Spring is in the air. Just yesterday we watched from the windows of the Art Life office as two galahs ‘loved’ one another, sort of like the art world, as it was all beaks, flying feathers and startled squawks. We have been working on a super exciting venture to coincide with this lovely time of year, which we will announce next week. In the meantime…
We lamented last week the passing of Gallery Wren, but as some readers pointed out, as one space closes, another opens. Welcome to PELT , an artist run gallery that invites proposals from emerging and established artists for exhibitions in their Chippendale space. According to the gallery’s mail out, “PELT will provide a space for practices that engage in the broad area of sound and contemporary media, including sound art, DVD, new media, installation and sculpture.” To kick off the new gallery, PELT’s grand opening is Wednesday September the 7th with the show 070905, an exhibition of audio works by Ben Byrne, Matt Earle, Fast Mountain Die, Anthony Guerra, Joyce Hinterding, Anthony Magen, William Noble, Thembi Soddell, Jasper Streit and Alex White. As they used to say when advertising the Parramatta Speedway, be there, be part of the crowd!
Sometimes we wake up in the middle of the night. At first we think it may have been a sound, or the smell of something burning, perhaps even a shadow moving across the blinds that woke us… but after a few moments we calm down enough to remember we were dreaming of an aggrieved artist, her eyes shining in the darkness, a knife bearing down on our throats. Yes, we crossed tracks with eX de Medici last year and learnt our lesson – never mess with pissed off Italians. We walked into Boutwell-Draper Gallery last week and we saw a show by de Medici, who has dropped the big X and is now just Ex De Medici. Anyway, the show was really excellent – a series of drawings of guns and skulls and a big work that brought in the artist’s skills as a tattooist. The work on the BD website is the largest of the pieces and not our favourite, but the baroque handguns painstakingly drawn using metallic paints and inks are intense creations which – weirdly – recall Andy Warhol’s $$$ and Guns paintings and Aztec Death Cult mortuary art. Crazy. These are exactly the kind of works that should have gone into the Dobell Prize for Drawing and added some life to that musty collection of academically respectable but nonetheless boring drawings. We thought we might email BD and ask for an image for the blog, but on reflection realised the pointlessness of doing so. James Draper gave us the filthiest look when we went in and an equally sour scowl as we went out.
Next door in GrantPirrie, they give you a prize just for going in the door, which is why we like going there so often – high class art, friendly non-scowling staff and a mystery prize! Come on! We had received an email from GP saying “get into abstraction” which we took to mean we should drop our hostility toward hard line abstract painting, not to actually become more abstract ourselves, but in the case of Peter Adsett either is entirely possible. We have to admit to being impressed with Adsett’s will to corrupt the purity of his painting project. Each new show, we were told, is a progression from the last show where he takes a single painting from his last body of work and then explores the permutations. More Rot are permutations of a work from a show called Serial Killer in 2004, which were permutations of a work from Polychrome Poison in 2003 and then presumably stretching all the way back to the point where there was no art at all, just an idea.
Peter Adsett, Painting 4, Acrylic and urine on canvas, 122x122cms.
As The Esteemed Critic noted in his review of Adsett’s work in the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend, the artist has done everything he can to upset the balance of the paintings. His fake edges [so that the lighting in the gallery confuses the ‘edge’ of the art work with the wall space], the asymmetric shapes created by the black lines and the dissipated colours he mixes with his own urine all collude to create supremely uncomfortable paintings. One feature the paintings have that stand out more than anything else – and which, perversely can’t be seen properly in reproduction – is that Adsett has used cheap, crappy brushes to paint his pictures and then left the long black hairs cemented into the paint. The effect is unnerving you want to pick out each hair or go wild and give the whole painting a good scrub. The artist’s project is pretty clear. His perverse upending of the various generic features of abstract painting, while at the same time reiterating them through his various strategies, has actually ended up being something that looks a lot like expressionism.
When we went to Galston High there were people who claimed Warren Waddell was ‘hot stuff’ while others said Nicole was the Waddell of choice. Even people who weren’t into the whole ‘Waddell vibe’ thing admitted that their fruit and veg stand (the one just past the high school as you head towards Galston from Dural) had the best damn apples you could buy. We’d been waiting for young Craig Waddell to stake his claim as an artist, thinking that all that we invested in his early career is finally going to bear fruit (as it were). So here we are in 2005 and Craig Waddell’s just-finished show at Mary Place Gallery proved three things; one was that we’re not alone in our admiration – the show was a 99% sell out – the second was that clotted cream has been an enduring influence on his work, and third, he was the Waddell to watch all along. Hooray for prescience.
Last year we reviewed Waddell’s show at what was then Maunsell Wickes Gallery [now Richard Martin Fine Art since M&W moved over to Barry Stern gallery to create the world’s most confusing gallery name: Maunsell Wickes at Barry Stern Gallery – take that King Street Gallery on Burton!]. We had our reservations about Waddell’s show, wondering in if he could resolve the huge brushstrokes with the size of the canvas. The impasto strokes must have been applied with a spatula or a trowel and were just too tight. Anyway, that was our minor problem with the 2004 show and since then Waddell went off and won the Paddington Art Prize and was selected as a finalist in the Wynne Prize.
Craig Waddell, Orange Grove, 2005. Oil on canvas, 170x160cms.
We didn’t know exactly what to expect for the Mary Place Gallery, the space being cursed by try-hard artists of the past who were down on their luck but cashed up enough to punt on a show. We’ve seen some good stuff there, but some terrible exhibitions too, and so worried that after his split with M&W, Waddell had drifted off the map into self representation. Apparently not, as he managed to get Kenthurst Galleries to put up the dosh for the show, and besides, when you walked into the gallery, you just knew in your bones why the entire place was festooned with red dots. It was an incredibly accomplished show. Not only had Waddell resolved the problems of 2004, he’d jumped far ahead into a painting style that was a mixture of Twombly-esque, supple wristed figuration built on a background that looked a lot like Elisabeth Cummings-meets-Gail English.
Finally, there is something you should know for springtime – Australia’s greatest artist is coming out of retirement.
