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Why Art? April 2010 Issue |
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| on 17-06-2010 10:11
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Why Art? April 2010 Issue
Welcome
Dear Friends,
Welcome to the April newsletter. By the time some of you will be reading this we will most likely be packing our bags or going through passport control or boarding the plane for Johannesburg en route to Zimbabwe. Such is our shiftless fate, we go where we are called and there are more surprises for all of us where that came from. However, while we are still on these shores, we would be remiss if we did not make a comment this month on the minor storm in the Australian art teacup, namely - the Sam Leach, Wynn Prize "controversy". We have already commented in the March 2010 newsletter on artists taking advantage of the ignorance of their audience, but here's for the record our view in a nutshell on the subject - if you are going to "quote" it is appropriate (pardon the pun) to reference the quotation. That way you are creating an additional and relevant context for interpretation. If it worked for Salvador Dali (Millet's Angelus)and Francis Bacon (Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X) to mention two of countless examples, so we suspect domestic geniuses can safely give it a shot, so without further ado...
Marketplace
International
The international art world was thrown into havoc with the rest of us courtesy of a restless volcano (21st century stem cell research and Hubble telescope but we are stumped by volcano in one of the most remote and under-populated countries on the planet - fascinating!)
Perhaps it was more than apposite that Christie's held its inauguralinaugural "Green Auction: A Bid to Save the Earth," in New York on April 22. The sale featuring novelty items and a Damien Hirst All You Need Is Jealousy, (a butterfly painting in green) raised $1,387,000 through the sale of 11 donated lots.
Across the Atlantic in London Phillips de Pury in London was also trying something new, with a "BRIC" (Brazil, Russia, India, China) auction -- a developing nation "package" targeting investors already familiar with the concept in their financial dealings. The April 24 sale yielded a respectable £4,135,150 ($6,351,590) witha new record for Russian collaborators Komar & Melamid ($1,009,536) and Brazilians Lygia Clark ($564,096) and Os Gemeos , as well above estimate prices reached for India's Jitish Kallat and T.V. Santhosh .
Not to be outdone in pitching at the exotic, Sotheby's held rather successful Turkish (London) and Russian (NY) sales in April. The Turkish art sale set impressive16 new auction records and totaled £2,436,850. The top lot (which yielded the bulk of the sale total was) Untitled pictographic abstraction from 1954 by the Istanbul-born artist Fahrelnissa Zeid which went for $1,019,263 and yielding auction records for works by Taner Ceylan ($188,000) and Haluk Akakce ($67,072).
The Russian art sale totaled $13,572,252 and a healthy 70% clearance rate and a percent of the 249 lots finding buyers, and included a new auction record for Pavel Tchelitchew , for his 1937 Portrait of Ruth Ford $986,500, at almost five times the presale high estimate(!?!?!). (We would speculate that there had to be a bidding war in the room - all of which bodes well for the re-bound of the market.)
Domestic
In Australia, April was Sotheby's turn to kicks off the yea and they did it in fine form (at least financially). Tim Goodman's acquisition of the auction house seems to be proving a sage move, with a $5.4 million sale carried by Sidney Nolan's 1956 Ned Kelly, which at$520,000 fetched three times its upper estimate.
Other than Ned, the auction was a boon for bargain hunters with the majority of the paintings selling for their reserve including the night's cover lot, Streeton's Coogee Bay 1907 going for $625,000.
Showtime
Out & About
Sydney
Public Affairs:
Sylvie Blocher at the MCA had been showing for a while and it is an eclectic choice but almost a nostalgic choice with regards to what video art. "What Is Missing?" takes its title from a new work made with residents of Sydney suburb of Penrith. Engaging and frequently provocative, exhibited works explore a range of themes from cultural identity and migration to issues of authority, masculinity and self-expression. The work, comprises of essentially larger than life, staged talking portraits (Living Pictures) - people telling us about their life/work involving various hats that they wear in life/uniforms/personae - cultural, gender based etc. The philosophical intention of building a model of Global/Local art being pursued by Blocher is impressive and ambitious but the execution is falls on the side of the predictable instead of arresting, challenging reaching for the sublime.
At the time of writing we are standing by with great expectations for the impending launch of the 17th Biennale of Sydney on 12 May 2010.
Private Affairs:
Turns out, we turned quite a few noses out of joint with our reviews last month - always good to find out, who is paying attention. To all the dealers, who took it on the chin - well done and good on you for standing by your artists. We all have a job to do in this business.
This month in Sydney was very much a mixed bag, with a tendency best described as avoidance of the shock of the new.
