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In conversation: Marcus Bunyan and Elizabeth Gertsakis discuss his new work, ‘The Shape of Dreams’ 2013-2017

December 2017

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled from the series The Shape of Dreams
2013-2017
Silver gelatin print
© Marcus Bunyan

In conversation

EG: Just saw your most recent Art Blart and your work. It’s very beautiful. Congratulations. At first I didn’t know whose they were. Then I went through them one by one, and only after responding to them ‘unknown’ I saw it was your work. SO BEAUTIFUL, so potent and yet, within the ambivalence and questioning there was space for great stillness and contemplation. Powerful and so poetic. The one of the children, close up is dazzling, but so are the open fields, mountains, roadways and minute images of flight.

MB: Thank you so much Elizabeth. Yes, my work would you believe. I can now believe after 4 years hard work. A poem to the uncertainty of human dreams. It’s a conceptual series in the vein of my hero Minor White – contemplative, poetic as always with me, but with an edge under the poetry as you so correctly observe EG – you are caught in the dream in the end image, suspended in time and space, in your imagination. You are always so spot on with your observations.

EG: Your own tendency is also closely linked to language and ideas?

MB: This is very true. The basis for all my work is body, time, space, environment and their link to language and ideas… and how conceptual work can be spiritual as well.

EG: I’m with you on that one, and political as well.

MB: Indeed – all my work, including this series, is very anti-war.

EG: What is unseen, invisible in these images is definitely the dark quiet hole of hell that war is. Or at least those that invest in it.

MB: The key image in this regard is the one of the explosion.

EG: But the ones of the distant and misdirected aerial machines also…

MB: Indeed, and the second one, where all the men are looking away while the cloud expands in the background.

EG: Yes, the casual indifference and banality of it.

MB: You have it perfectly Elizabeth!

EG: But the children, oh those children, and the innocent implacability of the natural world.

MB: To find these images on Ebay and then spend four years of my life cleaning and saving them was an incredible experience. It was almost like I was breathing these images as I was saving them, looking into each one and being immersed in them. Thus, the art demands contemplation from the viewer in order to begin to understand its resonances.

Many thankx to Elizabeth Gertsakis for her wisdom, knowledge, friendship and advice throughout the year. These observations of my work mean a great deal to me.

See the full sequence including the spacing of images (enlarge and use scroll bar)

See the full images on my website

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled from the series The Shape of Dreams
2013-2017
Silver gelatin print
© Marcus Bunyan

Marcus Bunyan website

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Photographs. Marcus Bunyan. ‘upside, down’ 2013

December 2013

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
2013
From the series upside, down 2013
Digital photograph

upside, down

Finally, I got my act together for a new series of my own work titled upside, down (2013). The series is now online on my website or you can click on the thumbnails below to go the full image. There are 30 images in the series formed as a sequence. Below is a selection of images from the series. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

People have asked me what this series is about. It’s about the suspension of belief; it’s about taking an enormous, heavy war machine and floating it in mid air and the impossibility of this; it’s about looking at this structure of destruction as a constructivist object, looking at the mass of this object; it is about the disintegration of this object (for these are poor quality scans that when enlarged will fall apart) – about raising the object up and letting it fall into the world. It is against war.

People have said to me the images look strange, that they look better the right way up. I’m glad that they are inverted for the world is a very strange place, where we make huge machines just to kill ourselves. I’m glad they look strange, I’m glad they make you feel uncomfortable. They are meant that way.

The sculptor Fredrick White has observed that the work is also about the beauty of the object, emphasising its form by inverting the mass of the ship, and also the weight, compression and displacement of space – almost like a time slippage/fracture, a time portal to another world. This is very perceptive because the work is about all of these things. I love layering the work so it reveals different things!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.

“The initial feeling of the series was of a curtain rising – and that strongly draws us into the drama. But the whole series is very witty, very touching and appeals very strongly to the senses. There is an inevitability about the human condition here that is very sobering. In the end the strongest of your gestures are almost ignored by the viewer who becomes aware of this atmosphere.”

