Gallery Crawl: Current Exhibitions

Queensland Art Gallery:Vida Lahey: Colour and Modernism
16 October 2010 - 13 February 2011 QAG
Vida Lahey (1882-1968) is one of Queensland’s best loved artists of the first half of the twentieth century and is recognized as much for her work in promoting of art in Queensland and art education as for her own paintings.

Premier of Queensland’s National New Media Art Award 2010
28 August – 7 November 2010 | GoMA
This exhibition features the work of leading new media artists invited to participate in the Premier of Queensland’s National New Media Art Award for 2010.

Valentino, Retrospective: Past/Present/Future
7 August – 14 November 2010 | GoMA
Exclusive to Brisbane, ‘Valentino, Retrospective: Past/Present/Future’ is a major exhibition developed by the renowned institution, Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris. It explores the work of the celebrated Italian fashion house Valentino, known around the world for its sophisticated, timeless design and glamorous clientele.



Heiser Gallery:Celeste Chandler
love is homesickness
October - 13 November 2010
Chandler’s work has been curated in a number of group exhibitions including Work by 1999 Residents, Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris (1999), The Portia Geach Memorial Award, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney (2001), Synergy, CSIRO Marine Building, Hobart (2002), and Scratching the Surface, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, (and touring 2003/04).





Jan Manton art:Imants Tillers& Dadang Christanto
Dual Worlds : Views of the Landscape
4 November - 23 December
For the past 30 years Dadang Christanto has produced controversial work rooted deeply in the human experience. Originally from Tegal in Central Java, Indonesia, Christanto now lives in Brisbane where he continues to produce art with an unrelenting message of human suffering and the need for compassion regardless of differing faiths and political systems.
Imants Tillers is one of Australia’s most revered artists. Tillers has represented Australia at important international exhibitions such as the Sao Paulo Bienal (1975), Documenta 7 (1982), and the 42nd Venice Biennale (1986).



Philip Bacon Galleries:Ralph Wilson
19 October - 13 November
"Subject is important to me. Rather than choosing it to convey some existing emotion or meaning, the subject is usually the reason for the painting. The challenge is to make the paint become the place or object and for the painter to disappear."
-Ralph Wilson





Jugglers Art Space:Gimiks Born
Bitter Winds
5 - 26 November 2010
Brisbane based artist Gimiks Born will create an unpredicted storm when the doors of the Bitter Winds exhibition blow open at Brisbane based gallery, Jugglers Art Space on November 5th 2010.
His novelist approach to art will not only sooth the visual senses, it will entice art enthusiasts to enter his unique realm of fantasy, a place where strange and wonderful creatures flourish in a mystical world riddled with chaos.

Jugglers Showcase for BARI Fest 2010. 1-29 October 2010
The BARI Festival is an initiative founded by the crew at Jugglers Art Space in 2008, aimed at celebrating and acknowledging the creative and cultural contribution that is often harbored by ARIs within a city.


Institute of Modern Art:Pieter Hugo
Nollywood
25 September — 20 November
The ghost of the Emperor Haile Selassie meets Idi Amin, Charlie's Angels do Rambo Foxy-Brown-style, David Lynch's Lost Highway snakes through Lagos, Ghostface Killah mutates into Fela's 'Zombie', and Dracula gives way for Blacula. Voodoo, hoodoo, and mambo are mashed up with Igbo rituals. Ahhwooooo . . . Werewolves of Lagos.
—Stacy Hardy


Brook Andrew
The Cell
25 September — 20 November
Brook Andrew is of Wiradjuri and Scottish descent. Although he is concerned not to be pigeonholed as an Aboriginal artist, his work nevertheless centres on Aboriginal politics. Conflating contraries, it confounds clear political readings.

Christian Marclay
Looking for Love
25 September — 20 November
Christian Marclay has long criss-crossed the art and experimental-music scenes. Back in the 1970s, the Swiss artist pioneered the use of turntables and records as musical instruments, operating independently of but parallel to hip hop. He also developed a career in art, making works that play on music's materials, supplements, and representations.

Welcome

Hi there,
Welcome to my blog! The Art Room is in its development stage so please forgive me for the abysmal amount of content on the page, it will get better I promise you.

I will be writing reviews of exhibitions and artists as well as articles on a broad range of art topics and I mean BROAD. I encourage you to send suggestions for an art topic that interests you and I will be more than happy to write about it :)

Art news and material from other sites will also be posted in The Art Room to help satisfy your art cravings.

Enjoy!

Ruth

Hinterland: The Rainforest Works of William Robinson

Take a break from the busy traffic and appointments of Brisbane’s central business district and venture into the rainforest for a much deserved break. No, I do not mean a stroll through the Botanical Gardens. Go further south to the rainforests of the Hinterland without even setting foot outside Brisbane. Tucked away in Old Government House is the exhibition Hinterland: The Rainforest Works of William Robinson, where one can enter into the vertiginous rainforest and escape, not into another world, but into another place.

