Contents
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Director's Foreword Filling the VOID Empty Pool, Forest, Home House On Hill, Jervis Bay Trees Jervis Bay Dune Trees Seidler Empty Pool Night Dragon Garden, Night Home, Pool, Forest House On Hill, Red Forest Seidler House With Brick Veneer Seidler Home, Burnt, Empty Pool Seidler House, Blue Forest Seidler, Tree Pool This Must Be The Place Seidler, Burnt Snow Forest White Forest Mirror House / Home Disused Seidler Stencil Disused Aspens Stencil Journal CV Acknowledgements
Director’s Foreword
The Cat Street Gallery is thrilled to present VOID and to welcome back Paul Davies to Hong Kong for his second highly anticipated follow up exhibition with the gallery. In November 2009 he exhibited overseas with us for the first time, generating a strong critical and commercial success. Shows in London and LA followed his sold out show in Asia, again with the same level of success and VOID is the artist's latest body of work. Paul Davies balances exquisite modern architecture in abstracted, painterly environs utilising contemporary art-making techniques. Primarily based on American and Australian Modern Architecture and treated in a contemporary manner, the latest series of works by Australian artist Paul Davies features the use of delicate hand-cut paper stencils. Working mainly in acrylic and stencils, composed from personal as well as researched photographs, Davies' works provide perspective, content and detail within painterly abstract environment. Davies’ work examines both the restored and forgotten modernist buildings in ways that allow them to be relevant rather than isolated in their time. The houses are fabulous - jutting concrete slabs, shimmering glass and pools - and invoke a disconcerting sense of nostalgia. I must, as ever, extend huge thanks to Tim Olsen for first introducing me to Paul and to his work in 2006 in Sydney. I have been passionate about his exceptional paintings ever since I first laid eyes on them, and they continue to excite and amaze me. Mandy d’Abo May 2011
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Filling the Void Kate Bryan Gallery Director At the very heart of the paintings by the Australian artist Paul Davies, is a fascination with modernist architecture and its form and history. Davies’ work encourages us to take a moment to cast our minds back to the first few decades of the twentieth century and try to imagine what a thunderbolt modernist architecture and design must have been in Europe and the U.S. In an economically challenging and socially tumultuous time, modernism was born and to many it symbolised a bright, bold future. Out of the ashes of the wars rose clean, technically advanced structures that represented achievements not just in industry and technology, but in the unification of form with function. Architecture and design no longer needed to pander to decoration and unnecessary ornamentation. The lavish approaches of generations past suddenly seemed old fashioned and alien in the new political and cultural climate. In Europe Le Corbusier masterminded entire cities based on a reduced aesthetic, placing the emphasis on industrially produced materials and simplified form. In the U.S. no name embodies modernist architecture more succinctly than Frank Lloyd Wright, who stressed that the materials and function of a building should dictate its appearance and started a long lasting love affair with fluid lines and organically inspired form. These architects belong to a long list of names, and indeed, even organised schools of thought, which are understood in general terms as modernist. Nearly a century later modernist architecture very much remains part of our lexicon; in fact it is still widely practiced, admired and developed. This is surely testament to the demonstrably sharp break it made with the past and to the simple beauty of its core philosophy. We might just be able to grasp how extraordinary the advent of this new style was in Europe and the U.S, but comprehending what a dramatic force it must have been outside of frenetic global cities like London, Paris and New York is perhaps harder. In his enigmatic paintings Paul Davies considers the impact modernist architecture had, and continues to have, on his remote homeland and how the style that was dominating the rest of the western world found its place in the cities and towns of Australia. For several years Davies has drawn upon the rich subject, populating his otherwise unoccupied landscapes with sharply rendered modernist buildings and structures. These are his protagonists, purposefully left devoid of human traces to underscore their gargantuan physical properties and original form. In the course of making various research trips in Europe and the U.S, Davies assembled a host of extraordinary architectural emblems for his paintings. However, one that has inspired the artist most consistently is found in Wahroonga, in Davies’ hometown of Sydney. Built by Harry Seidler, The Rose Seidler House dates from 1950 and is heavily influenced by international
