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Review: ‘The Art of Existence’ exhibition by Les Kossatz at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 22nd November, 2008 – 8th March, 2009

Les Kossatz (Australian, 1943-2011) 'Digger's glory box' 1965 from the exhibition 'The Art of Existence' exhibition by Les Kossatz at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, Nov 2008 - March 2009

Les Kossatz (Australian, 1943-2011)
Digger’s glory box
1965
Silk, felt, canvas, cardboard, wood, brass, ink, fibre-tipped pen and synthetic polymer paint
106.0 x 76.0 x 7.0cm
Courtesy the artist
Photographer: Viki Petherbridge
© Les Kossatz

Heide Museum of Modern Art has brought together nearly 100 pieces of work by the Australian artist Les Kossatz in an eclectic survey show, appropriately titled The Art of Existence. Featuring sculpture, painting and mixed media from the 1960s to the present the exhibition is appropriately titled because Kossatz’s work addresses certain archetypal themes that affect human existence:

“His life-long fascination with the natural world and desire to understand both its human and animal inhabitants; exploration of the systems of knowledge and codes of behaviour that structure individual and communal life; and his critical and playful reflections on contemporary behaviour and the mysteries of existence.”1

Strong symbolic paintings are the focus of the work in the 1960s, paintings that address the shocking brutality of war and its aftermath, when soldiers return home. To the observation that these are of the ‘pop-style’ school of painting suggested by the Heide website I feel these works are also influenced by the collage of Cubism, the boxes of Joseph Cornell and the dismembered bodies of Francis Bacon. They engage with the symbolism of war and remembrance: memory, myth, and the banality of heroism and sacrifice.

The key work in this series is the painting Diggers throne (1966). This is a powerful disturbing image, effervescent and unnerving at the same time. It features a disembodied arm on the hand of a throne, surrounded by a wonderful kaleidoscopic assemblage of pictorial planes, artefacts and memories – an English flag, the flag of St George, a crown, medals and the words RSL. The arm reminds me of the Francis Bacon painting Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) as it rests, roughly drawn in pencil on the arm of the throne, drawing the eye back up into nothingness.

The Diggers throne painting also features these prophetic words:

“throne slow to rot
and twisted the memory
becomes sacred.
Bloody was the truth
And this a chair.”

All other work in this period seems to flow through this painting – the other large paintings, the small canvases featuring individual medals and the less successful hanging banners. But it is to this work we return again and again as a viewer, trying to decipher and reconcile our inner conflicts about the painting.

As we move into the 1970s the work changes focus and direction. There emerges a concern with the desecration of the Australian landscape investigated in a series of large paintings and sculptures. In Packaged landscape 1 (1976) a steel suitcase with leather straps, slightly ajar, fulminates with artificial gum leaves trying to escape the strictures of the trap. In Caged landscape (1972) nature is again trapped behind steel wire, weighed in the balance on a set of miniature scales. The paintings feature trees that are surrounded by concrete and the rabbit becomes a powerful symbol for Kossatz – a suffering beast, strung up on fences, a plague in a pitted landscape of chopped down trees, erosion and empty holes.

Into this vernacular emerges the key symbol of the artist’s oeuvre – the sheep. In 1972 Kossatz began a series of sculptures of sheep, “initially inspired by the experience of nursing an injured ram.” For Kossatz “the sheep represent the hardship of pioneer existence, the grazing industries prosperity, environmental concerns and the sheep act as narrative devices, potent metaphors for human behaviour.”2

The first sheep presented ‘in show’ is Ram in Sling (1973, below). In this sculpture a metal bar is suspended in mid-air and from this bar heavy wire mesh drops to support the fleecy stomach and neck of the ram almost seeming to strangle it in the process, it’s metal feet just touching the ground. Again the scales of justice seem to weigh nature in the balance.

The themes life and death, order and chaos are further developed in the work Hard slide (1980, below) where a sheep emerges mid-air from a trapdoor, two more tumble down a wooden slide end over end and another disappears into the ground through a wooden trapdoor opening. Sacrifice seems to be a consistent theme with both the earlier paintings and the metallised sheep:

“The completed life cycle, down the trapdoor, down the chute, after sacrifice by shearing.” ~ Daniel Thomas 1994

Further sculptures of sheep, both small maquettes and large sculptures follow in the next room of the exhibition. This is the artist is full flow, featuring the inventive taking of 2D things into the round, investigating the key themes of his work: the contrast between nature and artifice, or humanity.