At Gallery 9 Bradd Westmoreland continued exploration of his canvas poised oeuvre, which is striving to re-discover painting and history of painting with painting and painting. Who knows may be one day he will break through the wall of interpretation of a theme.
At Sarah Cottier, a regular visitor to the Antipodes from the Netherlands, Jan van der Ploeg took over the whole space and made its irregular architecture part of the work with his usual minimal elegance.
Tracey Moffatt did not grace the opening of her new show at Roslyn Oxley0, Plantation and Other.Perhaps she did not think that the show was important enough or interesting enough to leave New York. We would tend to agree, having seen little that we have not seen before and leaving little new to say about the work that has not been said before. Yes Moffatt is continuing to ruminate on the subject of racial representation and the exotic erotic but she has nothing new to contribute on the subject and we think she ought to.
At GBK Fiona Lowry continues her series of humans masquerading as wildlife quasi-portraits, which seems to be a hit with the collectors for somewhat more obvious reasons than one might want for a serious artist.
At Grantpirrie Todd Hunter is beginning to look anachronistic both the context of the Grantpirrie stable and contemporary art. His abstract expressionist canvas ravishings in ice-cream colours are effective and perhaps even represent a development in his work but one has to wonder
Flinders Street Peter Nelson is a young artist still developing his ideas about the world. So far they are quirky musings about shapes and structures - carefully and respectfully executed. It will be interesting to see what Nelson can deliver when he really decides to start pushing boundaries.
MOP Projects Lesser Abstractions, Could have been re-titled "David Hollier, Justin Trindall and a few friendly incursions". We were looking forward to a solid dose of abstraction, given the title but were somewhat distressed to discover a heavy dollop of text based work in the exhibition. No objection to the work, just the title. Still the most enjoyable work by far was the tiny pristinely white jewel by David Serisier in the middle of the show.
In the adjoining project space, Josie Cavallaro's Texting Pigeons - a slightly too literally descriptive title here, could have done with more metaphor rather than pun. While the concept of finger puppets in the shape of birds' heads is in and of itself interesting, that would have been enough without the juvenile excursion of making the said finger puppets "tweet" using text messaging instead of tweeting as nature would intend birds to (but not we might add, finger puppets!!!).
Melbourne
Private Practice:
At Anna Schwartz Gallery in Safety Zone, John Young continues his fascination and exploration of China and Chinese culture extending it more squarely in a political context although and perhaps surprisingly given contemporary range of issues in China. These densely hung largely black and white ink jet prints depict incidents across the city of Nanjing in, China, before the onset of the Nanjing Massacre. While we question the show stylistically in the context of Young's ouvre, it is nonetheless on of Young's better shows of recent years.
John Buckley Gallery Steven Rendall's Security, Storage & Recreation is an illustratively titled collection of paintings, sit neatly both between painterly expressionism and the photographic images on which they are founded. Conversely they sit less neatly within the context of history of painting inspired as they are by the philosophies and works of artists like Luc Tyumans and Peter Doig back in the 1990's.
One thing one can say for Robert Rooney is that he is not one for courting fashion or fashionability in art, latest outing at Tolarno Galleries, Le Rire: Homage to Picq, Vireis an entirely guileless and zany tribute to French caricature and caricature French, which is off-beat, anachronistic and yet zany funny and surprisingly likeable perhaps precisely because it bucks every conceivable trend in favour of the personal and individual.
Uplands Gallery Tony Garifalakis presented a body of work both charismatic and apocalyptically dramatic, with off-set photographic prints covered, blacked out and transmogrified by enamel and spray paint into almost delicious urban nightmares.
Finally at Neon Parc Matt Hinkley presents a very charming selection of relics of contemporary civilization in monochrome polymer clay, to be deciphered by a contemporary view in much the same way as they might be by a 25th century archeologist. One of the more entertaining concepts to end the month on.
March Hop to It:
Sydney
Melbourne
Brisbane
Perth
Adelaide
Tasmania
In Focus
Andrew Leslie
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Blue Mirror" 2005 Acrylic on anodised aluminium
Some artist, seem to be content to be living their lives and making good work, without jostling for headlines. They are steadily but surely living the life in art every day and contributing to the art community without requiring any special prizes. We think this deserves a prize all of its own - a prize for perseverance, consistency and endurance. If we were giving out this prize, one of the first recipients would be Andrew Leslie, who has been crafting out a living, a career and a very very fine body of work for over three decades.
