Woollahra: town without pity. We had been dreading going there ever since we decided to visit every gallery in town and imagined it was going to be just terrible with its over priced cakes, jammed streets and the very real possibility of seeing John Laws driving his Merc through the gates of his mansion, (which looks like a pastel version of Mussolini’s winter retreat).
Yes, all of these things were plausible, possible and created a nervous sense of trepidation in The Art Life team, but once we got into the whole groove of Woollahra and accepted the fact that art was for sale just like anything else, that ever second shop was an Orson + Blake outlet, and that we really should reassess our attitude to cutting-edge Swedish design, we had fun.
Gould Galleries has a big banner outside that uses the G logo of Gould to spell out the G in GREAT AUSTRALIAN ART. Make no mistake, this is a greatest hits collection of paintings that’s pretty damn close to museum quality throughout. Calling their stock show Summer 2004 Exhibition, the gallery has a Cherry Hood painting in the window called Felix from 2003 and if you were looking to buy a generic Hood painting and have $14,000 handy, this would be a good buy.
Most people who collect art just want generic examples of artist’s work and get confused when non-typical examples of an artists work are fobbed off on them by dealers and auction houses. Gould Galleries, like many galleries of its ilk, cater to the buyers who want those typical examples – something different but something familiar. Walk through Gould and you’ll be amazed at what they’ve got on offer – Perceval, Nolan, Whiteley, Lindsay, Blackman, Olsen and Williams – all the big boys of Australian modernism. The recent interest in contemporary art is reflected by pieces by Howard Arkley (the third most expensive in the show at $185,000), the Hood picture while some Freddie Timms works add a little indigenous art to the mix. Just remember to bring your cheque book.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Paddington/Woollahra area was the place where a lot of the young Turks of Australian art dealing go their start. Many a long night was spent discussing abstraction after Rothko over a heavy dinner of Provencal meals and cab savs while scheming how to gettheir artists into the big time. As these young men became the establishment, the whole area was written off as the home of leather and stainless steel chairs and contemporary art galleries moved west away from the rapidly gentrifying area. We mention this only because, if you go to Axia Modern Art, you can actually see chairs like that and get in touch with that whole 70s vibe. There’s nothing much to say about the gallery itself except this is where the unbelievably pedantic Archibald winning painter Graeme Fransella shows along with the heroic abstractionist Guy Warren and Geoff Dyer, a painter who won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting and whose work represents good value for money if you like to see painters using a lot of paint in a very demonstrative way.
Libby Edwards has galleries in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and they’re called Libby Edwards Galleries. As we looked at the art hung in the gallery we wondered how Edwards does it – that’s three galleries, three sets of staff, three times the running costs. Clearly she deals in bulk, not K Mart bulk, but quality bulk, and her artists should be very happy people with all the sales. To have an operation like that you don’t want to be showing anything too wacky – it’ll scare people off – and besides, airport lounges and coffee shops need to go somewhere to find a good painting. Kim Barter and Belynda Henry appear to be two of the gallerist’s better painters – Henry doing a very restrained abstraction that looks like wrapping paper and Barter has a messy-but-neat scribbly style that’d look good in a very neat room.
Bandigan Aboriginal Art is again a lot like all the other galleries in the area, except it deals indigenous art, and like the other galleries, it isn’t afraid to put the prices where you can see them. There is a hell of a lot of good art here by familiar names like Mini Pwerle and Gloria Petyarre along with artists we’d never heard of. There are some pretty amazing psychedelic dots from an artist named Josie Patrick and two fantastic canvases by Mini Daniels Napurrula. The gallery is the front rooms of a long thin building and as we walked back through the hallway looking at some X-ray paintings, we suddenly became afraid as we heard a man yelling at the other end of the hall about the fact that he had already paid his credit card bill and what was the bloody use of wasting his time explaining it to some mere functionary!
We ran out of the building, across the road and into the welcoming embrace of Rex Irwin Fine Art Dealer . The exhibition, we discovered as we got to the top of the stairs, was that of Louise Boscacci and her near sell out show of ceramics. A few days ago we had a bit of a spew about ceramics and its status as so-called art and when we saw the poster on the stairs of the Irwin building we thought “please god, not again” but when we got in there we realised that maybe we had been too harsh. This exhibition was everything that the Boutwell Draper show was not. Instead of plonking the works down on plinths in a staggered row down the middle of the gallery, Boscacci’s work was artfully placed on chest-high shelves around the walls, and instead of the all-over grey lighting of fluro strips favoured by B-D, each piece was exquisitely spot lit. With the choral music playing in the Irwin gallery, we realised we were having a ceramics epiphany – these things look really good! Hallelujah! What we especially liked about this show was that Boscacci didn’t make some half arsed attempt to turn her pots and bowls and flasks into – ahem – sculptures – but played up the classical aspects of the form without tipping over into Gywn Hanssen Pigott fetishism. The photos on the Irwin website don’t do the pieces justice at all.
Zhong Chen is the about the most interesting living artist that Eva Breuer Art Dealer represents. He paints pixilated images of women in traditional Chinese costume and that’s his big thing – pixilation. The paintings are not nearly as well finished as they should be, but if you feel like buying one of Chen’s works you can rest assured that you’re at least supporting an artist, whereas the majority of Breuer’s artists have been in the cold, cold ground for a long time. They’re the happy modernists that form the backbone of the gallery’s trade and who are we to begrudge the resale of artist’s work?
Around the corner on Queen Street and upstairs from the world’s most expensive pizza slice shop is Michael Carr Art Dealer (if you want to do business in Woollahra you must put your name and profession in the name of the gallery). Anyway, Judy Cassab is exhibiting a suite of her works called Divertissements and at 84, the artist can do pretty much whatever she wants. The works on show are collages of famous paintings with paintings her favourite life model belnded into the pictures. Botticelli, Rembrandt, Matisse and Picasso get the Cassab treatment and we admired her joi de’vivre. We also predict that Sebastian Smee will review this show favorably – we don’t know why – we could just feel it in our bones.
The good life can become very gassy very quickly so we hustled on down the road to Maunsell Wickes Gallery to see two new shows by Ben Goss and Andrew Powell. Unfortunately the gallery was closed with a sign taped to the window that said “CLOSED ON TUESDAY” despite the fact the gallery hours are advertised as Tues-Sat 11.00am to 5.30pm, Sun 1pm to 5pm. Better luck next time. We also lost Galleries Primitif somewhere. If anyone knows where 174 Jersey Road has gone, please let us know, but as we drove and then walked slowly up and down whistling and calling its name, we couldn’t find it anywhere.
We finished up at Marlene Antico Fine Arts on the Paddington/Woollahra border. The large painting in the window by David Rose is called Sydney by Night, and features a view of Sydney harbour that one might see from the deck of a Captain Cook Cruise boat, when you’re pissed on cheap white wine and contemplating suicide. Inside the gallery things only got worse. It turns out that they have something called the Paddington Art Prize worth $20,000 and judging by the work in the competition, the artists are drawn from galleries in the Paddington/Woollahra area. The quality ranges from shocking to woeful and in that context we congratulate Craig Waddell for walking away with the cash for a work that is so far above the rest of the paintings it’s a joke. You are a very smart man. The only other decent works – those by Tom Carment and Judith White – were crowded out by the artistic heights of people like James Willebrant who we are staggered to discover still has a career. We should also mention that the gallery has a black grand piano in the front room.
