Australian Art Review Exhibitions

GOMA Turns Five

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The much trumpeted statistic that recorded Brisbane’s GOMA as the nation’s most visited art gallery complex (with 1.8 million visitors in 2010) was achieved short of the institution’s fifth birthday. A programme of exhibitions will celebrate this milestone and ensure that this significant moment is not missed by anyone interested in art and culture. It puts GOMA’s stamp on the kind of programming it does best – strongly contemporary, something for everyone, hip but with international cachet, and not forgetting the serious scholar. You may make up your own mind which exhibition fits which category, but summer, usually a big season for Brisbane’s culturati, offers GOMA’s trademark spectacle and variety.

A big international drawcard is de rigeur for such occasions. Matisse: Drawing Life includes works on paper from one of the masters; cut-outs, drawings, prints and artist books from the Bibliotheque National de France. Over 300 works make this exhibition amongst the most comprehensive of works on paper from Matisse seen to date. Queensland Art Gallery director Tony Ellwood said, “Many people know Matisse as the master of colour but this exhibition will reveal why he was also the master of line.”

Contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, now in her early 80s, is the subject of Look Now, See Forever. New works from her studio are highly engaging and include Flowers That Bloom at Midnight, a towering garden in three dimensions seen against her abstract paintings. Kusama’s much admired pumpkin sculptures are seen in a new incarnation, Dotted Pumpkin, combined with convex mirrors. Australian audiences are familiar with her work through the Asia–Pacific Triennials and internationally she is the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern, also touring to Europe and New York.

Exhibiting the James C Sourris AM Collection is an acknowledgement of the importance of patronage. Sourris is active in Brisbane’s cultural life and this exhibition of contemporary Australian art is lively in its description of his interests. Strong contemporary Indigenous art by Queensland-based talents Gordon Bennett, Richard Bell, Judy Watson and Vernon Ah Kee are included, in addition to significant works by Madeleine Kelly, Robert Hunter and Peter Kennedy.

Contemporary textiles from Australia are exhibited with those from the Pacific and Asia in Threads. Cultural narratives are woven through these fabrics, some of which will be displayed to immerse viewers installation-style. They include a new commission, a twenty-two-metre-long Tongan ngatu ta’uli (black barkcloth). Ellwood said, “This sumptuous work hovers in the centre of the gallery, evoking the idea of a journey through time and space.”

And greeting viewers, in the gallery foyer, is a series of new works by iconic Australian team Dinosaur Designs. The resin champions have created their largest works for this commission, comprising eight large and colourful, disc-shaped forms for GOMA’s foyer cabinet.

Dinosaur Designs
15 October 2011–25 March 2012
Threads: Contemporary Textiles and the Social Fabric
1 October 2011–5 February 2012
Yayoi Kusama: Look Now, See Forever
19 November 2011–11 March 2012
Matisse: Drawing Life
3 December 2011–4 March 2012
Ten Years of Contemporary Art: The James C Sourris AM Collection
12 November 2011–19 February 2012
Gallery of Modern Art
Brisbane

Artroom5

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Coinciding with the 2012 Adelaide Festival of Arts (2–18 March 2012), artroom5, the gallery in a home, curated by Vivonne Thwaites, presents the work of four artists, each of whom is tracking an individual path linked to Australian history with particular attention to mingled Aboriginal and White stories. Each artist spends a lot of time researching and then makes works opening up hidden or unknown stories.

This is an area in which Thwaites has long been interested. She is currently engaged in a project that will come to fruition in June 2012 at Flinders University Art Museum that looks at the work of White artists who have worked in remote Aboriginal communities.

Sue Kneebone draws on her past family history from the pastoral frontier in the Gawler Ranges of South Australia. Her emphasis is on ecological and environmental stories involving animals and the land as well as human ones. She uses bricolage and photomontage to knit the past into jarring configurations that reveal new angles of interpretation.

The work of Julie Gough of the Trawlwoolway people of Tasmania has been trawling the history of Tasmania for some time finding many stories to re-imagine and re-view. She has a fascinating piece in the new Aboriginal Cultures Galleries at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra called The Chase. This work consists of a very old and worn chaise lounge whose legs she has replaced with charred tea tree sticks like spears and into the padding of which an account from colonial times of an ambiguous encounter between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people is written with shiny steel pins.

The handicraft aspects of Kneebone and Gough’s work are more explicit in the Queer Art of Troy-Anthony Baylis, a descendant of the Jawoyn people of the Northern Territory as well as having an Irish background. He is reclaiming and inventing an Aboriginal Queer history one stitch at a time through text, photography, performance, Glomesh recycling and knitting. In his PhD research he is examining ‘drag’ in his character Kaboobie and ‘Perm-a-culture: An Indigenous and Queer Research Methodological Framework’. His new works, quasi-beanies, giant condoms or what you will are knitted and include text. He photographed them outdoors on a recent trip to New Zealand in imitation of fashion shoots that link fashion with remote places.

Therese Ritchie has been working in the Northern Territory for thirty years and was the subject of a recent joint retrospective with Chips Mackinolty called Not Dead Yet, curated by Anita Angel at the Charles Darwin University Art Gallery. Ritchie is a graphic designer, photographer and artist who makes biting work about living in the Northern Territory. Her recent work for this exhibition is photographs taken in Alice Springs showing what she calls a “paradise of sadness” and “a heart of darkness of our own making”.

Troy-Anthony Baylis, Julie Gough, Sue Kneebone, Therese Ritchie
Artroom5
Henley Beach, South Australia
29 February–18 March 2012

Wim Delvoye

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

At Hobart’s new ‘wunder’ museum, Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), the artwork rated most offensive by visitors is the Cloaca Professional (2010) by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye. A convoluted construction named after the ancient Roman sewers, it is literally a digestive machine that turns food into faeces. The machine is not for sale, but the artist sells the foul-smelling produce in small jars of resin. Whilst rating high on the ‘ick’ factor, MONA reports that it is this work that visitors spend most time with in the museum.