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Text from my mentor ISL

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
2013
From the series upside, down
Digital photograph

Marcus Bunyan website

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Exhibition: ‘Gerhard Richter: Panorama’ at Tate Modern, London

Exhibition dates: 6th October 2011 – 8th January 2012

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

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
Reader
1994
Courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
© Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
Mustang Squadron
1964
Private Collection
© Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
Abstract Painting
1990
Tate. Purchased 1992
© Gerhard Richter
Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
Forest (3) and Forest (4)
1990
Private collection (left) and The Fisher Collection, San Francisco (right)
© Gerhard Richter
Photo: Lucy Dawkins

Gerhard Richter is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today. Spanning nearly five decades, and coinciding with the artist’s eightieth birthday, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is a major retrospective that groups together significant moments of his remarkable career.

As evoked by the title Panorama this exhibition presents a broad look at the wide range of Richter’s practice, discovering contradictions and connections, continuities and breaks. Each room is devoted to a particular moment of his career showing how he explored a set of ideas. While the focus is on painting, the exhibition includes glass constructions, mirrors, drawings, and photographs, and explores how Richter uses these media to ask questions about painting.

The exhibition includes many of Richter’s most well-known works such as Ema (Nude descending a staircase) 1966, Candle 1982, Betty 1988 and Reader 1994. There are also important works that are rarely shown: the first Colour Chart from 1966, 4 Panes of Glass 1967, a triptych of Cloud paintings from 1970, and, for the first time outside Germany, Richter’s monumental twenty metre long painting Stroke (on Red) 1980, based on a photograph of a brush stroke. There are several groups of important abstract paintings including a room of brightly coloured works from the early 1980s, a room of monumental squeegee paintings from the 1990s, and the Cage series 2006.

Richter was one of the first German artists to reflect on the history of National Socialism, creating paintings of family members who had been members, as well as victims of, the Nazi party. In the late 1980s, looking back to the history of radical political activity in West Germany in the 1970s, he produced the fifteen-part work 18 October 1977 1988, a sequence of black and white paintings based on images of the Baader Meinhof group. At the same time as developing a complex body of abstract work, often using squeegees to drag paint across the surface of his canvases, Richter has continued to respond to significant moments in history. In 2005 he painted September, an image of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, which is shown for the first time in the UK in this exhibition.

Richter is often celebrated for the diversity of his approaches to painting. His practice can seem to be structured by various oppositions, with paintings after photographs as well as abstract pictures; traditional still-lifes alongside highly charged subjects; monochrome grey works and multicoloured grids. Some paintings are planned out and ordered; others are the result of unpredictable accumulations of marks and erasures. Richter sometimes maintains these oppositions, but at other times he undoes them. This exhibition shows how he often brings abstraction and figuration together, and explores related ideas in very different looking works. The exhibition reveals breaks and new beginnings in his career, but it also reveals questions that he has asked throughout his life.

Short Biography

Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and after training in the East, moved to West Germany in 1961. He was part of a group of painters working in Düsseldorf, that included Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg, who turned to image-based painting during the emergence of American Pop art. Major solo exhibitions include the 36th Venice Biennale in 1972, his first large-scale retrospective at Städtische Kunsthalle und Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf in 1986 and Forty Years of Painting, a large-scale retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002. He installed Black Red Gold in the foyer of the Reichstag building in Berlin in 1999 and the window that he designed for Cologne Cathedral was completed in 2007. Richter lives and works in Cologne.”

Press release from the Tate Modern website

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
Abstract Painting
1990
Private Collection
© Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
Demo
1997
The Rachofsky Collection
© Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
Cage 4
2006
Tate. Lent from a private collection 2007
© Gerhard Richter

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 6pm

Tate Modern website

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Photographs: Marcus Bunyan. ‘The Symbolic Order (cartes de visite)’ 2011

March 2011

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
2011
From the series The Symbolic Order (cartes de visite)
Digital photograph

The body of work The Symbolic Order (cartes de visite) 2011 is now online on my website. There are 23 images in the series of modulated fighter aircraft recognition cards that cycle through the colour wheel. Below is a selection of images from the series.

I hope you like the work!

Marcus

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Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.

All photographs: Untitled from the series The Symbolic Order (cartes de visite) 2011 by Marcus Bunyan

See the whole series on my website.

Marcus Bunyan website

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Photographs: Marcus Bunyan. ‘Missing in Action (red kenosis)’ 2010

October 2010

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Missing in Action (red kenosis) No. 76
2010
Digital colour photograph

“God doesn’t give them things he doesn’t want them to use.”

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Anon

“There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.”