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design. Davies has lovingly taken the building as his muse, showing it in a myriad of compositional forms and settings, each one at once complimentary and contrasting to the architectural forms (see plates 4, 8, 9,10,11 and 13). The Rose Seidler House is not just an icon in Davies’ works; it remains one of the most significant modernist buildings in the country. Seidler’s work must have seemed positively futuristic to its contemporaries and purposefully so. The architect was attempting to bridge Australia’s distance from the cultural meccas in the U.S and Europe. This bold and stark building proposed a new way of life for its inhabitants and neighbours. We can draw parallels with major architectural developments in Sydney in the twentieth century that shared the same agenda. We need only think of the Sydney Harbour Bridge with its superfluous sandstone towers at each end that pay homage to London’s Tower Bridge. And of course the enduring symbol of the city, the Sydney Opera House. Though Davies’ paintings present beautifully rendered and sometimes recognisable modernist buildings, these sophisticated works are a far cry from student-style homage to great architectural masters and their iconic works. Davies cultivates a distinct atmospheric quality in his work, combining the power of manmade buildings with the potency of the natural world. There is no backdrop in his work, no ‘setting’ created simply to show off the building. Each is a carefully and uniquely rendered scene, scenes that have become increasingly complex in more recent works. Rather than draw directly from existing topography Davies creatively invents every composition from a combination of studied elements. Effectively each is an imaginative collage of scenes that interested the artist, a pool from one location and perhaps a forest from another. This approach lends his work a layered sense of reality and in many ways fulfils a desire within all of us to cut and paste our surroundings in ways not possible in reality. It is his insistence on a beautifully composed, geographically distinct location that adds such weight to his work. In this sensitive juxtaposition of building and landscape, Davies draws us into a long-standing dialogue about the relationship between built and natural environments, drawing attention to its innate conflicts and challenges. The clean, modernist lines of the buildings allow for large windows and easy transition between indoor and outdoor areas. These unfussy and self assured structures rendered with geometric certainty sit amidst painterly and even abstract passages, which present various surrounding natural environments, including pool scenes, palm trees, night skies, lakes and even aspen wintry forests. There is a sharp interplay between the sleek manmade architectural line and the encroaching areas of loosely painted natural motifs. The increasingly abstract nature of these landscapes lend Davies' work great depth and are testament to the artist slowly charting a course in new directions.
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VOID is the second solo exhibition in Hong Kong for Davies and includes fifteen new paintings as well as works on paper and stencil pieces. The exhibition title has multifaceted meanings. At once it signals to the empty swimming pools and seemingly uninhabited homes. The empty pool has always been a disquieting motif in Davies’ work, acting as a metaphor for the notion of time passing, neglect and ultimately nostalgia. The fact that the homes are devoid of human figures is perhaps an even stronger image, these are homes intended for human dwelling and activity, and here they are ineffectual for the purpose they were created. However, more than referencing emptiness, the unpopulated buildings underscore the striking quality of the architecture and monumentalise it by removing its domestic connotations. Void also refers to the space that Davies creates for interpretation; he conjures deeply atmospheric compositions which allow room for the viewer’s own reading of the scene. There is no single narrative, no one perspective or meaning, an approach that engenders a multitude of responses. Lastly, the title is a nod toward the debate about the architectural validity of modernism, in that its critics have sometimes labeled it an elitist, universal approach that lacks feeling. It also infers the opposite end of the argument, leveling an accusation against the scores of modern homes that are built without concern for aesthetic prowess and are thus stylistically void. In this latest exhibition Davies exhibits new departures in his work both stylistically and conceptually. In earlier works there was an obvious connection to Pop Artists such as Hockney, who composed effortlessly languid pool scenes showing LA homes complete with palm trees in all their glory. The palm trees in Davies' work played homage not just to the LA scene but to the mid-century artists that awarded it iconic status in their art. In his latest works Davies has supplanted the palm trees for Australian bush trees and deciduous trees. The shift is subtle but significant. The non-deciduous palm tree is more an emblem of vacation, relaxation and even glamour than the natural world. The Australian counterpart, on the other hand, is seasonal and speaks of the bush and his homeland. It conjures notions of nostalgia, national identity and history. There is also a distinct change in the manner in which Davies handles the sky in his newer paintings. Originally the artist employed a graphic approach, using brightly coloured stripes to evoke sunshine or bold night-lights. In VOID the artist has replaced these stripes with dots, stars and drips (see plate 5 for instance). By doing so Davies is able to explore the possibilities of combining a two dimensional canvas with a three dimensional perspective, cultivated by using a figurative approach. Rather than graphic and strong, his skies are now painterly and textural, further enhancing the sleek lines of the architectural protagonists.