The small maquettes of sheep feature races, gantries, sluices, pens, trapdoors and paddocks. Sheep tumble in a cataclysmic maelstrom, falling with flailing legs into the darkness of the holding pen below. These are my favourite works – small, intimate, detailed, dark bronzes of serious intensity – the sheep becoming a theatre of the absurd, suspended, weighed and balancing in the performance of ritualised acts, a cacophony of flesh at once both intricate and unsettling. Their skins lay flayed and lifeless disappearing into the ‘unearth’ of the slated wooden floor of the shearing shed. The sheep “can be viewed metaphorically as a commentary of the existential situation of the individual and collective behaviour.”3 As Kossatz himself has noted, “It is hard to bring a piece of landscape inside and give it a living animated form. The sheep somehow gives me this quality of landscape.”

But we must also remember that this strictly a white man’s view of the Australian landscape. Nowhere does this work comment on the disenfranchisement of the native people’s of this land – the destruction of native habitats that the sheep brought about, the starvation that they caused to Aboriginal people just as they bought riches to the pastoralists and the country that mined the land with this amorphous mass of flesh.

Recent work in the exhibition returns to the earlier social themes of memory, war, remembrance, religion, shrines, atomic clouds and temples but it is the work of the late 1970s-1980s that is the most cogent. As Kossatz ponders the nature of existence on this planet he does not see a definitive answer but emphasises the journey we take, not the arrival. Here is something that we should all ponder, giving time to the nature of our personal journey in this life, on this earth.

Here also is an exhibition worthy our time and attention as part of that journey. Go visit!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Word count: 1,074

1/ From the Heide website
2/ From wall notes to the exhibition
3/ From wall notes to the exhibition

Many thankx to Heide Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Postscript 2018

The late Les Kossatz (1943-2011) was a well known Melbourne-based artist and academic whose work is represented in many regional and state galleries and the National Gallery of Australia. He studied art at the Melbourne Teachers’ College and the RMIT, and went on to teach at the RMIT and Monash University. Kossatz’s first significant commission was for the stained glass windows at the Monash University Chapel in Melbourne. Later commissions included works for the Australian War Memorial, the High Court, the Ian Potter Foundation at the National Gallery of Victoria and the Darling Harbour Authority, Sydney. His sculpture, Ainslie’s Sheep, commissioned by Arts ACT in 2000, is a popular national capital landmark in the centre of Civic. A major retrospective of Kossatz’s work was held in 2009 at the Heide Park and Art Gallery, Melbourne.

Text from the High Court of Australia website

Francis Bacon (British born Ireland, 1909-1992)
Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X
1953
Oil on canvas

Les Kossatz (Australian, 1943-2011) "Ram in sling" 1973 from the exhibition 'The Art of Existence' exhibition by Les Kossatz at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, Nov 2008 - March 2009

Les Kossatz (Australian, 1943-2011)
Ram in sling
1973
Cast and fabricated stainless steel and sheepskin
129.3 x 126.5 x 66.0cm
Heide Museum of Modern Art Collection
Purchased from John and Sunday Reed 1980
© Les Kossatz

Les Kossatz (Australian, 1943-2011)
Trophy room
1975
Colour lithograph
74.0 x 76.0cm (sheet)
Courtesy the artist
Photographer: Viki Petherbridge
© Les Kossatz

The art of existence is the first exhibition to review Les Kossatz’s contribution to Australian art in a career that spans the 1960s to today. Kossatz’s consistently experimental approach to media and techniques is revealed in works that display a lifelong fascination with humanity and the interaction of man and nature. His paintings, sculptures and works on paper stimulate a questioning and exploration of such concerns, which form the basis of this artist’s practice.

