Antonia Sellbach: Open Fields by Heide Museum of Modern Art

ANTONIA SELLBACH OPEN FIELDS

17 SEPTEMBER 2016 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 26 FEBRUARY 2017

Pages 1–2 Stick Works #5 2015–16 synthetic polymer paint and gesso on pine

18 parts, installation

Installation view,

dimensions variable

Antonia Sellbach: Open Fields

ANTONIA SELLBACH: OPEN FIELDS Linda Short

LANGUAGE IS FAILING ME The idea that meaning is fluid is central to Antonia Sellbach’s artistic practice. For this reason she understands the irony when attempting to put her visual inquiries into words: ‘I feel like language is failing me’, she wrote when titling her new installation for Heide Museum of Modern Art’s project gallery.1 She decided upon Open Fields, a deliberately loose descriptor but one which offers vital clues to the elusive essence of her work. ‘I am more interested in “what ifs” than fixed outcomes’, she says, ‘where the result is never right or wrong but active’.2 In Sellbach’s words, her paintings on canvas and arrangements of painted timber rods ‘observe how thought works and talking works’. This explanation can be difficult to grasp at first, especially since her compositions consist mainly of lines and daubs of eye-catching colour. However the correlation starts to register when Sellbach describes her artworks as ‘pieces and parts’, elements that can be ordered and reconfigured in accordance with rules. She also refers to colour and line as the ‘building blocks’ of her vocabulary, and compositional decisions as ‘making moves’. Indeed many of the terms she applies to painting suggest a creative process much like engaging in a game or a conversation.

YES, NO, MAYBE Sellbach takes her cue from the mid twentiethcentury philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who famously imagined language as a game in his celebrated text Philosophical Investigations (1953). Applying Wittgenstein’s theories to traditions of abstract painting is the focus of Sellbach’s current doctoral thesis. She is particularly drawn to the philosopher’s poetic yet playful examination of meaning, and how within the system of language, which we see as more or less fixed, there is ‘a lot of scope for play and interpretation, and … misinterpretation as well’.3 Linked to this observation is Sellbach’s adoption of the function of ‘limitation’ as part of her working methodology.4 Thus she establishes specific parameters for the making of her artworks: for instance, keeping to a uniform size and shape of canvas or support, or working with rectilinear patterns of a consistent scale against white grounds. The point is not to narrow down the scope of her practice but to encourage something unexpected to occur with a pre-determined matrix. ‘Many anomalies, “imperfections” and a rich amount of visual information is made available that would otherwise not be noticed’, she notes of this approach.5 Working with limitations enables her to achieve a seemingly endless variety of formal and optical relationships through the slightest of recalibrations: a decision to halt a line a matter of inches above the edge of the canvas, for example, or to transect an open field with a diagonal, or to place a primary colour at the outer limit of the picture plane. As in all games, however, Sellbach’s works have outcomes that rely on chance as much as choice and regulation. She intentionally allows opportunity for divergence. Viewed at a distance

Modular Wall Piece for Heide 2016 (detail) synthetic polymer paint and gesso on linen 4 parts, each 150 x 150 cm

or in reproduction her simple geometric schemes appear crisp and precise, but on closer inspection reveal an unexpectedly expressive approach. As she recognises, her pictures do ‘look painted’. Slightly wavering lines, blurred edges, and shadows of overpainted marks are left visible in order to show the artist’s mind and hand at work. ‘I’m interested in the decision-making process, in what gets added and removed’, she says, ‘I like the trace that is left behind. I think of it like the timeline of the painting’.6 It is this dialogue between artist and work—a private exchange which Sellbach defines as a ‘push and pull between yes, no and maybe’—that she strives to make tangible through the layering of the paint. Observing this, art critic Dan Rule referred to the white fields on which she builds her colourful arrangements as a ‘testing ground’, arguing that the layers of semi-obscured marks add ‘a sensitivity, subtlety and quietness … that so much geometric abstraction fails to grasp’.7 Sellbach’s friend and contemporary Andrew McQualter has noted how the gentle tussle on the canvas results in picturemaking ‘as imperfect as language’ because ‘it conceals as much as it is able to give away’.8 Never