Delvoye is an extreme artist who seems to take delight in creating works that provoke and shock. A self-described prankster, the artist appears to be a perfect match for MONA’s David Walsh, whose vision for the museum is to court controversy and shake up the Australian art world.

MONA is therefore an ideal venue to host Delvoye’s first retrospective show in Australia. What is striking is the breadth and scale of Delvoye’s practice. His eclectic oeuvre ranges from industrial machinery, such as cement trucks and earthmovers that have been painstakingly perforated with ornate filigree, to pig skins tattooed with consumer icons, from Louis Vuitton to Coca-Cola, not to mention his ‘sex rays’ — medical X-rays of sexual acts transformed into stained glass windows.

Delvoye’s practice, redolent with irony, juxtaposes themes such as the body versus machine, high art versus popular culture and industrial technology versus traditional craftsmanship. He is a conceptual artist with anti-modernist sensibilities. In works such as Butagaz 52 Shell 372446 (1987), a gas cylinder decorated with delft blue enamel patterns and Concrete Mixer (Roses) (1991), composed from engraved teak wood, the artist challenges the dying art of artisanship in the face of modern industry.

Born in West Flanders in 1965, Delvoye has exhibited his work since the 1990s in major international art festivals, including the Venice Biennale in 1999 and Documenta IX in Germany in1992, with solo shows across Europe and the US, and at museums such as Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.
In recent years, the artist has built monumental architectural towers out of laser-cut corten steel, incised with beautifully intricate gothic filigree. In 2010, one was displayed in front of the Musée Rodin in Paris, appearing like a strange medieval building from a Grimm Brothers fairytale. The megalomaniac artist is now envisioning even larger projects; he has expressed a desire for commissions to build museums and castles.

Whether beautiful or disturbing, serious or satirical, Delvoye’s fantastic, outrageous projects are sure to continue making headlines. His irreverent collection of artworks will be a seamless fit for MONA’s exhibition space, already dubbed as a ‘subversive Disneyland’.

Nomad Art Productions

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Djalkiri: We are standing on their names is a touring group exhibition organised by Nomad Art Productions, based in Darwin and Canberra. Originating as a cross-cultural printmaking project undertaken in 2009, and coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species, it includes works by Djambawa Marawili, Marrirra Marawili, Marrnyula Mununggurr, Mulkun Wirrpanda, Fiona Hall, John Wolseley, Jörg Schmeisser and Judy Watson.

There are many things to like about the Djalkiri project. First is Nomad’s approach to cross–cultural and collaborative projects. Since their foundation in 2005, Nomad has embarked on various excursions in the print medium in collaboration with Basil Hall Editions including Replant: a new generation of botanical art (2006) and Custodians: Country and Culture (2008). The trip to Yilpara, Blue Mud Bay in north–east Arnhem Land, where much of the work was made, included not only the artists, but facilitators including the printmaker Basil Hall, ethno–biologist Glenn Wightman, anthropologist Professor Howard Morphy and photographer Peter Eve.

And then there are the works on display. Their gap in stylistic approach is bridged by the print medium employed by the artists. Jörg Schmeisser, one of Australia’s pre-eminent printmakers, combines etched lines with delicate tonal shading in his multiplate Mangroves and Notes (2010). John Wolseley’s Sea wrack: Tide after Tide – Baniyala (2010), which shares a similar palette to Schmeisser’s Mangroves, brings together objects from the sea deposited by the tide at the artist’s feet. Arranged in the drawing as they appeared on the sand, the objects present an interesting mediation of landscape at Yilpara that is neither didactic nor staid.

Mulkun Wirrpanda’s Yalata (2010) combines etching and screenprint techniques to portray miny’tji, or sacred designs, of ancestral times in Yolgnu culture. Its vibrant rarrk [cross hatching] patterns shimmer across the picture surface, while the bird-like tracks appear to move away from and towards the well-like motif at the picture’s centre. Fiona Hall’s Pandanus – Gungu (2010), with its explosion of pandanus leaves across the picture plane, is similarly teeming with life, while Marrnyula Mununggurr’s Bawu (2010) references the flags of Macassan ships, as well as the ocean, sky and sea rights ceremony.

In their examination of the Yilpara landscape, these works fulfil the publisher’s aim for the project, namely to “share knowledge and observations of the natural environment from a range of cultural viewpoints”. With print publishing such a rare activity in Australia, it is incredible to see such a unique project intrinsically linked with its site. As well as the multifarious responses to it from artists of diverse cultural background and experience. Djalkiri: We are standing on their names sets another benchmark for Nomad Art Productions and serves to highlight the possibility and importance of cross-cultural collaboration.

Botticelli in Canberra

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The word ‘Renaissance’ does have a lovely ring to it, especially when it is coupled with a string of names of major artists, including Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, Bellini and Mantegna, as well as some of the less prominent and quirkier figures, such as Tura, Crivelli, Lotto, Vivarini, Carpaccio, Perugino and Moroni. All of this makes the new summer exhibition at the National Gallery in Canberra a significant cultural event.

More than seventy paintings are drawn from the collection of the relatively little-known Pinacoteca Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, and are leaving Europe for the first time because the gallery display spaces are being renovated. Generally it is an exhibition of minor paintings by major artists and some major works by minor artists. Catalogues of names and works are tedious, so I will just mention three paintings which caught my imagination.

Raphael’s Saint Sebastian, 1501–02, is a gem where the sweet-faced youthful saint with flowing locks and dressed in rich brocade poses against a sweeping misty Leonardoesque landscape while he fondles an arrow with his right hand. The arrow is the saint’s attribute as he was to have his dry run at martyrdom by being converted into a pin cushion by the archers of the evil Roman emperor Diocletian. Contrary to popular belief, he was not martyred in this way and in fact he was rescued by St Irene of Rome who kissed him better, but then St Sebastian returned to harangue the emperor and was subsequently clubbed to death. Raphael shows one of the most tranquil depictions of this saint.

