Imants Tillers: a labyrinth of meaning

A famously enigmatic artist, Imants Tillers creates art that is like a rubiks cube demanding to be solved. The conundrum at the heart of his art is the presence and absence of self.

Concerns about origins and originality, and the interactions of self and other are concepts that send a pulse through his works and power his long-term strategy of appropriating and re-working images.

Though Tillers draws on images which are not his own, there are definitive personal aspects residing in the works that cause instant recognition of the artist, for example, the specificity of his visual, intellectual and intuitive choices, his canvasboard system and layered surfaces.

Furthermore, through his appropriation Tillers’ creates unexpected juxtapositions which form new realities and echo his own experience.

The sense of Tillers’ presence being erased by his use of images derived from other sources, coupled with his evident presence in his artistic process, reflects his concern with the presence and absence of self, whilst revealing a complex interweaving of subjectivity and objectivity.

Though large in scale, his works are developed through a rather intimate process of working on small individual panels which are subsequently put together to make up the larger work.

This idea of ‘one and many’ relates to Tillers’ view of the artist’s life as solitary, but the world inhabited within his work as an archive full of vast ideas and imagery.

The process of applying one panel after another to make up the entirety of his work on the wall reveals interactions between intimacy and expanse, movement and stillness, permanence and impermanence. These ideas can be traced back to environmental and earth art, performance art, minimalism, and conceptual art of the 1970s.

In the 1980s Tillers’ developed a response to Terry Smith’s comment, in ‘The provincialism problem,’ that the most an Australian artist can aspire to in an international context is to be considered second-rate.

In works such as The Nine Shots, 1982, Tillers fuses the emerging style of Aboriginal art with neo-expressionist art. It could be said that in this work we are looking neither at the original nor the copy, but the distance between them. In this respect Tillers identifies that it is in the difference between Europe and Australia that the originality of Australian art lay.

Imants Tillers has earned a place as one of Australia’s most esteemed, thought-provoking and engaging contemporary artists.

‘Imants Tillers and Dadang Christanto Dual Worlds: Views of the Landscape’ is at Jan Manton Art gallery 4 November-23 December.