Modular Wall Piece for Heide 2016 synthetic polymer paint andÂ gessoÂ on linen 4 parts, each 150 x 150 cm

afraid to let her images take an uncertain path or succumb to paint’s natural variability, Sellbach sees possibility in imprecision, just as Wittgenstein did when he wrote: ‘Is it even always an advantage to replace a picture that is not sharp by one that is? Isn’t one that isn’t sharp often just what we need?’9

THIS HERE, THAT THERE Again drawing on Wittgenstein, Sellbach relates the spatial limits of both her canvases and the gallery space to those of a game board, or in fact any arena bound by markers and rules. From the way she lays down her boldly coloured line-work through to the open-ended arrangements of her paintings, which can be flipped, rotated and tessellated in response to different settings, she establishes distinct zones via procedures similar to those used by players manipulating pieces in a game. In doing so, her demarcations in paintings such as the large fourpart scheme Modular Wall Piece for Heide, ‘carve into what was once an open field, implying territories’.10 Following Wittgenstein’s lead, as she delegates or retracts motifs and objects, Sellbach is acknowledging a symbolic mode of expression that occurs within both games and language. ‘We use words such as ‘this’ and ‘there’ in much the same way’, she explains, ‘as placeholders that can be both vague and certain’.11 To an outsider who does not know the terms of play, such directives are rendered meaningless. Andrew McQualter understood this well when he wrote: ‘We can interpret a line painted in that specific place on the surface of that painting, or a scumble of paint in that position on the painting, or two lines forming an “x”, as constituting a private language invented by the painter and only intelligible to her.’12

Udo Sellbach Untitled c.1963 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 125 x 125 cm Sellbach Family Collection Photo supplied by Antonia Sellbach

Despite this, Sellbach’s visual vocabulary is familiar. Her grid-like patterns, a hallmark of modernist abstraction, signify an attempt to create order even though at times they are undermined by a less stable energy, with lines and planes working to unlock as well as close down space. Similarly, flashes of red, blue and yellow hark back to an era of ‘pure painting’, though Sellbach points out that certain colour schemes arise from far more commonplace origins. The vibrant greens, oranges and purples, for instance, recall an eclectic collection of artworks and objects assembled by her artist parents when she was a child. There are further points of connection between her aesthetic sensibility and that of her father, Udo Sellbach, who emerged as a painter and printmaker during the colourfield and hard-edge movements of the 1970s.13 Asked how her father’s work might inform her own, Sellbach has remarked: I grew up around the abstract paintings my father made, many of which seemed to hold some sort of puzzle or riddle. They were set up to appear as though they would have an ordered resolution which I would spend hours trying to figure out.

My father’s work made a deep impression on me for the reason that it drew the viewer in to this very engaged relationship, but didn’t offer a clear resolution … making me realise that a question need not have a fixed answer or any answer at all.14

CALL AND RESPONSE The importance of arrangement, structure and improvisation to Sellbach’s working methods points to the touchstones of music and architecture as much as to language and abstraction. For more than ten years she has performed with the Australian indie rock bands Beaches and Love of Diagrams, while architecture is an enduring interest that informs her art. These influences are most evident in her groupings of multicoloured rods, which she tends to display leaning casually against a wall alongside her works on canvas. At once brightly painted struts that link to other visible architectural geometries, and a colourful synaesthetic cadence, these unusual objects once served a far more practical purpose. Sellbach developed the notion of working with timber rods after seeing the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the influential conceptual artists who captured the beauty of industrial buildings in postwar Germany. Taking inspiration from their images of ‘framework houses’, a study of geometry within the exposed beams of Tudor-style buildings, Sellbach began to construct low-relief structures from long pieces of wooden lattice. After several frustrating attempts to build the elaborate constructions she had in mind, Sellbach changed her approach.15 She refashioned the lengths of wood into templates for composing linear arrangements on canvas. Eventually she was able to dispense with the templates and execute the bands by intuition alone, based on her