Botticelli’s The story of Virginia the Roman, c.1496–1504, is an interesting late and problematic painting by the master, created long after he renounced his pagan works such as the Birth of Venus and the Primavera and after he had possibly embraced the teachings of the fanatical Savonarola. Envisaged as two panels to be hung together, the other being Lucretia, they are based on the classical writer Livy and his account of two Roman heroines. In this painting, the beautiful and virtuous Virginia becomes the victim of intrigue when she rejects the sexual advances of Appius Claudius and despite her innocence is called a slave. In order to avoid this disgrace, her father, Lucius Virginius, as an honour killing, stabs her to death. These events led to a revolt against Rome’s tyrannical rulers and the re-establishment of the Roman Republic. It is a complex, dry multifigured composition.

Giovanni Bellini’s The Alzano Madonna, c.1488, is from the church of Santa Maria della Pace of Alzano Lombardo. The naked healthy bambino seems more curious than holy, and behind the holy couple is a wonderful landscape populated with towers. What is particularly fascinating about this painting is the beautifully painted red marble parapet in the foreground with a scroll with the artist’s name and an enigmatic fruit balanced on it, which, if it is an apple, may refer to the original sin which Christ’s blood will cleanse; if a pear, it is a possible emblem of the Virgin, with the pear as a pacifier in contrast with the ‘apple of discord’ or temptation. This is a rich exhibition with enough to satisfy any knowledgeable art snob or passionate admirer of superb painting.

A European Treasury

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Princely Treasures, the second instalment in the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s Great Collections of the World series, surveys the vast field of European arts patronage from 1600–1800 through a refined selection of objects from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Many have never previously left the V&A, and a handful were specially negotiated by AGWA for exclusive inclusion in the exhibition’s only Australian showing.

The monumental exhibition premise is explored through five thematic categories. Princely Patronage details the key European arts patrons of the era, such as Pope Innocent X, the Medicis and Madame de Pompadour. Power and Glory features representations of war in objects designed for courtly use, including vast tapestries, the inlaid tabletop of Marie Antoinette’s writing desk and a fascinating (and surprisingly trashy) souvenir enamelled snuffbox painted with intricate maps relating to Prussian victories in the Seven Years War. Religious Splendour comprises Christian and Judaic objects of worship, while Display in the Interior and Fashion and Personal Adornment illustrate designed objects for the more intimate contexts of home and body.

This intimacy makes the latter two sections perhaps the most fascinating; while one expects opulence from the trappings of palaces and cathedrals, quirky home wares such as an ivory and turtle-shell guitar and an ebony and an ivory spinning wheel illustrate the almost inconceivable luxury experienced on a daily level by pre-industrial European aristocracy. A quilted bed cover and yellow sack-back gown are staggering simply for still being in existence a quarter-millennium after first being woven.

Lovers of ceramics will delight in a Sevres cabaret set and Garniture, a platter from Wedgwood’s iconic Frog Service and a Condor from Augustus the Strong’s Kandler-designed Meissen porcelain menagerie (a relatively recent V&A acquisition and one of the works exclusive to Perth). Particularly enthralling is another early Meissen piece, a huge platter with a fanciful Chinoiserie design evidencing the Asian influence on Europe’s then-fledgling porcelain industry, while a tiered Chinese tulip vase reflects not only the significance of Eastern imports to the European market during the eighteenth century, but that of the Ottoman Empire, responsible for introducing the flower to Europe from Kazakhstan at the same time.

This handful of objects alone provides a satisfying summary of European ceramics over the two centuries from which the exhibition draws, indicating the curators’ discerning approach in tackling their epic historical premise. Other exhibition highlights are too numerous to mention; each of the ninety objects is fascinating, and all reflect a historical richness rarely seen in Western Australia.

Showing alongside Princely Treasures is AGWA’s breathtaking Contemporary Indigenous Art Award and numerous curated selections from the State Art Collection (including a standout display of works on paper), which combine to make AGWA look better than I can recall ever seeing it. Following Princely Treasures: Great Collections show, MOMA’s Picasso to Warhol: Twelve Modern Masters, opening in June 2012.

Princely Treasures: European Masterpieces 1600–1800 from the Victoria and Albert Museum
Art Gallery of Western Australia
Perth
24 September 2011–9 January 2012

A treasure trove of manuscripts

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Boasting a collection of some 10 million books, 4400 incunabula (publications before 1501) — more than 10% of the world’s holdings — some 60,000 manuscripts and over 250,000 autographs, it is one of a handful of libraries which can tell the history of western civilisation.

The library was founded in 1661 by Frederick William of Brandenburg as Churfürstliche Bibliothek zu Cölln an der Spree and this year is celebrating its 350th anniversary. In 1701, the library was renamed Royal Library at Berlin and retained this name until the end of the First World War and the collapse of the monarchy in Germany in 1918. After that it was renamed the Prussian State Library. During the Second World War it went into hiding and some of the collection was confiscated as war reparations by the Polish state. Only in 1992, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, were most of the collections reunited, although still divided physically between its two sites in the district of Mitte — Unter den Linden 8 and Potsdamer Straße 33.

The exhibition Handwritten: Ten Centuries of Manuscript Treasures from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin is the inaugural show in the National Library of Australia’s new exhibition galleries. It brings together a hundred unusual manuscripts which will chronologically span a millennium.

Some of the treasures in this exhibition will include the Book of Hours of Nicholas von Firmian, from the Netherlands of the fifteenth century, and the exquisite illuminated manuscript of St Bernard of Clairvaux’s Commentaries on the Song of Songs. The text of the latter was of particular interest to Martin Luther. Both of these illuminated manuscripts have been included on the basis of their outstanding aesthetic qualities, rather than for the originality of their texts.

The other sort of manuscript included in this exhibition may be termed the autograph of an artistic genius. There is a very rare handwritten document by Michelangelo Buonarroti to Lionardo de Bartolini (5 June 1519); it is a receipt for a portrait of Our Lady dated 1519. Of course, it is a romantic flight of fancy to be voyeuristically looking at this scribble by this enigmatic genius. There is also the original of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro manuscript and one of only two surviving St John Passion’s by Bach, originally performed in 1724. A curiosity is a battlefield document by Napoleon Bonaparte, a letter to his foreign minister Talleyrand-Perigord (12 October 1806) in which he describes Prussian generals as “grandes imbeciles”, as well as correspondence by Voltaire, Goethe, Heinrich von Laufenberg (1390–1460) and Karl Hartwig Gregor von Meusebach.