Les Kossatz’s early works of the 1960s draw on his training and ability to work across a diversity of media, including painting, drawing, printmaking and glass. Early paintings and etchings on the theme of the emptiness of memorials to the Australian ‘digger’ or soldiers were succeeded by images and objects offering impressions of the world around the artist – the rural domain and interior life of St Andrews in Victoria where Kossatz lived and worked. Such works demonstrated his determination to pursue a figurative practice at a time when abstract art had been imported to Australia and was considered the avant garde.

Remaining a staunchly independent artist, at the start of the 1970s Kossatz painted images of rabbits and sheep from St Andrews. In addition, the practice of working in three dimensions was to become more significant. Kossatz continued to develop familiar themes in the creation of installations and cast objects. Although he has produced drawings and prints across his career, working with sculpture has, since the early 1970s, been his primary mode of art-making. Large scale cast and assembled objects show Kossatz pursuing related themes of caged and packaged landscapes, shrines to the harvest and the still life.

The art of existence surveys Kossatz’s monumental life-sized sheep sculptures, which he began making in 1972 from casts of animal parts, and for which he is best known. These include Hard slide (1980), his prize-winning commission in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. Kossatz has won numerous commissions for outdoor sculptures that employ the sheep as literal and metaphorical beings. Kossatz’s work across three decades reveals a number of ongoing engagements, such as his observations of human behaviour and at times its similar manifestation in animals; the beliefs that sustain individuals and communities (such as religion, music and politics); and the forms of the landscape and our understanding of these relationships.

Introduction to the exhibition written by Zara Stanhope, Guest Curator, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2008

Les Kossatz (Australian, 1943-2011)
Hard slide
1980
Sheepskins, aluminium, Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga sp.), leather, steel
372.0 x 100.0 x 304.0cm (installation)

Les Kossatz (Australian, 1943-2011)
Guggenheim spiral
1983

Heide Museum of Modern Art
7 Templestowe Road
Bulleen Victoria 3105 Australia
Phone: +61 3 9850 1500

Opening hours:
(Heide II and Heide III)
Tuesday to Sunday and public holidays, 10am – 5pm

Heide Museum of Modern Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Delacroix and Photography’ at Musée National Eugène Delacroix, Paris

Exhibition dates: 28th November, 2008 – 2nd March, 2009

Many thankx to the Musée national Eugène Delacroix for allowing me to publish the artwork in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798-1863)
Etude de jambes d’homme assis et étude d’une tête
Nd
Lead pencil
20.3 x 15.2cm
Museum of Fine Arts and Archeology of Besançon
© Museum of Fine Arts and Archeology of Besançon

Eugène Durieu (French, 1800-1874)
Nu masculin assis de face, les jambes écartées
1854
Plate XV of the Durieu Album
Salted paper from negative paper
17.8 x 12.8cm
BnF, Department of Prints and photography
© BnF

Jean Louis Marie Eugène Durieu (1800-1874) was an early French amateur nude photographer, primarily known for his early nude photographs of men and women. A number of his male and female models were also painted by Eugène Delacroix, with whom he was friends.

Durieu was born in Nîmes, and became known for making studies of nudes for Delacroix. During his career Durieu was a lawyer. His last job was inspector for education and culture. In 1849 he went into early retirement and devoted himself to the newly developing technology of photography. In 1853, Durieu worked with Delacroix on a series of photographs of different male and female nude models.

Text from the Wikipedia website

In the early 1850s, Durieu, like many of his photographic peers, gravitated from the daguerreotype to the calotype. None of the works from his daguerreotypical oeuvre can be attributed to him with any certainty. Apart from the Delacroix album held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, another work on paper does exist, however, a more personal album preserved at the George Eastman House in Rochester, which was once part of the Gabriel Cromer collection. Its repertoire is more varied and includes female nudes in fairly elaborate settings, as well as portraits and reproductions of paintings and engravings. …

In 1851, along with Delacroix, Durieu became one of the founder members of the Société Heliographique, the first French institution to be created specifically for photographers. Above all, its brief was to encourage the development of photography on paper and in particular the calotype as opposed to the daguerreotype.