approximation of the timber forms. Over time the rods themselves came to be used as corollary rhythmic networks as Sellbach began to paint on them while she was also painting her canvases. Though the painted rods reveal a freer treatment of surface and pattern than the canvases, the connections between them are key. For instance, the broad brushstrokes wrapping around a strut might index the palette of a particular painting or, alternatively, suggest a spectrum of hues to be explored in future compositions. Often Sellbach assembles several sticks in front of a canvas in progress to determine the next ‘move’, and if what they add to the picture feels right, she paints an impression of them on the picture surface using an almost representational mode. Open Fields conveys the impression that Sellbach is testing the performance of her two and threedimensional forms. By bringing them into conversation with the architectural setting she triggers a visual ‘call and response’. The group of tilted rods in Stick Works #5, for instance, creates an illusionistic flattening of space so that the walls read like a white plane containing the sticks’ geometries. Even the shadows cast by the timber can be mistaken for softly painted diagonals. The opposite effect occurs if we spend time looking at the paintings, as their white grounds flow out beyond the edge of the canvas into the expanse of wall beyond, causing the painted lines to take on the appearance of a relief. This ‘optical flicker’, which captures and challenges the eye, is exactly what Sellbach is after.

FORMS OF LIFE As is often the case in Sellbach’s practice, her installation at Heide has set in motion a related group

Here 2015 synthetic polymer paint and gesso on canvas 150 x 150 cm Collection of Anna Sellbach

Opposite Installation view, Antonia Sellbach: Open Fields

of works. During several performances to be held in the gallery, she will invite friends to participate in a newly devised game involving two players who must handle plasticine pieces and set them down on a board while discussing a ‘complex subject’ without consciously forming ‘known things’. ‘The action of handling objects while absorbed in conversation creates an abstract bi-product of that dialogue’, Sellbach explains, ‘while the plasticine becomes a marker for the trajectory of that conversation’. To be titled Subject/Object, the new series links to an earlier group of wooden constructions based on the simple shapes of household trivets. After noting how visitors to her studio were inclined to hold these objects and move them around in their hands while talking, often rotating the trivets when the conversation reached a turning point, Sellbach began to see how abstract forms could be prompts or aids for thoughts and words. Wittgenstein believed the most essential aspect of language is that we learn how to use it in social contexts. In his view, the main reason we all understand each other, or at least attempt to do so, is because of shared norms in everyday experience, which he termed ‘forms of life’. This, he observed, is what ties language to reality. Along similar lines, Sellbach seeks to align the so-called universal discourse of visual abstraction to more figurative and literal ways of making meaning. She wants to highlight that ‘abstraction can make itself felt and seen within areas where it is largely unimagined’ and that ‘its allusive nature is what makes it so powerful’.16 Whether we engage with the philosophical undertones of Open Fields or simply respond to the richness of colour and pattern oscillating within the works on display, Sellbach draws us into the realms of her abstract scheme.

ENDNOTES

Opposite Modular Wall Piece for Heide 2016 synthetic polymer paint and

1 Email from Antonia Sellbach to the author, 18 July 2017.

gesso on linen

2 Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are taken from conversations between the artist and the author from March to September 2016.

4 parts, each 150 x 150 cm

3 Antonia Sellbach in conversation with Daine Singer, https:// vimeo.com/122953930.

Unstable Object #8 2014

4 Email to the author, 21 June 2016. 5 Email to the author, 21 June 2016. 6 Antonia Sellbach, quoted in Maura Edmond, ‘Antonia Sellbach: Forms of Life at Daine Singer’, Primer, 8 April 2015, http:// primermag.net/art/2015/4/antonia-sellbach-interview-dainesinger. 7 Dan Rule, ‘Antonia Sellbach: Forms of Life’, The Age, 11 April 2015, p. 21. 8 Andrew McQualter, ‘Words Don’t Mean Anything’, essay to accompany the exhibition Antonia Sellbach: Forms of Life, Daine Singer, Melbourne, 2015, http://www.dainesinger.com/ past/#/antonia-sellbach/. 9 Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted in Antonia Sellbach’s artist statement for the exhibition This, That, Here, There, Yes, No, Maybe, BUS Projects, Melbourne, 2015. 10 Sellbach, artist statement, This, That, Here, There, Yes, No, Maybe. 11 Sellbach, artist statement, This, That, Here, There, Yes, No, Maybe. 12 McQualter, ‘Words Don’t Mean Anything’. 13 As well as maintaining a career as an artist, Udo Sellbach co-founded the Print Council of Australia in 1965 and became the inaugural director of the Canberra School of Art in 1977, a position he held until 1985. Sellbach’s mother, Mary Fooks, is a painter who lives and works in Tasmania. 14 Email to the author, 27 September 2016. 15 Email to the author, 19 September 2016. 16 Email to the author, 21 June 2016.