Handwritten: Ten Centuries of Manuscript Treasures from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
National Library of Australia
Canberra
26 November 2011–18 March 2012

Colonial Works on Paper

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This exhibition showcases works made in the first century of European settlement in Australia. Charting the changing use of graphic images, from maps of topography through to commercial publications made for profit, it offers a version of Australian history tinted by the colonial gaze. Separated across both sites at the National Gallery of Victoria, the two themed shows focus on the settlement of the Australian continent and the establishment of the city of Melbourne.

Louis Buvelot’s drawings of Fernshaw, Dromana and Bacchus Marsh must rate as some of the best drawings of Australian landscape in any period; George Alexander Gilbert’s drawings of Pentland Hills also deserve a mention for their technical virtuosity; and the pulsating line work in William Barak’s Figures in possum-skin cloaks (1898) is mesmerising.

Other works in This Wondrous Land require a more rigorous inquiry. The line between ethnography and caricature seems to blur in the watercolours of Richard Browne. Although the body markings and objects carried by his sitters Burgun and Killigrant (both around 1819) are accurate representations, the stick–thin limbs and knobbly knees seem to be rendered to appeal to the souvenir market Browne often sold work to. Of course, there are counterpoints to this trend also. Charles Rodius’s portraits, including Morirang, Shoalhaven Tribe, N.S. Wales (1834), are delicately rendered and appear to have a greater sympathy for the sitter.

While it shouldn’t really be surprising that some images in the exhibition are constructed to include fiction, sometimes the viewer may mistake works of historical significance for historical fact. Robert Havell junior’s epic Panoramic View of King George’s Sound, part of the colony of Swan River (1834), depicts Nyungar and European figures in an idealised landscape and image of harmony which, we learn, was rarely the truth.

Similarly, artists and natural historians in Europe who had never been to Australia constructed pictures of the colonies based on notes and sketches. View in Port Jackson (1789), by Robert Cleveley, which depicts an Aboriginal fishing scene in which each boat has a contained fire in its bow, is one such image. With interest in the colonies high, and the number of artists on the ground few, market demand found its satisfaction.

It is difficult to imagine the reaction to these images at the time of their execution or publication. With the benefit of hindsight they appear as romantic visions of landscape and the development of the new colony, and exotic renderings of the ‘other’. What the colonial gaze obscures, moulding perception to its own ends, developing a tension and an historical unease, is part of what makes these images so engaging.

Harvison Gallery and Graham Stove

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Established in 2003 in Director Mark Walker’s home (on the street that gave it its name), Randell Lane Gallery would showcase some of Western Australia’s best Indigenous remote community painting and fibre art over the following eight years. Rapidly outgrowing its domestic surrounds, the gallery moved to small but stylish Mt. Lawley premises in 2006, from where it presented some of the most breathtaking exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous art this writer has seen. Early this year with the space’s lease due for renewal, Walker made the decision to shift location a second time and rename. Harvison Gallery (a family name) opened in March, in larger, inner-city premises that have allowed Walker to expand his curatorial focus to encompass non-Indigenous and interstate artists, alongside the community works for which Randell Lane was renowned. The centrepiece of the new space, a ludicrously ugly (and ridiculously comfortable) 1970s leather modular sofa, provides a note of disarming humour amongst Walker’s trademark minimal elegance.

Influencing the rebranding was Walker’s interest in challenging divisions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous art that he feels to be unnecessarily prevalent; in particular, he laments that so much community art is channelled into galleries that only sell Indigenous art, thereby limiting its audience. He considers the new venture an opportunity to simply promote exceptional contemporary Australian art, irrespective of racial classification.

Hence, program highlights of the gallery’s former incarnation will remain, such as the annual Generation Next emerging artists survey that has previously helped establish the careers of Joshua Bonson, Lloyd Kwilla and Lance Peck, amongst others. Generation Next was counterbalanced by Masterstroke, showcasing some of the leading mature community artists (such as Freddie Timms and Robert Boynes). Both shows will now be expanded to incorporate non-Indigenous participants for the Harvison program, alongside exhibitions by the likes of Bonson, Boynes and Timms, Canberra-based photographer Gary Lee, Western Australians Layli Raksha, Esther Giles Nampitjinpa and Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa (Mrs Bennett), in addition to Red Rock Art Kununurra, Papunya Tjupi and Munupi Arts Centres. Perth-based Graham Stove will also hold his fourth (self-titled) solo exhibition of paintings at the gallery, opening in November. Stove majored in textiles at Curtin University during the 1990s, prior to which he studied graphic design; the formal elements of both disciplines have informed his practice (which also incorporates printmaking, collage and textiles) since then. Walker initially met Stove through another artist and was immediately drawn to the ‘meditative feel’ of his works.

Stove’s exhibition is the culmination of work produced since 2008 based on grids, mazes and labyrinths. Some of the paintings suggest organic or botanical forms, others mathematical or architectonic constructions. They employ surface pattern and layering to create the illusion of three dimensions, resulting in complex compositions in which the viewer’s eye can get lost.

The mad square

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The mad square: modernity in German art 1910–37 is an ambitious exhibition encompassing almost three decades of modern German art. Covering the last years of the multifarious, disparately modern Wilhelmine period, the exhibition moves through the decadence of the Weimar Republic and its characteristic expressionism and ends with the censorship and anti-modernism of the National Socialist regime.

The exhibition’s title refers to Felix Nussbaum’s surreal depiction of the Pariser Platz, exemplary of an ambivalent attitude towards the ostensible prosperity of the Weimar era. Born out of the chaos of the Great War, the often equivocal response to decadence and excess in the art of the time belied the fact that for a while the light of the Weimar Republic burned with phosphorescent intensity.

In fashion, Berlin’s answer to the haute couture of Paris was the Konfektion industry, which employed roughly a third of the entire workforce in Berlin in the mid-1920s. Working symbiotically with it was the local film industry, producing upwards of 300 films a year, many of which used a loosely woven plot to parade celluloid mannequins before the now fashion-conscious urban classes of Berlin.