Born in
Perth in 1956 Leslie is a painter/sculptor, who has developed his own
unique language that moves between sculpture and painting, between text
and abstraction, between formalism and expressionism. His high
aesthetic values and emphasis on delivering finished work for his
audience to see, make him a master of his craft as well as a talented
and insightful contemporary artist.
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His mastery and his unique medium, makes his work highly complementary to built environments and architectural projects but equally the subtlety of his installations, which utilize the impact and the effect of shadow and reflected light, make his works unique creatures, which create a chromatic musicality in any environment in which they are installed.
Concurrently with his private practice (he has had more than twenty solo exhibitions since 1992) he has always been a strong and generous contributor to the artist community both in his native Perth and now in Sydney.
His work has been acquired in Australia by numerous public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Artbank, Holmes a Court Collection, as well as the National Gallery of Malaysia and the Galleria Civica D'Arte Contemporanea - Marsala, Italy. He has also been the recipient of numerous awards and commissions.
Leslie shows with Annandale Galleries in Sydney, John Buckley Gallery in Melbourne and is a frequent participant in the SNO programme. Leslie's sculptural works range in price from $5,000 to $16,000.
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Collector's Footnotes
On the follies of youth...or what the young can get away with and old age can't
Now occasionally our professional pedantry forces us to accept challenges and go to see exhibitions at galleries we ordinarily would not patronise or have found wanting because a persistent someone insists, "you must see it and then tell me you don't think much of it". So we do, and invariable we find that our original view is entirely vindicated but now we have proof, an answer to our insistent colleagues and occasionally a subject for this column. So it was on this occasion. The gallery we never go to, also doubles as a framing shop. Yes that is a good reason not to patronise a gallery in our book - running a gallery is not a sideline business and does not work with a business on the side, but we digress. The show was a two hander upstairs and down.
Now we always look at the CV or ask the gallery about the age of the artist and here's why. Concerns we encounter in a work of an artist in the early stages of their career still have the possibility of being ameliorated by age. In fact in works of a younger artist, we do not expect to find a fully formed identity, a solidified credo, style etc etc. It makes sense, they are still growing and finding out, who they are and gathering pace. Few artists (as we have noted in the past), really hit their strides until their forties, such is the life in art...but heck visual artists are traditionally a sturdy lot compared to flakes likes like poets and musicians. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Picasso, Rothko (even with a suicide lived to 80) and John Olsen still kicking it at the spritely age of 87. So nothing to despair about or rather until you are in your 40's still wondering what it is all about and experimenting with style. |
So back to the unfortunate duet we were forced to consider. Both were painting shows featuring figurative and non-figurative. Both suffered from the failure of the artist to understand their strength and the incompatibility of their figurative work with their abstraction. The younger artist, had made some strong statements with non-figurative canvases, which were almost completely annihilated by the facile and facetious canvases with the same base as the abstract ones but "enhanced" with flowers and leaves neatly positioned to match someone's upholstery. Were the abstract canvases an accidental discovery or were the flowers an accidental error. The jury is out and we won't find out possibly for quite a few years. However, we were inclined to take a far harsher view of the work of the older artist, for the simple reason that at that age, blending in the same body of work awkward portraits, pixilated city scapes and geometric Mondrianish mosaics, shows a lack of intellectual cohesion and self-awareness, which is all but incurable. (Our existentialist past prevents us from excluding the possibility of change, even if our empirical experience teaches us otherwise.)
The advantage of age and experience (if you live your life right) is that technical accomplishment and wisdom enable art to become clearer, simple, more eloquent, more elegant and accomplished. If we trace the lives of most major artists, towards the acme of their careers, that is what we find almost without the fail. (Of course there is that very late period when things tend to decompose somewhat but that is the subject for another article, perhaps even next month, draft title "On knowing when to stop...")
So what is the collector to make of this? Understanding the career path of an artist is important in making a judgment of their work. No artwork or exhibition, exists in isolation, nor can it or should it. No work of art needs to be a cat in the bag, if you ask the right questions and of course the word to the wise is as always, if in doubt, get advice...
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Hunters & Collectors
This month we could not help but indulge ourselves with a little detour into art history on the theme of quotation, influence, appropriation, adaptation and interpretation. Here are some of our favourite examples and their inspirations.
Salvador Dali Self portrait as Mona Lisa (1954)
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa (1503-1506)
Velazquez, Las Meninas (1656-1657)
Pablo Picasso, Les ménines (1957)
Diego Velazquez Pope Innocent X (circa 1650)
Francis Bacon ‘Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
(1953)
About Renaissance aic…
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By: DrHarold (Guest) on 09-09-2010 07:22