It was at precisely this time in the early 1850s that Delacroix’s interest in photography was at its height, coinciding with that of Durieu. In February 1850, he wrote in his journal: “ask Boissard for some daguerreotypes on paper,” and later, in September 1850: “Laurens tells me that Ziegler is producing a sizeable number of daguerreotypes, including portrayals of nude men. I intend to go and see him to ask if he can lend me a few.” In May 1853, he showed Pierret and his cousin Léon Riesener the prints given to him by Durieu. In November 1853, he discussed the topic of photography with Riesener, who in the 1840s had not only been a painter but an ‘author’ of daguerreotypes. Delacroix maintained that the term author was a misnomer for what he regarded as a mechanical recording process, a machine-led art: “He referred to the solemn account the good Durieu and his friend, who assists him in these operations, give of their time and trouble, whilst taking much of the credit for the success of the aforementioned operations, or more precisely their results.” He made fun of Riesener, who had asked them with great trepidation if he could use their pictures as models for his paintings without being accused of plagiarism. Finally, on two successive Sundays, 18 and 25 June 1854, he visited Durieu on the seventh floor of his home at 40 rue de Bourgogne to ask him to make a series of photographs of models under his guidance…

Extract from Sylvie Aubenas. “Eugène Durieu, senior civil servant, photographer and forger,” in No 32 Printemps 2015 (translation Caroline Bouché) on the Etudes photographiques website [Online] Cited 04/10/2018

Eugène Durieu (French, 1800-1874)
Nude couple: female nude standing in the background, male nude sitting in profile on a leopard skin
1854
Plate 3 of an album containing 32 studies of models
Salted paper print
16.2 x 11.5cm
BnF coll., Paris
© BnF

Eugène Durieu (French, 1800-1874)
Model of male nude sitting in profile on a leopard skin
1854
Plate 11 of an album containing 32 studies of models
Salted paper print
17 x 13.5cm
BnF coll., Paris
© BnF

“I look with passion and without fatigue at these photographs of naked men, this admirable poem, this human body on which I learn to read and whose sight tells me more than the inventions of scribblers.”

Delacroix, ‘Journal’, October 5, 1855

Delacroix was confronted, like his entire generation, with the emergence of photography. An intriguing tool fascinating for the painter, this medium occupies a place apart in all of his work. He is at the source of a deep reflection on artistic truth in the face of photographic realism.

Far from seeing photography as a potential rival to painting, Delacroix took a keen interest in the development of this new medium, following its technical progress with sufficient curiosity to become a founding member of the Heliographic Society in 1851. He amassed a considerable photographic collection-of frescoes by Raphael, paintings by Rubens, and cathedral sculptures. Moreover, although he did not use a camera himself, a series of male and female nude models were photographed at his request by Eugène Durieu, in 1854. We know from his diary and letters that he sometimes used these photographs to practice drawing when no live models were available. These shots, which he sometimes carries with him, are a valuable tool for practicing drawing during his stays in the province. They meet very personal criteria; Delacroix wanted to use images voluntarily a little blurry and mostly stripped of all the quaint accessories conveyed by commercial photographs to the attention of artists.

However, despite a deep fascination for photography, Delacroix keeps a critical eye on this new medium. He adopts an attitude sometimes skeptical about his proper use and mastery of the technique, refusing to award benefits beyond its instrumental value. His reluctance is particularly keen with regard to one’s own photographed image: he even goes so far as to demand the destruction of some negatives, fortunately in vain.

Almost all the photographs and the drawings done from them (together with a number of paintings) have been assembled for the first time at the Musée Delacroix, with the generous support of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and other collections. The exhibition also features a surprising series of photographic portraits of Delacroix himself, ranging from the precious intimate daguerreotypes of the 1840s to the more posed and strikingly dignified pictures taken by Carjat or Nadar toward the end of his life-many of which images the great man himself would rather have had destroyed.

Press release from the Musée National Eugène Delacroix

The Durieu Album

The album of thirty-two photographs preserved in the department Prints and Photography of the National Library de France and commonly known as “Durieu Album”, by the name of the author of the photographs contains mainly photographs of two nude models, a man and a woman, taken by Eugene Durieu in the presence and on the indications of Delacroix during two sessions of successive poses, on Sunday 18 and 25 June 1854. The album was probably in lot 1532 of the sale after the painter’s death, bought by the critic Philippe Burty, who said on the front page: “All this sequence of photographs was bought by me at the posthumous sale of Eugène Delacroix’s workshop. He used it often and his cartons contained a considerable number of pencil studies from these photographs some of which were made expressly for him by one of his friends, and the models posed by him.” This album went on to the bibliographer and historian of the art Maurice Tourneux, who offered it in 1899 to the Cabinet des Prints.