Pages 17–18 synthetic polymer paint and gesso on linen 150 x 150 cm Unstable Object #9 2014 synthetic polymer paint and gesso on linen 140 x 114 cm

LIST OF WORKS Modular Wall Piece for Heide 2016

Unstable Object #8 2014

synthetic polymer paint and gesso on linen

4 parts, each 150 x 150 cm

150 x 150 cm

Stick Works #5 2015â&#x20AC;&#x201C;16

Unstable Object #9 2014

synthetic polymer paint and gesso on pine

synthetic polymer paint and gesso on linen

18 parts, installation dimensions variable

140 x 114 cm

All works courtesy of the artist

Installation view, Antonia Sellbach: Open Fields

BIOGRAPHY Melbourne-based artist Antonia Sellbach was born in Canberra in 1981. She is currently undertaking a practice-led PhD between the department of Architecture and Design at the University of Tasmania, Hobart, and the School of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Previously, Sellbach studied at RMIT University in Melbourne, completing a Masters of Fine Art by Research in 2008–11, a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2003–07, and a Diploma of Visual Art in 2001–02. Recent solo exhibitions include: This, That, Here, There, Yes, No, Maybe, BUS Projects, Melbourne, and Forms of Life, Daine Singer, Melbourne, both 2015; AAANZ GeoCritical Exhibition, Sawtooth ARI, Launceston, and Unstable Objects and Other Paintings, C3 Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne, both 2014; Part and Piece, Mr Kitly, Melbourne, 2012; Impossible Prisms, Faculty Gallery, RMIT University, Melbourne, and Tessellation: Finding Visual Pathways, Gossard Project Space, RMIT University, Melbourne, both 2011; and Structure Patterns, BUS Projects, Melbourne, 2010. Since 2006, Sellbach has participated regularly in group exhibitions in both Melbourne and Tasmania: Elastic Field, Strange Neighbour, Melbourne, 2016; Faux Fair, C3 Contemporary Art Space,

Melbourne, 2015; Un Educated, Counihan Gallery, Melbourne, and Tangible, Trocadero Artspace, Melbourne, both 2014; Wired for Melbourne Sound, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2013; Small Protests Against Forgetting, SVPA Gallery, University of Tasmania, Hobart, 2013; Frames of Reference, Langford 120, Melbourne, Understanding Infinity, Kings ARI, Melbourne, and GROUPWORK 001: Something to hold onto, Mr Kitly, Melbourne, all 2012; House me with a geometric quality, Platform, Melbourne, 2011; Cluster and Connect, Sutton Project Space, Melbourne, and Dark Moon 3, Anytime Place, Melbourne, both 2010. Alongside her visual arts practice, Sellbach composes for and performs with the Melbourne bands Love of Diagrams and Beaches, having toured extensively with them in Australia and overseas for more than ten years. She is also a cofounder of LISTEN, a feminist collective that seeks to gain further visibility for women within the independent Australian music scene. At present, Sellbach is employed as a lecturer in creative arts at Melbourne Polytechnic. www.antoniasellbach.com

Published to accompany the exhibition Antonia Sellbach: Open Fields Curated by Linda Short Heide Museum of Modern Art 17 September 2016 – 26 February 2017 © Heide Museum of Modern Art, the artist, author, designer and photographer. This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means whatsoever without the prior permission of the copyright owners. Designer: Ramona Lindsay ISBN: 978-1-921330-54-4 All photographs by Christian Capurro unless otherwise stated. Artworks by Antonia Sellbach are copyright the artist. Artworks by Udo Sellbach are copyright the Estate of the artist. Opposite: Stick Works #5 2015–16 (detail) synthetic polymer paint and gesso on pine 18 parts, installation dimensions variable Cover image: Modular Wall Piece for Heide 2016 (detail) synthetic polymer paint and gesso on linen 4 parts, each 150 x 150 cm Back cover image: Modular Wall Piece for Heide 2016 (detail) synthetic polymer paint and gesso on linen 4 parts, each 150 x 150 cm Heide Museum of Modern Art 7 Templestowe Rd Bulleen VIC 3105 T +61 3 9850 1500 www.heide.com.au This exhibition has been supported by the Bequest of Erica McGilchrist, who advanced the standing of women’s art throughout her lifetime. Antonia Sellbach has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.