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera opened in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Also in Berlin, Einstein and Planck unveiled relativity and quantum theory, while in Göttingen, Heisenberg was among the fifteen Germans who won science Nobel Prizes in the Republic’s fourteen-year lifespan.

But this hopeful period faded quickly. In Diary: Memories of Weimar, Eric Hobsbawn comments that by the early thirties it was clear the republic was on its deathbed. What the great Austrian theatre director and actor Max Reinhardt referred to as “the taste of transience on the tongue” lent the period an air of evanescence that intensified and focused the artistic endeavours that were underway.

The singular artistic vision of Max Beckmann, gloriously on display in the confined crush of nightmarish futility that makes up the showstopping The Trapeze (1923) affords The mad square its most epic embodiment of the expressionist aesthetic.

Other luminaries including Otto Dix, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and John Heartfield are among the plethora of artists gathered in the exhibition, which draws on over 200 works — photographs, film posters, collages, paintings, prints and sculpture — to convey the scope of creativity in the pre-war and Weimar era.

The masterful portraits by August Sander, drawn from his People of the 20th Century project, and the urban exposures of László Moholy-Nagy offer moments of stillness amongst the chaos. Ultimately, The mad square reaches that great moment of cultural rewind, the opening of the Entartete Kunst exhibition on 19 July 1937 in Munich, which displayed confiscated art that the Nazis had labelled ‘degenerate’.

The interwar period of frenzied artistic and intellectual innovation was over, a dark future awaited and according to Eric Hobsbawm, “This was the last time Germany was at the centre of modernity and western thought.”

Two exhibitions — one museum

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Many Australians recoil — culturally, politically, personally — from religious observance. It is a significant point of difference from other countries with whom we have strong relationships (most of our Asian neighbours and the USA).

Nonetheless, spirituality is less outré, more humanistic, and is embraced or accommodated in Australia as a personal quest, a fundamental need or interest being acknowledged. It may be that our embrace of the individual within a multiplicity of cultural and ethnic backgrounds is at odds with the notion of being restricted by systems of belief — a throwback to the anarchy of our convict beginnings.

Art has, however, an intrinsic relationship with spirituality — an expression of our ideas, thoughts and desires once the basics of human survival have been covered. The Blake Prize has always accommodated images that confront traditional religiosity, and its dialogue between art and religion allows for “a personal and idiosyncratic response”. This year’s finalists and a selection from the larger Sydney exhibition provide a broad range of genres and responses to the theme and continue the long tradition of the prize in its celebration of its sixtieth birthday.

The pairing of Leonard Brown’s paintings with this touring component of The Blake Prize creates a lively synergy in its probing of the dimensions of the spiritual and provides useful context for the deeper survey of Brown’s work. Winner of the Blake Prize last year (2010), with an abstract painting titled If you put your ear close, you’ll hear it breathing (2008), Brown is best known for his shimmering, optically resonant abstract paintings with their evocative titles. Yet in this exhibition he also shows, for the first time, the parallel aspect of his practice — traditional paintings of Orthodox icons.

The intriguing duality of this practice illuminates Brown’s personal dedication to his faith (he was baptised in the Russian Orthodox Church in 1976) and also his reasons for a decades-long study of icon painting. As Sasha Grishin notes in his essay, “Leonard Brown’s icons … serve the role of a functional aid to worship .... while [the abstract paintings] , although maintaining the sense of spiritual presence, do not engage with a specifically Christian iconography.”

The icons have a centuries-old traditional resonance and codified beauty. Brown’s interest in working within two practices, the first in which rules are dictated according to a highly interpretive practice of assigned meaning, and the other an individualistic personal expression defined only by the contemporary interests of the creator, makes for a survey that illuminates not just a holistic embrace of Brown’s interests, but the intrinsic distinction between religion and spirituality.

Leonard Brown is represented by Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane and Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne.

The 60th Blake Prize
28 October–23 December 2011
Union with reality: The art of Leonard Brown
21 October–18 December 2011

Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Brisbane

Rethinking the Past

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The most famous element in À la recherche du temps perdu/Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust is the madeleine, the small cake crumbled into a mouthful of linden tea that the narrator eats and from which his vivid memories arise. Proust calls what flows from that small mouthful of tea and cake — “the vast structure of recollection” — a reasonable description of his sprawling seven-volume novel.

Like Proust, the four artists showing work in Bethink at the South Australian School of Art Gallery in November during the Feast Festival are each reflecting upon and thinking over the past in order to create structures that recollect and refashion it. The Feast Festival is Adelaide’s major arts festival for the lesbian and gay community. It includes performing and visual arts, film, literature, food and forums.

Growing up is always difficult but growing up queer is definitely harder. The exhibition curators Keith Giles and Susan Bruce quote from a book on gay and lesbian families: “The way a word like family is defined can affect social policies and practices in a community. Being included in the definition often conveys important rights and privileges while being excluded bars people from these advantages.” As I write these words, Federal Parliament is debating gay marriage, a large part of the rationale for which is surely about normalising being gay as being no big deal, no threat, no reason for fear.

The Visual Arts PhD research of Keith Giles on the subject of censorship and self-censorship in art has led him to look back at his own childhood and adolescence in the form of his old school photos and the elements of repression and disguise within them. Internationally screened experimental video artist Susan Bruce recently completed a documentary about the 1972 drowning in the River Torrens of academic Dr George Duncan, an event which led to South Australia being the first state to introduce gay law reform. Her videos often use disintegrating imagery to examine the mundane and domestic. When his partner of thirty years died, Michael Gabbedy put together a series of photographs for the funeral. In the new work he has made for Bethink, he looks back at the history of this long relationship through stitched images, text and photographs. Gary Campbell uses a bowerbird scrapbook aesthetic to combine history and memory, and to examine what normal means and might mean. He writes: “By pursuing this mixture of past and present there is a sense that the future will be less daunting. Less of a scramble for relevance, less of a search for dignity.”

