CONTEMPORARY PAINTERS WITHOUT CURATORS

See article in its original context here by Hannah Bambra for Melbourne Review.

Without pretence or forcefulness, Sydney’s Gallery 9 are creating an inter-state art scene.

For years Gallery 9 has promoted the work of Melbourne artists in their Darlinghurst exhibition space. To continue the exchange, the gallery is bringing the recent works of their acclaimed Sydney-based painters down to show at fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne.

“This is a collection of wonderful artists with a broader appeal than the city that they live in,” says Will Sturrock, manager at Gallery 9.

The gallery happily acknowledges that a shared time and medium are the only elements that tie these artists together. Sturrock and his team have purposely avoided curating the collection and named it simply and honestly, Contemporary Painting. The result is an approachable, eclectic exhibition without a forcibly woven thread between the abstract and figurative paintings of the six artists who are on display.

The exhibition comes from an interesting standpoint as the work of each post-modern painter seems to resonate with one or many twentieth century painting styles. Julian Hooper, Tonee Messiah and Simon Blau create semi-abstract pieces, their gestural brush strokes and opaque shapes occasionally bleeding into classic fine art forms and figures.

Suzie Idiens is similarly direct in titling her work what it is: Red and Pink, Green and Blue. Idiens trained as a furniture designer in the UK and creates canvases segmented with commercial colours and a high-gloss finish. Her paintings manage give an insight into the recent history of industrial design, with only two hues at a time.

In the centre of the gallery space, acting as both a separating panel and a 360-degree artwork, hangs what’s interpretation of Piet Mondrian’s 1943 painting Broadway Boogie Woogie. The grid has been recreated with squares of gold leaf painted on a large plywood panel – a commentary on our use of natural resources, rather than an ode to Manhattan.

Throughout the time Gallery 9 has supported Jelena Telecki, Sturrock has noticed some of the characters in her intimate, eccentric oil paintings consistently reoccur and be thrown into different situations. What separates painting from drawing, Sturrock deems, is that it has to build up in layers and is therefore more intentional. Telecki paints the details of a face and then blocks them out again in a smear of white. This could be viewed as considered or intuitive; either way it adds a dimension to the characters she paints.

While each artist has an entirely different approach to creating art, the basic principles of painting in a contemporary context give the exhibition consistency. Instead of an essay between each work, there is a considered amount of space and the larger gallery of fortyfivedownstairs has been utilized to show off these often fun, sometimes thought-provoking pieces the group of artists have crafted for a new show and audience.

Images:

Pink Red by Suzie Idiens, 2012, MDF & Polyurethane, 310 x 730 x 70mm
Nurse by Jelena Telecki, 2012, oil on canvas, 510 x 410mm
Walk by Simon Blau, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 510 x 405mm