The examination of the album, whose pages are all presented here in the order of the pages, shows that divides into four distinct sequences. Plate I represents a seated male nude model. His black beard and its abundant hair absolutely distinguishes him from the model with the better drawn musculature having posed in the following photographs. This test is undoubtedly part of a different set provided by Durieu to Delacroix.

The twenty-six photographs that follow in the album are, like the first, calotypes, that is to say prints from negative on paper. The calotype is characterised by a slight blur that Delacroix’s eyes found useful and tolerable photography, the grain of the negative paper producing, in the prints, less precise contours than in the daguerreotype or prints based on collodion glass. These twenty-six photographs of June 1854 form a very homogeneous series, with two models. The man that Delacroix calls “the Bohemian” appears by the development of his musculature and his ease to pose, as a professional model. He is present alone on seventeen views, and on the other nine in the company of a female model, probably an Italian, also a professional model, who posed again in 1855 for two other photographers.

After this series, the album contains two studies (plates XXVIII and XXIX) of the same young woman, of which one served as the model for Odalisque of 1857 (private collection). The model is Miss Hamély, a small actress who appeared in tableaux vivants and pantomimes at the Porte-Saint-Martin theater (1853) but who also posed for photographers. The freedom that Delacroix takes in the painting in relation to the photography confirms that, he only uses it as a support for the imagination, unlike a painter like Gérôme for whom the cliche really replaces the model. So photography is amalgamated, among other ingredients, in a personal universe, not to mention the colours of the painting.

The album ends with three prints, based on a glass negative, of the same model draped to the waist, sitting in front of a plain canvas background. The sharpness, due to the negative on glass, the rigorous composition and images, their “professional” aspect make them totally different from the previous ones, to such that we can hesitate to attribute them to Durieu. While the calotypes posed by Delacroix are very rare, these last three images are seen in more than one collection; they have been broadcast to a wider audience.

Text from the Delacroix et la photographie exhibition pdf (translated from the French by Google translate)

Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798-1863)
Two studies of naked men one standing, the other sitting
Nd
Graphite
Musée Eugène-Delacroix
© RMN / Michèle Bellot

Eugène Durieu (French, 1800-1874)
Nu féminin assis sur un divan, la tête soutenue par un bras
1854
Plate XXIX of the Durieu Album
Salted paper varnished from negative paper
14 x 9.5cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography
© BnF

Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798-1863)
Odalisque
1857
Oil on wood
39.5 x 31cm
Private Collection

Eugène Durieu (French, 1800-1874)
Model Study
1854
Calotype
BnF, Department of Prints and photography, Paris
© BnF

Louis Camille d’Olivier (French, 1827-1870)
Female nude
1855
Salted paper print
21 x 16cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography
© BnF

Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798-1863)
Study of naked woman in profile on the left
Nd
Lead pencil
13.6 x 20.9cm
Louvre Museum, Department of the Arts graphics
© RMN Photo / Thierry Le Mage

Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798-1863)
Three studies of men
Nd
Lead pencil
19.2 x 25.3cm
Museum of Fine Arts and Archeology from Besançon
© Museum of Fine Arts and Archeology from Besançon

Eugène Durieu (French, 1800-1874)
Naked man standing, back, holding a vertical stick
Nd
Albumine paper
9.9 x 5.8cm
Gérard Lévy Collection
© 2008 Louvre Museum / Pierre Ballif

Eugène Durieu (French, 1800-1874)
Naked man sitting on a chair
Nd
Albumen paper
9.7 x 5.8cm
Gérard Lévy Collection
© 2008 Louvre Museum / Pierre Ballif

Léon Riesener (French, 1808-1878)
Portrait of Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863)
1842
Daguerreotype
© Musée d’Orsay, Dist RMN / Patrice Schmidt

Louis Antoine Léon Riesener (21 January 1808 in Paris – 25 May 1878 in Paris) was a French Romantic painter.

