Melbourne Art Fair, 2006
30th Anniversary Year
1976 - 2006
Rex Irwin Art Dealer was established in Sydney in 1976. The gallery represents important Australian and international artists, and supports and encourages emerging artists. The gallery also provides valuations, development of corporate and private collections, portrait commissions and restoration and framing advice. Art fairs are an interesting way to meet new clients and to show pictures in a less formal atmosphere than an art gallery. At Melbourne Art Fair, we are showing the work of four artists the gallery represents and exhibits regularly: Louise Boscacci, Alun Leach - Jones, Sean Scully and Fred Williams. Art fairs are exciting and not a little chaotic but going to a gallery regularly, where one can look at pictures in a calmer atmosphere, is the best way to continue the experience of Melbourne Art Fair. RI 2006 |
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I first knew of Louise Boscacci as she was about to leave the National Art School in 1999, I was told she was an artist of promise and she was told that even though we did exhibit many ceramics we were the gallery to go to. Well Boscacci came to us and we have enjoyed the experience. When a new artist joins a gallery there is always a period when each is wary of the other, can they do well for me, will we be able to sell her work? This is a strange time for both artist and dealer when trust and understanding is required. In a gallery that shows predominately paintings, a ceramic artist can look out of place but not Boscacci as her work is firmly fixed in the Australian landscape. As a zoologist Boscacci has walked the landscape, peered into sink-holes, experienced the heat and the dust and the magic of the bush which now informs all her work. |
Sculpture - Extracts from an interview with Brett Ballard BB: Alun, the first thing is how. Can you describe briefly how the sculptures are conceived - at least in physical terms? ALJ: I generally start with small drawings of images that I think I can make into individual wooden components that might then be assembled into fully three dimensional objects. These components are always flat in appearance and are variable in thickness and size. At this stage I have little idea how these components will fit together, many are discarded in the process of building the sculpture. I make dozens of these small discrete components, all different, but they basically constitute an alphabet of forms from which I can then build the work. BB: Are the sculptures in part models - idea models, maquettes? ALJ: When I first commenced making these three dimensional objects I thought of them as problem solving models for use in understanding spatial aspects of my painting, somewhat in the manner of Poussin’s models for his paintings. I had always found this helpful and enlightening but did not really consider them anywhere near being serious sculpture. This is no longer the case. BB: I know that titles are very important to you so I wanted to ask you about the series of sculptures, Small Worlds and I and The Observatory. I suppose because I want always to get a hand on the significance of abstract forms - in part or whole? ALJ: Titles are important to me for many and varied reasons. But the titles are the result of finding what the subject or theme might be through the process of making the work. The subject is never predetermined. The group of small works collectively titled ‘ Small worlds and I’ is what I term imaginary ‘self - portraits’, me thinking about small intimate things. The ongoing series, ‘The Observatory’ refers to the ‘Imaginations Chamber’, where things observed, imagined, emotionally engaged with are then recorded in some form or another. The artist wishes to thank and acknowledge the assistance of Crawford’s Casting Foundry, Sydney in creating all the bronze sculptures at Melbourne Art Fair, 2006. |
There is no other art form to match cinema for scope and veracity. With its unrelenting sway over reality, cinema is without equal. Cameras point at things and devour them, in an absolute grasp, knocking for six all other representational forms. Painting by contrast is a slower art form. Painters look at things and tamper with reality, adjusting form, colour and scale to the coordinates of their canvas. Here the key is mediation because as viewers we are tethered to the subjectivity of the artist, and the things we see, if paintings are to be successful, are seen anew. How then are we to ally an experience of the cinema to the paintings of Amanda Marburg? Marburg’s exhibition of 2005, Mad love is Strange, drew upon film noir. The paintings of Melbourne Art Fair 2006 refer to the classic western. With each series Marburg has inveigled stills from narrative cinema into the space of painting; something more mutable, plangent and of greater limitation. Yet painting must also be about something in the world, because by definition, painting is an image. I would contend that it is the image of a Marburg painting which holds us. To achieve this image, her look, Marburg employs a process where each stage prefigures the next; from film still to plasticine model, from photography to the canvas, each being a critical step in the resolution of her painting. Perhaps here we find a form of mannerism where images are constructed at a full to bursting scale, and, although her paintings anticipate the baroque, it is the finished paint surface which seals all of the elements, giving an order and a reflexiveness to proceedings. In effect it is the paint which is the real architecture of these works and without Marburg’s overt skills of painting we would see a very lumpen form of art. Marburg renders her shrunken scenes with seamless brush work - indeed there is no visible brush work - to create surfaces which glow with an opalescence much like the light - surface of a pearl. These paintings have in detail great beauty and when in time she turns her lens to the world, Amanda Marburg will take with her the great skill of painting. |
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Sean Scully is an artist of international note who produces paintings, prints and watercolours. At Melbourne Art Fair 2006 is a selection of eight individual prints including Vertical Bridge 2003 (ill. left) and two suites: Etchings for Federico Garcia Lorca 2003 and Munich Mirrors 2004. Scully’s rectangular and squared slabs are suggestive of stone walls and architectural structures. These forms are never perfectly aligned; they abut and overlap with a great weight and integrity but at their edges there is light and transparency suggesting another more random order. In 2004 there was a major exhibition of Scully’s work at the National Gallery of Australia, Body of Light.
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Fred Williams is arguably the greatest painter of Australian modernism. Noted for his interpretation of the Australian landscape, Williams worked tirelessly in the mediums of oil, gouache and etching, to create a body of work without parallel in Australian art. The paintings and prints of Melbourne Art Fair further exemplify how singular Williams vision of the landscape was. The painting, Sherbrooke Forest Series 1961 and the etching, Sherbrooke Forest number 1, 1961 (ill. right) are from a series of paintings and prints of trees which Williams developed over four years in the Sherbrooke Forest Series and then later in the Echuca Landscapes.
Williams continued these themes in his prints, often making many states of each plate, refining and extending his ideas, changing tonal values, counter - proofing and reprinting images. The prints of this exhibition are the complement to the paintings of this time, each medium informing the other. |
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