At Kaliman Gallery right now, there’s plenty to be happy about. On Tuesday, the gallery mailed out an announcement that Adam Cullen, formerly with Yuill/Crowley, was now with the gallery in its lower Paddington grotto. Just a stone’s throw from Roslyn Oxley 9 and fellow grunge alumni Hany Armanious, it’s like 1993 all over again. Mix in other Kaliman Gallery artists such as Maria Cruz and John Spiteri, and Kaliman is becoming the go-to gallery for rocking contemporary thrills.
Another artist who made a splash at the end of the 1980s is showing with Kaliman in a one-off-let’s-see-how-it-goes exhibition of his first work in a quite a few years. Tim Schultz, who previously exhibited with Barry Stern and Rex Irwin, has charted a sincerely original course through a series of unlikely inspirations ranging from Mannerist and Rococo painting to Dali and Fragonard. Even in the overheated days of late 80’s Post Modernism, Schultz’s concoctions were seen by some as too perverse, too rich, too creamy. It’s interesting that when a lot of people who demand what they call ‘originality’ in art end up running screaming from the room when they actually see it. Schultz’s latest show at Kaliman is another brave offshoot into a new direction.
Schultz is now painting in acrylics and his approach gives the suite of ten paintings an eye-popping hard edged, illustrative quality. Using black lines over browns and whites, the works have the appearance of a monstrously engorged Lindcraft home tapestry kit, sans fibre, and the images are pure migraine – distorted heads and bodies, over-ripe landscapes, curlicues of paint and decorative elements that edge the works into the fantasy realms of the Brothers Grimm. There’s also a suggestion, believe it or not, of the classic Bugs Bunny cartoons of the 1950s – the one that plays out the Hansel and Gretel story for laughs but which has its own indelible associations of sick-at-home-with-the-measles-and-a-fever hyper quality that’s impossible to escape.
Pictorially, Schultz plays with associations, creating a world that’s seems rich yet harmless, but carries within it some disturbing possibilities. A work such as The Hovel, a painting that seems a lot simpler than some of the other more dense paintings in the show, carries its shock in the dazzled eyes of the kid/monster that clings leech-like to a woman’s back. The works are big – The Hovel on the smaller side measures 145 x 110 cms – and a work such as The Puppy Mothers at 163 cm x 174 cms is almost overwhelming. The Puppy Mothers has a kid on the left looking up at a female figure on the right who holds what appears to be a pearl. Fertility symbols abound in this Freudian nightmare and Schultz’s inclusion of what appears to be a vagina on the woman’s dress just seems completely logical in context.
