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Hyperrealism and Improvisation
28 August, 2018 - 8 September, 2018
James Yuncken
Hyperrealism and Improvisation
28 August – 8 September 2018
hours:
Tuesday – Friday 11am to 5pm,
Saturday 12pm to 4pm
admission: Free
There is no one way in creativity. Different ways not only serve different purposes, they can inform one another.
Hyperrealism and Improvisation are two ways artist James Yuncken has been working the last years. Two quite different modes of expression fit for different purposes.
Hyperrealism for the series of landscape paintings from a trip along the Oodnadatta Track.
Hyperrealism denotes a realistic treatment of a scene, an inventory of detail, but at the same time something more, an attempt to give a sense of the experience of the place – or at least his experience of it: The vastness, the sense of geological time, of grand and overwhelming natural forces slowly and inexorably at work, the struggle facing life in an extreme environment.
It’s a landscape shaped by heat and dryness, also by water that now and again inundates it and, because of its flatness, floods all over, turns the earth soft and erodes it.
The Improvisations are drawings done in Yuncken’s residency at St Vincent’s Hospital.
That began almost at the same time as his trip along the Oodnadatta Track. In his once-weekly visits to St Vincent’s Caritas Christi studios, Yuncken would attempt to fill as many sheets of paper as quickly and spontaneously as he could.
Perhaps a respite from the paintings determined by the world without, these are genuine improvisations, determined by the world within. No prior plan, only the spontaneous expression of a state of mind. The game was to try to make each mark lively and interesting and then the next likewise in relation to the marks gone down before. If a subject matter arose along the way, then good. If not, no matter.
“There is no one way in creativity. Different ways not only serve different purposes, they can inform one another. Operating these two modes in parallel has, I believe, made me better at both.”
James Yuncken is a Melbourne based artist, working from a studio on Smith Street in Fitzroy.
James has exhibited frequently in Melbourne and Canberra since 1989.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2018 Improvisations, St Vincent’s Residency: Drawings from Caritas Christi, St Vincent’s Gallery, Fitzroy
2017 Represented 45 at 45, fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
2015 The Drawing Room, Prints, Drawings and Bas Relief, fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
2014 Places Nearby, More Inner Melbourne fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
2012 Walking to Work, Melbourne, Inner East fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
2011 Vox Pix, Voices and Images Together Centre for Theology and Ministry, Parkville
2010 Travelling North, Journey to Cape York fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
2008 Abstraction and Space, fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
2005 Formal Considerations, 257 Church St, Richmond and On-line
2003 Sense of Place, SPAN Galleries, Melbourne
2001 Presence/Absence, SPAN Galleries, Melbourne
2000 Represented 8 x 8, Roar Studios, Fitzroy
1999 Represented 8 x 8, Roar Studios, Fitzroy
1998 Represented 3rd Annual Summer Show, Galerie helengory, Richmond
1997 First Steps, Galerie helengory, Richmond
1996 Represented A Four Art 19 ninety-six, Westspace
1995 Studio Landscape Exhibition, Smith Street Studio, Fitzroy
1993 Represented Swan Hill Print and Drawing Show
1992 Represented Studio One’s ’92 Pressing Annual Show, Spiral Arm Gallery, Canberra
1990 Represented Sun, Smoke and Steel, Studio One touring exhibition Canberra, Sydney, Newcastle
1989 Images in Different Genres, Dorette’s Bistro, Canberra