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Dwight D. Eisenhower

Missing in Action (red kenosis)

A body of work Missing in Action (red kenosis) 2010 is now online on my website.

There are 100 images in the series which are like variations in music with small shifts in tone and colour. Below is a selection of images, one plane and its variations from the series. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. I hope you like the work!

Marcus

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Missing in Action (red kenosis) No’s. 77-88
2010
Digital colour photographs

Marcus Bunyan website

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Text: Marcus Bunyan. ‘Missing in Action (dark kenosis)’ 2010

June 2010

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Missing in Action (dark kenosis) No.16
2010
Digital photograph

Missing in Action (dark kenosis)

Several people have asked me for some text to help describe the themes that my work investigates.

My work has always investigated the spaces and environments that people inhabit. Over the last few years the work has come to focus on fighter aircraft and the people (usually men) who fly them – the reason to fly such war machines, to fight for freedom, democracy, to bomb, to kill – the moral and ethical choices that human beings make, to undertake one action over another.

I have returned to childhood influences: I remember as a kid making toy models by Airfix and Tamiya of tanks and fighter planes and flying the planes from my bedroom ceiling. The work is strongly anti-war. Most of the work features shifts in texture, of light and dark and the occasional use of text to illuminate personal feelings. Text that is hidden among this particular body of work includes:

“The true enemy is war itself” from the anti-war movie Crimson Tide (1995)
“The destiny of man is in his own soul” Herodotus (484-420BC)
“We are all of us children of earth” Franklin D. Roosevelt: Flag Day Address June 13, 1942

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Conceptually the work is based upon an investigation into Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’ and the paradoxes of such (self) determination:

“Technologies of the self (also called care of the self or practices of the self) are what Michel Foucault calls the methods and techniques (“tools”) through which human beings constitute themselves. Foucault argued that we as subjects are perpetually engaged in processes whereby we define and produce our own ethical self-understanding. According to Foucault, technologies of the self are the forms of knowledge and strategies that “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.””1

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The next series are the same planes with a red colour (red kenosis) and after that I have some silhouette aircraft recognition cards – just the black shapes of the jet fighters – with colours behind, should be a good series!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Foucault, M. (1988) “Technologies of the self,” in L. H. Martin, H. Gutman and P. H. Hutton (eds.,). Technologies of the self. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, page 18 quoted on Wikipedia. “Technologies of the Self.” [Online] Cited 23/06/2010.

SEE THE FULL SERIES ON MY WEBSITE

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.

Marcus Bunyan website

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Photographs: Marcus Bunyan. ‘Missing in action (dark kenosis)’ 2010

May 2010

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Missing in Action (dark kenosis) No.11
2010
Digital photograph

Missing in action (dark kenosis)

A new body of work Missing in Action (dark kenosis) 2010 is now online on my website.

There are eighty-two images in the series which are like a series of variations in music with small shifts in tone and colour. Below are a selection of images from the series. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Many thankx to the people who have emailed me saying how much they like the new series of work.

Marcus

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.

Kenosis

“In Christian theology, Kenosis is the concept of the ‘self-emptying’ of one’s own will and becoming entirely receptive to God and his perfect will.”

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Missing in Action (dark kenosis) No.19
2010
Digital photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Missing in Action (dark kenosis) No.35
2010
Digital photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Missing in Action (dark kenosis) No.46
2010
Digital photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Missing in Action (dark kenosis) No.49
2010
Digital photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Missing in Action (dark kenosis) No.67
2010
Digital photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Missing in Action (dark kenosis) No.71
2010
Digital photograph

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Missing in Action (dark kenosis) No.76
2010
Digital photograph

Detail of images

Detail of images 76, 78, 6 and 9

Marcus Bunyan website

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Photographs: Marcus Bunyan. ‘Missing in Action (horizontal kenosis)’ 2010

March 2010

Marcus Bunyan (Australian born England, b. 1958)
Missing in Action (horizontal kenosis) No.4
2010
Digital photograph

Missing in Action (horizontal kenosis)

A body of work, Missing in Action (horizontal kenosis) (2010) is now online on my website.

There are nineteen images in the series which can be viewed as a sequence, rising and falling like a piece of music.
Below are a selection of images from the series.

Marcus

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.

Kenosis

“In Christian theology, Kenosis is the concept of the ‘self-emptying’ of one’s own will and becoming entirely receptive to God and his perfect will.”