Bethink — Susan Bruce, Gary Campbell, Michael Gabbedy and Keith Giles
South Australian School of Art Gallery (SASA Gallery)
Adelaide
2–25 November 2011

A Different experience of Christmas

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The Chan Contemporary Art Space is closing its 2011 exhibition program with Christmas Birrimbirr, a multimedia installation collaboratively created by a collective of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and filmmakers in the community of Gapuwiyak in Arnhem Land.

Christmas Birrimbirr invites visitors to experience the emotional power and beauty of Christmas through Yolngu eyes. Jennifer Deger, a participatory media maker and curator, approached Paul Gurrumuruwuy and Fiona Yangathu to use video to enact the performative and affective dynamics of Yolngu Christmas. David Mackenzie, a video artist, joined the group. The four of them formed Miyarrka Media in 2009 to enable Yolngu to work creatively with new media technologies. They worked together on the development and production of Christmas Birrimbirr for two years.

The result is a powerful exhibition which provides an insight into the pain, joy and resiliencies of contemporary Yolngu lives. It premiered in Paris at le Cube gallery, the first centre of digital creation in France in November 2011, prior its official ceremonial launch in Darwin at the Chan Contemporary Art Space. The multimedia installation transforms the art gallery space into a performing ground. The central piece is a three-channel video which explores the themes of loss and renewal, mourning and joy. It opens with a series of landscapes of the seasonal wulma clouds, which signal the coming of both Christmas and the wet season. Around the graves of three Dhalwangu clan leaders, which are being cleared and decorated, preparations for Christmas take place. The work climaxes with a performance of a Yolngu Christmas Day bungul ceremony. It merges Christian symbols and ancestral power into a new expression of Yolngu culture. In a separate gallery, another installation is taking place and consists of a Yolngu Christmas tree sculpture, a series of photographs and short video works mixing Christmas and Yolngu themes. This unique installation is described by co-director, the late Fiona Yangathu, who sadly passed away earlier this year, as a “gift of grief”, an Indigenous vision and expression of reconciliation. It has been made for, and offered to, non-Yolngu audiences, with the hope that viewers might incorporate the affective traces of this video experience into their own lives. At the time of Christmas celebrations around the world, this exhibition provides the visitor an intriguing, emotionally charged, sometimes humorous vision of Christmas from a non-western perspective.

Christmas Birrimbirr (Christmas Spirit)
Chan Contemporary Art Space
Darwin
8–21 December 2011

Tjukurrtjanu Western Desert art

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The National Gallery of Victoria is setting the bar high. The claims it makes for Tjukurrtjanu/Origins, the exhibition which will close its 150th year and celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Papunya Tula Artists cooperative, are more pole vault than high jump.

The painting movement that started in the desert outside Alice Springs in 1971 is “internationally recognised as one of the most important events in Australian art history”, says a press release. Frances Lindsay, the NGV’s Deputy Director, believes “this new art form has changed the way we see the land and the history of art in this country”. And Judith Ryan, the country’s senior Indigenous art curator, believes: “The founding Papunya artists brought to the world an iconoclastic vision ... [marking] a new beginning for art in Australia.”

Ryan’s co-curator for Origins, Philip Batty from the Melbourne Museum — once an art teacher at the very school in Papunya where the painting began under Geoffrey Bardon’s guidance — is a little more grounded. “The key aspect of the exhibition for me is that Papunya painting really confused the distinction between ethnographic objects and art for the first time.”

And as a museum man, Batty has been involved over the past three years in making links between the new art (200 boards from twenty artists) and 100 old objects — such as shields, head-dresses, photos of ceremony, body art and ground paintings — which will both preface the exhibition and sit contextually beside relevant paintings. It’s taken that long to ensure all these works were made for public display. And where there’s any doubt, they’ll be in a ‘restricted’ room warning Aboriginal women and uninitiated men not to enter.

Given the current fashion, captions accompanying the art will be basic, leaving “deep detail” about the artists’ intentions to catalogue essays by participant-observers from Papunya’s early days, Fred Myers and John Kean.

One of Batty’s two essays ‘Anxious Objects’ tackles the motives behind the boards’ emergence. His emphasis is on the cross-cultural rather than believing it was simply a decision by tribal elders to reveal the complexity of their culture in order to forestall assimilation. “There’d been sales of sacred tjuringas at Hermannsburg in the 1930s, and Mountford had published a Honey Ant Dreaming drawing in an ethnographic journal,” he explained. “What happened in the 1970s — to put it bluntly — was there was money on the table for the first time. It was mostly from the Aboriginal Arts Board for that first decade. But it allowed the artists to share the vast, complex ethnographic language they’d used for thousands of years to express their relationship to ancestral beings with a nation in a state of renewal. The new Labor government changed the position of Aborigines totally, which allowed Aboriginal art to become the national art.”

The concreteness of poetry

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 12:06:00 +0000

Concrete poetry emerged as an international movement during the 1960s. An amalgam of poetic and visual arts, its leading exponents in Australia in its heyday were Sweeney Reed, Alan Riddell and Alex Selenitsch. Born to Concrete presents the works of over twenty Australian artists that have engaged in this form, with works drawn predominantly from the Heide collection. Also included are multiple pieces by the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, an early champion of concrete poetry, whose influence resonates among the works displayed.

There is an incredible graphic sensibility inherent in the works in Born to Concrete that links them to typography and design, as well as to experimental poetry and art legacies. Also evident is an intellectual wordplay. Alex Selenitsch’s monoton eeeeeee 1969, in its seven repetitions of the root word “monoton” followed by a line repetition of the letter “e”, constructs a visual double entendre by spelling out “monotone” and aurally sounding out “monotony”. His use of black type mounted on a white field enhances his text image. Alan Riddell’s Eclipse I, II and III mines similar territory, with the letters that form the title progressively performing its action across the plane of each work. More emotive are the efforts of Sweeney Reed and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Some may recognise Reed’s works from the excellent survey exhibition Sweeney Reed: Artist + Concrete Poet, curated by Max Delany at Heide in 1996. The etching Rose I 1976, with its single line of embossed text, “i am hiding, in a Rose” broken up vertically across a red field, has lost none of its lyrical appeal, nor its vulnerability. His Impounded Illusion (Horizon) 1976 that employs steel letters cropped horizontally from their midpoint, by contrast, generates a perceptual response in the viewer. While Finlay’s Sea/Land 1967 is akin to a diagram in its execution. Blue and red lines, representing sea and land respectively, interweave like a net, intrinsically linking these natural elements in an oft-repeated theme of Finlay’s oeuvre in which a poetic voice successfully emerges from a pictorial device.