Enchanted by the play of light and reflections which transformed the appearance of matter, Riesener began a new aesthetic that made him one of the precursors of impressionism. A passionate colourist, he researched all the nuances of colour and studied the techniques of ancient Greece and the Renaissance, including Titian, Veronese and Corregio. Impressed by his research into colour, he turned towards Rubens, which for him was the Shakespeare of painting. Very early in his career Riesener studied tonal divisions, well before the physician Chevreul discovered their scientific basis. His tactile taste led him to look for the most perfect expression of matter and particularly of skin. He put poetry into his painting by the play of shadow and he passionately admired nature, life and all the beauties they produced.

He researched the subject of life in the countryside and, liking to paint reality, said he wanted to express “the heat of the day, the melancholy of the evening, meadows, flowers as they are in nature”. His study of the elements caused him to paint a series of skies which varied according to the light and time of day – the subjects were ahead of their time and Riesener had to fight hard against the Salon juries and the Institut. Using pure colours, he excluded the blacks and whites which had been used for shadows and light before him. His material science of colour was the opposition which gave birth to contrasts from juxtaposed pigments. He did not portray faces by contours, but by shadows and modelling.

Relations with Delacroix

After his father’s return from Russia in 1823 Léon got to know Eugène Delacroix better. Ten years older than Riesener, Delacroix was his first-cousin – they shared a grandmother, Marguerite-Françoise Vandercruse, whose daughter by her first marriage was Delacroix’s mother and whose second husband Jean-Henri Riesener was Riesener’s grandfather. Delacroix quickly recognised Riesener’s talent and originality and he supported his early career by recommending him to civil servants he knew. On trips to the countryside they met at Valmont, near Fécamp, the home of their cousin Bataille, owner of the abbaye from 1822 onwards. Riesener devotedly attended Pierret’s salon (Pierret was a school friend of Delacroix), where he met Mérimée, Viel-Castel, Sauvageot, Feuillet de Conches, Viollet-le-Duc, Lasus and Guillemardet. Later, Riesener became friends with Fantin-Latour, Ernest Chausson and the Morisots (the Morisot family was very friendly with the Riesener family, with Rosalie Riesener’s friend Berthe Morisot researching Léon’s opinions, listening to his advice and copying out about 135 pages of his writings) – his friends were artists and he preferred a quiet life rather than the high life favoured by Delacroix.

From childhood, Riesener and Delacroix were friends and confidants. So different in life and character and so independent, they were preoccupied by the same artistic problems and enjoyed exchanging ideas, both having been formed by the 18th century and its neo-classical culture. They discussed their study of the classical world and they were both colourist painters searching for new techniques in tonal division. The difference in their temperaments expressed itself in their ways of looking at nature – Delacroix thought of drama, Riesener thought of sensuality. Delacroix bought Riesener’s painting Angélique as an exemplar for all painters and put it in his studio. On his death in 1863, Delacroix left Riesener his country house at Champrosay.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910)
Eugène Delacroix seated three-quarter facing, his hand in the waistcoat
1858
Salted paper
24.5 x 18cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography
© BnF

Musée National Eugène Delacroix
6 rue de Furstenberg
75 006 Paris
Phone: +33 (0)1 44 41 86 50

Opening hours:
The museum is open daily except Tuesday, 9.30am – 5pm (tickets sold until 4.30pm)

Musée national Eugène Delacroix website

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Opening: ‘Oleh Witer’ at Space 39 Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 11th November – 22nd November, 2008

Opening: Tuesday 11th November, 2008

Oleh Witer (Australian) 'The Elephant Beetle' 2008 (installation view) from the exhibition 'Oleh Witer' at Space 39 Gallery, Melbourne, Nov 2008

Oleh Witer (Australian)
The Elephant Beetle (installation view)
2008
Oil in linen

A warm and lively crowd was in attendance for the opening of the latest Oleh Witer exhibition at Space 39 in Little Collins Street, Melbourne. Nine paintings are presented in the open space of the gallery and what magical paintings they are.

