Eva Kot’átková’s The Theatre of Speaking Objects (2012), Nadia Meyer’s The Scar Project (2005-ongoing) and Erin Manning’s Stitching Time – A Collective Fashioning (2012), although their inclusion begs the question as to whether participatory art loses agency in long-running exhibitions, especially on sites like Cockatoo Island, where on quiet days these works can sit empty and flat. This is also true for politically driven projects such as Susan Hefuna’s Celebrate Life: I Love Egypt (2011), which doesn’t work away from the energy and context of its making in Cairo and London.

The 18th Biennale of Sydney offered audiences the chance to experience some exciting artists’ practices that explored All our relations, emphasising the viewer’s subjective experience and involvement in making meaning through these processes of participation and conversation. And while there were some wonderful artworks, the curatorial cohesion across venues and inaccessible theoretical framework didn’t extend these artist’s dialogues as one would hope, to allow new narratives and relations to emerge.

Images from top:

Pinaree Sanpitak, Anything Can Break, 2011, handmade glass, paper. Courtesy the artist.

Maria Fernanda Cardoso and Ross Rudesch Harley, Museum of Copulatory Organs, installation at Cockatoo Island, 2012, Photograph Nicholas Sullivan.

Khaled Sabsabi, Air Land, 2011, 8 channel digital video. Courtesy the artist.

Philip Beesley, Hylozoic Series, installation view, 2010, 3000 x 1500 x 400cm. ©Philip Beesley Architect Inc. Photograph Nicholas Sullivan.

Nadia Myre, The Scar Project, 2005, installation view, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Art Mûr, Montreal. Photograph Alan Wiener.

Lee Mingwei, The Mending Project, 2009, table, chairs, 800 spools of thread, sewing needles, mended garments.

Park Young-Sook, Moon Jars, 2006–2008, white porcelain. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul.

Judith Wright, A Journey, 2001, installation view. Courtesy the artist; Sophie Gannon Gallery, Sydney; Jan Manton Art, Brisbane; Jensen, Sydney; and Fox/Jensen, Auckland.

Eolo Paul Bottaro | Humanising

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Recent paintings and works on paper

In March this year, Queen St Gallery will host a solo exhibition by established Melbourne-based artist Eolo Paul Bottaro. In this his first solo exhibition in Sydney, a number of recent paintings, drawings, etchings and lithographs will be on display in this recently opened art space in the heart of Woollahra’s gallery precinct. While Bottaro’s work is widely known for its representation of Melbourne’s urban underbelly and iconic buildings such as the National Gallery of Victoria, Shrine of Remembrance, and the Royal Exhibition Building, this exhibition will mark the commencement of a series of works that introduce Sydney’s various urban environments as the stage for the dramatic figurative narratives the artist creates.

Bottaro’s work consciously blends the past with the present, depicting contemporary people enacting often mythologically inspired scenes. Sometimes he revisions compositions drawn from historical paintings, though here they are introduced into city streets to reflect on modern urban experience. Broadly speaking his powerful oil paintings and works on paper explore intrinsic and often contradictory facets of human nature. Add to this the artist’s attention towards the process and materials of painting – making paints from pure hand-ground pigments, hand-made coloured gessos and his use of gold leaf – and the result is strikingly original and vibrant paintings.

Humanising also exhibits a significant body of works on paper, revealing a passion for printmaking with particular focus on the medium of lithography. Bottaro has translated many of his oil paintings such as Joyride – city jam (featured at Melbourne Art Fair 2012) into the lithographic medium in collaboration with Master Printer, Peter Lancaster.

Exhibition runs 6th – 31st March 2013

Opening night: Wednesday 6th March, 6 – 8 PM

Image: Joyride - city jam, 2012, four colour lithograph, edition: 10, 44 x 57 cm