Also included in the exhibition are various pages, cards and booklets that disseminated the work of the concrete poets beyond the gallery walls. The dummy book of Finlay’s 8 Line Poems 1975 is displayed in a cabinet below Reed’s Impounded Illusion (Horizon). It is a book that Reed had intended to publish before his tragic death in 1979. His spirit looms large over this exhibition, particularly in the context of Heide II. Though it is his work, rather than his biography, that ought to be celebrated along with that of the other artists represented in Born to Concrete.

Art of the West

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 08:06:00 +0000

When Ron Radford was complimented on the National Gallery’s phenomenal archival holdings in Australian art, he remarked that Australian art was more than just the art of Melbourne and Sydney, or, for that matter, the art of Brisbane, Adelaide and Hobart — it had to include the art of all Australia, including Western Australia and northern Queensland.

With two prominent senior curators on the staff, Anna Gray, Head of Australian Art, and Robert Bell, Head of Applied Arts, being West Australians, the gallery has been purchasing well in this area. Most recently it has acquired The Wordsworth Collection, assembled over more than forty years by Marie Louise Wordsworth, one of Western Australia’s most passionate and respected collectors. The collection covers the period from Western Australia’s beginning as a free-settlement colony in the early mid-nineteenth century, through the importation of convict labour in the 1850s and the discovery of gold in the 1890s. It includes rare views of Albany, Augusta, Bunbury, Esperance, Gingin, Rottnest and Toodyay. A highlight of her collection are very rare items of colonial furniture.

It is interesting to note that there has not been a major survey of Western Australian art shown anywhere in the eastern states. While recent Western Australian Aboriginal art has made a major impact internationally and artists including Howard Taylor, Kathleen O’Connor, Robert Juniper, Brian Blanchflower, Elise Blumann and Rodney Glick are well known, if not household names in Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, the bigger context is little known.

The exciting thing about this exhibition is that it charts a history which is distantly familiar to us, but which is now being exhibited within a new context. The deeply evocative paintings by James W.R. Linton appear alongside works by Robert Dale, Thomas Turner and A.B. Webb. Guy and Helen Grey-Smith, as painters and printmakers, are worthy of greater exposure, as is the work of Herbert McClintock, a social realist graphic artist and painter, who during his time in Western Australia underwent an unusual surrealist blossoming in his art. Harold Vike, a sort of Jon Molvig-like character of the West, has also suffered through his relative lack of exposure. All of these sins of omission are being addressed in this exhibition. It is only in much more recent times that someone like James Angus is as well known in Sydney as he is in his native Perth.

I have always argued that the primary responsibility of the National Gallery of Australia is to show the art of Australia — all of Australia and in all mediums. This exhibition includes a healthy diversity, including painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, video installation, jewellery, furniture, decorative arts and design. It is a timely and significant exhibition when the West comes to the nation’s capital.

Seedling Art Space

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 13:24:00 +0000

Seedling Art Space is one of the most unusual artist-run initiatives in Australia. Run by a committee of five local artists, it was conceived in 2006, opened in 2008 and calls itself a site-specific project. It is an exemplar of the percolation of contemporary art practice into suburban life as well as of art with a growing awareness of the local, the environment and community.

Seedling is located in the Adelaide Hills in Blackwood Forest Recreation Park, at a site that was once an experimental orchard. For exhibitions it uses two buildings, recycled from their previous uses — the office of the experimental orchard and down the way a bit, the pump shed. Then there is the paddock, the forest — both bush and pine — and the park itself.

All these minimal spaces have been used, often with musical components, over the four years of Seedling’s operation. There is an emphasis on sustainable and environmentally aware work and openings include dogs, music, wine, tea, wind, rain, sun and song. Local, interstate and international artists apply to show at Seedling and sometimes run workshops. In September, Seedling will be showing the work of the New South Wales-based artist Jan Hogan, who has for some time been working in the far back corner of Gundaroo Common where there is a stand of remnant forest. Hogan records the voice of the land by using the shadows of the trees as well as patterns from the ground in her prints. She has said: “My aim is not to draw a landscape but to find a new way of drawing the land. I think of it as an open dialogue with materials, thoughts, the elements and the process of drawing all contributing. The land and I need to come to some sort of understanding. I want to feel my way in using all my senses rather than looking at the land using my perception and analytical skills.”

Another artist using the eloquence of paper is the emerging South Australian textile artist Kara Growden, who will be showing in October. Her work explores the past through objects made with handmade and recycled paper. In May 2011 at Prospect Gallery, she curated an exhibition with Kate O’Leary, called Ornate: South Australian Emerging Textiles, which explored pattern as a way of organising and communicating. She focused on memories of her grandmother’s home and wallpaper shop which contributed many designs to the young Kara. In The empty nest at Seedling, the artist continues her exploration of her past in an installation of paper objects inspired by dwelling on her memories of being passed back and forth between her mother and father’s homes, not living just in one place but being divided.

The artist and the mirror

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The appeal of portraiture visible in Australia’s longest running art prize, the Archibald (hosted by the Art Gallery of New South Wales since 1921), has only increased over time. The Moran Portraiture Prize (with Australia’s largest purse) has, in recent years, gathered in strength with its awards to significant contemporary artists such as Ben Quilty (2009) and Michael Zavros (2010).

The University of Queensland’s biennial award is the newcomer in the context of portraiture extravaganzas and unique in its focus on self-portraiture. This subject has elicited two significant and different exhibitions in 2007 and 2009 with its focus on the documentation of the personal and particular, in its depiction of the artist as an individual. The prize is acquisitive and builds on the university’s developing National Collection of Artists’ Self Portraits.