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This approach also allows for the employment of a greater artistic license with colour, Davies' skies are populated with a myriad of colours that are bounced around the entire composition, lending them a vibrancy and greater sense of energy. It is perhaps in his treatment of the natural settings where the most development has occurred. Previously many were elegant, abstract colour washes or even bold fields of flat contrasting colours giving the work a graphic, retro appeal (as displayed in plate 8). In many of the paintings in VOID, Davies introduces backgrounds of loosely applied stencils, which are visible in glimpses through exposed areas, thus creating a distinct sense of layering in the work. By revealing and then concealing these background stencils Davies reveals the process of how the composition was conceived, with ideas built over each other, signaling to the creative journey that all the works share. In exploring where the painting began and where it has gone since, we might be tempted to see the layered backgrounds as a metaphor for the original flourishing state of natural world before it met with manmade construction. In rare works such as This Must Be The Place (plate 12) or Jervis Bay Dune Trees (plate 3) Davies presents solely the natural world devoid of architectural structures and by doing so allows the Australian bushland to take centre stage, again emphasising the importance of the natural world in his work. There is also symbolism and metaphorical allusion to be found in VOID in Davies’ use of reflections. Some of the works feature swimming pools that act as a vehicle for mirroring the buildings. By reflecting the modernist homes and their settings the artist employs an age-old tactic of drawing attention to them and what they stand for. Reflections and mirrors in art have long stood for notions of prudence, vanity, lust and truth. In this instance prudence might refer to best practice and industry conduct when building in areas of natural beauty. Vanity is obviously at work in the bold lines and strength of the modernist architectural forms. These are not homes that go unnoticed or are easily forgotten. There is also a sense of desire and lustfulness; for several generations the modernist home complete with swimming pool has stood as an emblem for the height of affluence and success. Finally, truth; we know that mirrors can play tricks but they are also presented in mythological tales as the origins of what is true and valid. In this case, what are these images really saying, how should we understand these scenes which seem at once so inviting but also so self-contained? And of course, the brilliance of Davies’ work is the inclusion of the viewer in this way; he immediately gets our attention with his beautifully rendered and vivid compositions, but ultimately leaves the rest up to us.
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plates
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Plate 1: Empty Pool, Forest, Home Acrylic on linen 100 x 76 cm 2010
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Plate 2: House On Hill, Jervis Bay Trees Acrylic on linen 122 x 91 cm 2011
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Plate 3: Jervis Bay Dune Trees Acrylic on linen 122 x 91 cm 2011
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Plate 4: Seidler Empty Pool Night Acrylic on linen 153 x 122 cm 2011
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Plate 5: Dragon Garden, Night Acrylic on linen 122 x 91 cm 2011
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Plate 6: Home, Pool, Forest Acrylic on linen 76 x 76 cm 2010
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Plate 7: House On Hill, Red Forest Arcylic on linen 153 x 122 cm 2011
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Plate 8: Seidler House With Brick Veneer Acrylic on linen 76 x 100 cm 2010
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Plate 9: Seidler Home, Burnt, Empty Pool Acrylic on linen 153 x 122 cm 2011
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Plate 10: Seidler House, Blue Forest Acrylic on linen 153 x 122 cm 2011
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Plate 11: Seidler, Tree Pool Acrylic on linen 153 x 122 cm 2011
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Plate 12: This Must Be The Place Acrylic on linen 76 x 76 cm 2010
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Plate 13: Seidler, Burnt Snow Forest Acrylic on linen 153 x 122 cm 2011
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Plate 14: White Forest Mirror Acrylic on linen 122 x 91 cm 2011
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Plate 15: House / Home Acrylic on paper 76 x 100 cm 2011
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Plate 16: Disused Seidler Stencil Acrylic on paper 100 x 60 cm 2008 - 2011
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Plate 17: Disused Aspens Stencil Acylic on paper 50 x 70 cm 2008 - 2011
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CV QUALIFICATIONS AND TRAINING
2011 - undergoing 2006 2000 1987 - 1994
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2011
2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2001
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2011 2010
2009
