STAND F24

Telephone at Melbourne Art Fair 0422 737 505

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 not only showing the work of five artists the gallery represents and exhibits regularly - Louise Boscacci, Jonathan Delafield Cook, Nicholas Harding, Chris Langlois, Amanda Marburg - but also, we have included a number of artists whose work we carry in stock.

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.’

(Rex Irwin)

Louise BOSCACCI

From Louise Boscacci’s evocation of place and weather in her diaries, we can see how central the role of landscape is to her practice. In her writing, Boscacci attends the technical knowledge of the field biologist - which of course she once was - to the landscape through which she walks. Indeed this walking ‘around the ground’, as she calls it, is fundamental to her process. At one level Boscacci’s impulse is to explore a place factually. The names of flora and fauna are critical to her and become incorporated into the titles of her work. The other is to let impulses float freely, more akin to a free signifier where a single aspect, in word, or in three dimensions, can take on a multiplicity of meanings. This poetic affect, in twin with the other more factual aspect, suggest that land and
body are inseparable.

Jonathan DELAFIELD COOK

The materials of a Jonathan Delafield Cook picture are significantly plain: a conté – like compressed charcoal and the white of the gesso ground. Simple means it would seem but with extraordinary results. Delafield Cook draws animals, feathers and flowers - things of the natural world - in a style which although photographic in look, has more to do with the tenants of botanical art: the factual depiction of flora and fauna recorded by gentlemen in day books and diaries. In art, it equates to an uber – realism, a heightened naturalism, where fidelity is the key, perhaps the generator, to a symbolic level beyond description. Objects float in a white void, their shadows intact, but separated from their original context.

Nicholas HARDING

Observational drawing is one of the critical elements in the work of Nicholas Harding. In this exhibition of urban pictures we will see three large drawings in ink on paper and four paintings of the concourse at Central Station, Sydney. All of these pictures rely on the ongoing pursuit which Harding makes of observational drawing and the importance he places on working in sketch books. What Harding then does is important: the drawings are photocopied and put up on the studio walls. From one of the drawings, or more likely a combination of drawings, comes a composition which is made up on the canvas and painting begins. The image is very likely to change over the course of one picture’s completion. For Harding, it is a process by which an image in development can suggest a revision in overall composition or the replacement of a figure. Flux is at the source of this process. It proceeds by push and a pull. Elements are in train until a finished picture is agreed upon, in the mind and eye of the artist, and that of the world which must accord it a place.

Chris LANGLOIS

The painted vista has a long and enduring tradition in the history of art. There are two elements of this tradition which contribute to Chris Langlois’ paintings and which he successfully conflates. Realism - the topographic depiction of nature, and - Romantic Idealism, where one finds immanence in weather and its effect. It is worth noting that EM Forster identified nine types of weather in the novel: ‘in emotional contrast’, ‘illustrative’, ‘determinative of action’, ‘utilitarian’ and so on. There is a parallel to be made here. If we look to the effect of weather in a Langlois painting we see pockets of feeling across the picture surface – waves hardening to chopped edges, the mist pulling down the eye to the horizon line. The portrayal of nature in Langlois’ pictures, if seen from the standpoint of Idealism, is one and the same as the mental image we have of the sea and the landscape.

Amanda MARBURG

The four underwater pictures by Amanda Marburg at Melbourne Art Fair follow on from her exhibition, Lobster of 2007. Marburg has looked to the depths to find inspiration and has found a full torso in marble – with some addition in algae - and a classical head sat atop a rock. I wonder if she is thinking here of the Riace bronzes - two life-size Greek bronzes (460 - 430 BC) - found off the coast of Italy in 1972. However, Amanda Marburg models her Plasticine figures and places them into an aquarium. She then photographs the particular arrangements of light, water and object. Photographic imagery has always been the key point of mediation for Marburg. By drawing on the sheen of the digital image, and the skewed colouration captured within, Marburg begins her journey toward the resolution of a painted image.