This third Self-Portrait Prize has taken a step further, with an exhibition curated by Alison Kubler that focuses on risk-taking — in art and life. She has invited artists to develop work for the prize on this premise, stating, “Making and exhibiting art is a risky pursuit: it is not always rewarded financially, critically well received, or even acknowledged on the cultural landscape. To make a self-portrait then is to add to the calculated risk, for it is to say something about oneself explicitly, to risk exposure. That is its strength.”

Those invited to make work for this prize include emerging and established talents across a range of media. Artists who are not known for their personal aesthetic forays such as James and Eleanor Avery are included – their usual work is sculptural, monumental and architectural. Then there are others for whom personal memory is a steady stream of inspiration like Louise Hearman, Polly Borland and Eric Bridgeman. While Bridgeman is creating a new work for the prize, it may speak to his 2010 image Fuzzi Wazzi, which was inspired by spending time in his mother’s country in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, in its exploration of his own identity and cultural stereotypes.

Nicholas Folland’s work for the exhibition is experimental, a soundscape in which he recorded his sleeping breath overnight. He suggested that in this work, “The conscious and rational mind is at rest and the dream state plays out impossible and fleeting scenarios that subtly encroach on our waking reality.”
The exhibition promises to be an exhilarating exploration, marrying ongoing artistic interests with the challenge of the personal. The experimental nature of the premise bodes well for another stimulating essay into self-portraiture at the University of Queensland Art Museum.

The University of Queensland National Artists’ Self-Portrait Prize 2011
University of Queensland Art Museum
Brisbane
24 September–4 December 2011

New work from north-west SA

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:30:00 +0000

Mimili Maku Artists at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi showcases the work of established and emerging artists from the Mimili Maku art centre located in Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands in the north-west of South Australia. In this, their second showing at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Milatjari Pumani, Ngupulya Pumani and Tuppy Ngintja Goodwin consolidate their reputations as some of the most exciting painters to emerge from the APY area.

The works of Ngupulya Pumani shimmer in their multilayered textures. Her paintings have at times been compared to the early works of Emily Kngwarreye. In Antara 2011, Pumani has created an intricate underpainting that provides a structure for her field of dots. A strong example of her painting style, the work seemingly occupies two distinct pictorial planes: the gestural shapes depicting landscape and the pulsating rhythm of dots that float above it. By restricting her palette to a sparse collection of red, white and yellow, Pumani is able to orchestrate a kind of optical wunderkammer, in which the eye constantly moves across the canvas, unable to remain focused on a single brush stroke or gesture. With her assurance of technique and sensitivity to colour and composition, it is remarkable that she only began putting brush to canvas in 2009.

Tuppy Ngintja Goodwin’s Kunga Kutjara Tjukurpa 2011 works in a similar, though more orgiastic, manner. Her brushstrokes are broader and her colouration more vivid. Though filled with black wells, the overlaying of violets, pinks, red, white, yellow, lilac and the occasional orange moves the eye over the picture surface to the point where the negative spaces are virtually lost in the field. The experience is like searching for the edge of a James Turrell light work, or of trying to recognise the shape of objects in the pitch dark.

The matriarch of the community, and a mentor for the emerging artists, Milatjari Pumani paints just as fluidly. Her works from the first Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi exhibition of Mimili Maku artists in 2010 were remarkable. Ngura Walytja Antara 2010, depicting landscape and ceremony, offers something of a blueprint for the works of Goodwin and Milatjari’s daughter Ngupulya Pumani, though with a more restrained palette and a flatter picture surface. And then there are the paintings of Willy Martin, Robert Fielding, Betty Kuntiwa Pumani, Puna Yanima and Judy Martin, each with their own assurance and style.

Established in 2004 and incorporated in 2010, Mimili Maku seems to be gathering stride and its artists are proving they can keep pace with their works spreading far and wide across the country. This latest exhibition at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi further demonstrates the remarkable depth of talent in the central desert.

A Melbourne master

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:02:00 +0000

It has been about a quarter of a century since we last had a major retrospective of the art of Fred Williams, one of Australia’s most significant painters and printmakers.

Fred Williams died tragically young, at the early age of fifty-five in 1982, after having achieved the reputation as Australia’s most distinguished landscape artist from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. He worked in three interrelated art mediums — oil paintings, gouaches and intaglio printmaking — and achieved distinction in all three of them.

Williams is also one of the few Australian artists whose international reputation has been rising. In his lifetime he held the successful Fred Williams — Landscapes of a Continent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1977, while posthumously, an exhibition of his work at the British Museum in 2003 was exceptionally well received and his standing amongst European artists and curators has risen dramatically.

Williams, more radically than any of his predecessors, altered the way Australians looked at our land. He deconstructed it, flattened the picture plane and then introduced a system of idiosyncratic spots, dabs and dashes, like individual pockets of energy. It was a new vision of the Australian landscape which became widely accepted and which presented a radical revision to existing visual schema. Fred Williams’ significance in Australian art is as a landscape artist who changed substantially our perception of the Australian landscape, more fundamentally than had the painters of the Heidelberg School the best part of a century earlier.

Every artist works within a tradition of art history — Roberts and Streeton in the final analysis were translators, Williams was an explorer and inventor. He devised a formal structure through which one could express the unique preciousness of the Australian landscape, a formal language of marks through which others could interpret the landscape.

This exhibition has been curated by Deborah Hart, Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture post 1920, at the National Gallery of Australia, It will highlight Williams’ strength as a painter and will include important large oil paintings and luminous gouaches to reveal his distinctive approach, often combining a feeling for place with a strong abstract emphasis.

The curator writes: “Williams’ inspiration often emerged from the unique qualities of landscapes around Australia, from Upwey in Victoria to the Bass Strait in Tasmania and the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Although Williams is most often associated with dry environments, some of the surprises in the exhibition are the works that reveal his fascination with water — ponds, rivers, waterfalls and seascapes. The show uncovers other unexpected elements, such as portraits of his family and friends, and delicate studies in gouache of plants and animals.”