Two of the main canvases feature rearing beetles in the foreground, almost photo-realistically painted, lit from above while in the background geometric red and blue squares are overlaid by enigmatic shadows – almost as though the shadows were the interior structures of a fantastical light shade.

Other canvases feature a bee and a wasp facing each other with cellular geometric patterns and overlaid shadows in the background. Between these two seeming adversaries is a large canvas of a black skull with candle flickering in the it’s lobotomised top sitting on a spiral shape with geometric shapes and the shadows of an almost tarot like ‘ten of swords’ pattern overlaid to the background.

The strongest work features geometric forms with dark surrealist imagery. These are talismanic images with a strong connection to taoist and shamanic principles. A concern with the connection between all things is evident – archetypal pentagrams, spirals and swords are linked to the principles and proportions of the golden mean equation. Contemplation is required to access the inner meanings of the work but they reward extended looking as their magical phosphorescences are revealed over time. Recommended viewing.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Oleh Witer (Australian) 'The Rhinoceros Beetle' 2008 (installation view)

Oleh Witer (Australian)
Installation view and opening crowd with The Rhinoceros Beetle
2008
Oil on linen

Oleh Witer (Australian)
The Bee (installation view)
2008
Oil on linen

Space 39

This gallery is no longer open

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Opening: Darren Wardle ‘Soft Target’ at Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 7th November – 29th November, 2008

Opening: Friday 7th November, 2008

Darren Wardle (Australian, b. 1969) 'Frontier Psychology' 2008 from the exhibition Opening: Darren Wardle 'Soft Target' at Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne, Nov 2008

Darren Wardle (Australian, b. 1969)
Frontier Psychology
2008
Oil and acrylic on linen
153cm x 274cm
Private collection

Six luminous oil and acrylic paintings by Darren Wardle greeted viewers in the front gallery at Nellie Castan in South Yarra. In his apocalyptic fractured pop coloured landscapes objects elide, disintegrate and vanish into thin air. Buildings, empty screens and advertising hoardings become the target of lost innocence, a metaphor for the dis-ease and disintegration of consumer society, a portent of things to come.

The titles of the paintings (such as Tipping Point, Faultline and Slanted) perfectly describe the conceptual themes explored in the work. Slinks of dripping paint pour down the canvas, canvases are cut in three through the use of fractured planes like a double exposure in photography and vegetation becomes purple and white, mutated and x-rayed. Some of the paint almost has a crystalline nature to it’s surface, a ‘surface tension’ that contrasts with flat gradated areas of colour in the backgrounds, as though the world is solidifying, cracking and about to fall apart.

An excellent show that is well hung: so many exhibitions have too many objects, too much noise crowding the walls. Here the work is given space to breathe and live and looks all the better for it. Highly recommended.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Darren Wardle (Australian, b. 1969) 'Faultline' 2008 (installation view)

Darren Wardle (Australian, b. 1969)
Faultline (installation view)
2008
Oil and acrylic on canvas

Darren Wardle (Australian, b. 1969) 'Faultline' 2008 from the exhibition Opening: Darren Wardle 'Soft Target' at Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne, Nov 2008

Darren Wardle (Australian, b. 1969)
Faultline
2008
Oil and acrylic on canvas
153cm x 274cm
Private collection

Darren Wardle (Australian, b. 1969)
Inland Empire
2008
Oil and acrylic on linen
183cm x 167cm
Private collection

Nellie Castan Gallery

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Art work: Cy Twombly ‘Cold Stream’ 1966

November 2008

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Cold Stream
1966
White wax pencil on canvas

This painting reminds me of the drawings of Rudolf Steiner (see the exhibition Joseph Beuys & Rudolf Steiner: Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition at The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne earlier this year) but here the performance of marking is pushed beyond the bounds of the spiritual by the ferocious attack of the artist – repeating the form but transgressing the boundaries of that form, disintegrating the ritual into the physical release of energy through the hand.

One can almost see the maelstrom of the splitting of the atom in Twombly’s repeating performance threatening to destroy himself and the world around him.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Rudolf Steiner. Blackboard Drawings, 1919-1924

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