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Masters by Research UNSW College of Fine Arts, Sydney Painting Master Class, National Art School, Sydney Bachelor of Fine Arts, UNSW College of Fine Art, Sydney Landscape painting class under Central Coast artist Kel Connell VOID The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong Portraits Tim Olsen Gallery at Guy Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne Portraits Gold Coast City Regional Art Gallery, Gold Coast Hanmer Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Modern Home Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, London New Paintings Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Re-Constructions The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong New Paintings Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Recent Paintings Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Recent Paintings Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Modern copy blank_space Gallery, Sydney (December) Modern building copy blank_space Gallery, Sydney (May) First Draft Gallery, Sydney 2 Step Gallery, Sydney Space3 Gallery, Sydney DK Restaurant, London WATTLE The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong Self Portraits China Heights Gallery, Sydney Hong Kong International Art Fair, The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong Evocatecture Heather James Fine Art Gallery, Palm Desert A Summer Survey Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Hong Kong International Art Fair, The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong Miscellanea Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Art Chicago, Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, Chicago Hamptons Art Fair, Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, Bridgehampton Structural Through-Line (Coherence) Lawrence Asher Gallery, Los Angeles San Francisco Art Fair, Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, San Francisco LA Art Show, Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, Los Angeles London Art Fair, Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, London Melbourne International Art Fair, Tim Olsen Gallery, Melbourne Dragon Garden The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong King’s School Art Prize Finalist, Parramatta Finalist - Royal Bank of Scotland Australian Emerging Artist Award, Sydney Hong Kong Art Fair, The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004 2003
2002 2001 2000
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PUBLISHED
COLLECTIONS
Affordable Art Fair Paris, Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, Paris Hamptons Art Fair, Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, Bridgehampton Toronto Art Fair, Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, Toronto London Art Fair, Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, London No Comply Red Bull Gallery, Sydney Finalist - ABN-AMRO Emerging Artist Award, Sydney Melbourne International Art Fair, Tim Olsen Gallery, Melbourne University of Sydney PALM Awards, Guest Judge for Art Prize, Sydney 2 X 2, Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney 100th Heights China Heights, Sydney Across the Board Cancer Council, Wallspace Gallery, Sydney Solstice Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Melbourne International Art Fair, Tim Olsen Gallery, Melbourne Sydney Art Fair, Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Postcards from Paddington Sydney Sydney Art Fair, Soho Galleries, Sydney Group show, Touch Galleries, Sydney Department blank_space, Sydney Vans off the wall George Street, Sydney Eloquence (a group thing) blank_space, Sydney Graffiti and Stencils Knot Gallery, Sydney 3D’s Space3, Sydney Stencil exhibition Surry Hills Labour Club, Sydney Appliance UNSW Solar Research Centre, Sydney Group Show, PCL Gallery, Sydney Photography Prize Winner TNT Magazine, London Seven Senses Mercedes Fashion Week, Kudos Gallery, Sydney Walking the Streets Sydney Dialogue COFA Graduation Show, Sydney Con/struct College of Fine Arts, Sydney Yerg UNSW College of Fine Arts, Sydney
Wallpaper* Online / Financial Times UK / Vogue British / ArtWorld / Vogue Living / Harper's Bazaar / Belle / InsideOut / GQ U.K. Australia / Art & Australia / Urbis / Black Magazine / Yen Magazine / The Sydney Morning Herald - Spectrum / WISH Magazine - The Australian / Sunday Arts ABC / Stvdio SBS. BYL Companies USA / Central Coast Grammar School, Australia / Historic Houses Trust, Australia / Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Australia / Rothschild, USA / Stockland Australia / Wilson & Hill Architects New Zealand / Private collections across Australia and internationally
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Book Acknowledgements VOID Catalogue written in full by Kate Bryan All images courtesy of Paul Davies Catalogue Design The Antithesis 1 Pak Tze Lane, Central www.theantithesis.net
Exhibition Acknowledgements This book was published to accompany an exhibition of the same name VOID Thursday 5th May - Saturday 4th June 2011
222 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong T: +852 2291 0006 www.thecatstreetgallery.com
The artist would like to give special thanks to: Mandy d’Abo, Tim Olsen, Kate Bryan, Fiona Ho, Chris Phillips, Nigel Messenger, Rob Williams, Sarah Noye, Edward Woodley, Ian Davies and Kyle Montgomery.