As the title suggests, the exhibition focuses on works made by the artist while he maintained a studio at Springbrook in Queensland’s Gold Coast Hinterland and lived at Beechmont. The selection of 41 works range across 21 groundbreaking years of the artist’s career, from 1984 -2005. Visitors to the Gallery will be met with an array of works, including paintings, drawings, ceramics and lithographs, as well as several sketchbooks and the artist’s palette. Located in the private quarters of Government house, a visit to the exhibition proves to be an intimate experience, rather fitting for the nature of Robinson’s works.

Curated by the Gallery director Stephen Rainbird, the show is the 2nd to be held in the Gallery since its opening in August last year. The First, Realms of Vision: The Art of William Robinson, spanned across the dominant genres in the artists mature output including interiors, farmyard, landscape, seascape and portraiture. The current exhibition allows visitors to contemplate the landscape genre, in particular the Beechmont landscape which significantly became an inspirational focus for his subsequent works.

Robinson, 74, had various art teaching jobs from the 1950s to the time he began working as a full-time artist in the late 1980s. He has been exhibiting since the 1960s, and with his sublime landscapes, which are included in the current exhibition, he has secured himself a unique place within Australia’s landscape painting tradition. His innovative reworking of the Australian landscape has earned him a place alongside prominent figures Fred Williams, Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale.

The first and most obvious difference between Robinson’s works and those of Williams, Nolan and Drysdale is that rather than the outback they are set in a rainforest landscape. The second significant difference will be noted on entry to the Gallery where visitors standing before such grandiose works as Twin Falls and Gorge 2000 will feel like they are part of the landscape, rather than feeling alienated, often a theme in the work of Nolan or Drysdale. This is because Robinson was part of the landscape he was painting.

Living within the landscape has been central to Robinson’s work. In preparation for these paintings he walked through the rainforest making brief sketches to record as many sensations as he could. When looking at works such as William by lamplight 1990, the observer gains insight into Williams experiences with this landscape. Robinson includes the viewer in the work as a traveller by using multiple viewpoints and creating a void in the centre of the work. Sketchy, Van Gogh-like brushstrokes are also used which give a sense of the tactility of the environment.

The exhibition is organised in such a way that the visitor can follow the developments which lead to Robinson’s works of the 1990s. In the Governor’s bedroom, works from the 1980s show the beginnings of multi-viewpoint which would come to dominate Robinson’s later works. In Puddle Landscape l 1984 the viewpoint is looking up, down and forward simultaneously. The foreground and background trees suggest the viewer is looking across the landscape from an aerial perspective. In contrast to this, the puddles are seen from a perspective of looking down from directly above, and the viewer is able to see the sky in the reflection.



Sense of time, another element which became significant in Robinson’s later works, is evident in Sunset with riders 1986 which depicts a sunset in the centre of the canvas and night sky to the left. In his Rainforest works Robinson uses multiple viewpoints to create a sense of the combined feelings experienced in the landscape and united moments in time.

Further development of these elements is seen in the next bedroom, where works from the latter part of the 1980s show a transition from earlier figure-landscape works to a new phase primarily focused on the landscape itself. Watercolours and lithographs such as Late Sunlight and Afternoon cloud, Beechmont 1993 reveal explorations into the effects of light at different times of day and in different weather conditions. A superb colourist with the utmost attention to dense and carefully considered detail, Robinson captures the various rainforest conditions––from mist and rain to sunlight; and from morning light to evening shadows––in his phenomenal landscapes.

Standing before the awe-inspiring rainforest works of the 1990s onwards, one can’t escape feeling physically affected by the swirling subject matter. If you visit the exhibition you are bound to see, as I did, a spectator standing before a painting such as The ant tree landscape 1992 turning their body this way and that trying to find a single view point. Take note that if you try to achieve this you will inevitably fail. These paintings are not made to be seen, but to be experienced, and as Robinson himself said ‘such pictures cannot be understood if they are not felt physically.’

Robinson was no stranger to vertigo. He discovered this feeling on his first encounters with the steep landscape and cliffs of Springbrook. These responses were particularly severe during his early residence in the rainforest, but subsided as he got to know the land better. At first glance, the feeling of being physically pulled into the swirling work is strong enough to create a sense of vertigo. As you continue to look at the painting you develop a more exploratory nature and the vertiginous feeling subsides. In this sense we experience the feelings of the artist as he explored his landscape.

In the presence of these works one feels what it would be like for the figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog 1818, as he stands before the powerful, untamed forces of nature. Hinterland: The Rainforest Works of William Robinson will not only take you on a journey through the wonders of the Hinterland Rainforest, but will also guide you on an intimate journey through the remarkable career of William Robinson during his time at Beechmont.

Hinterland: The Rainforest Works of William Robinson is at The William Robinson Gallery until 3 April 2011.