STIEG PERSSON Venetian Painting 4 - 28 February 2021
Presented in association with Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne © Martin Browne Contemporary © All images copyright Stieg Persson This catalogue is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. COMPILER: Ally Russell-Floyd PHOTOGRAPHER: Christian Capurro COLOUR SEPARATIONS: Spitting Image, Sydney Cover Image: Pomodori Secchi, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
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Venetian Painting A little art history. Historically, Venetian painting hasn’t always had a great rap. Vasari’s Tuscan bias saw Venetian painting ignored in his first edition of The Lives of Artists and relegation to the second division in subsequent editions. For Reynolds, the painters of the Venetian school are a lower school, an inferior class; “mere elegance is their principal object, as they seem more willing to dazzle than to affect”. ‘Sir Slousha’ copies Vasari in asserting the superiority of ‘disegno’ over ‘colore’ – the Florentine over the Venetian, whose boastful art is “a mere struggle without effect; a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Venetian painting’s crime is that it “departs from the great purposes of painting” and “is weak and unworthy of regard.” It is too naturalistic, too sensual, too colour based, inadequately concerned with elevated intellectual concepts. To our 21st Century sensibility this is simply bizarre. Venice, its painting, and all it contains, is a jewel box – a sanctuary of beauty – in a coarse, vulgarian world. Reflecting on a Survey Exhibition of some 35 years of my paintings, I was baffled by my own use of colour, almost always in service of a conceptual value or intellectual conceit – of ‘disegno’ over ‘colore’, as it were. Colour was there, and used well I think, but always as a minor partner. What would happen if this was inverted? And what better place to start than with Venetian painting? The paintings in the exhibition reflect these pondering as well as my own delight in the city; images derived from its shapes and forms, its ironworks, its food, its art. And, of course, its colour. As is my habit in the studio, a series of ‘rules’ were established. Each painting would use the same compositional structure – circle in the middle, a shop-sign shape in each of the four quadrants – and this rule was strictly adhered to. Each painting would have a still-life, Italian food element – strictly adhered to. Each painting would use patterning derived from Venetian ironwork – strictly adhered to. Pthalos and azos were to be avoided in favour of more ‘traditional’ pigments – generally adhered to. Grafitti, sourced from Venice, would be painted in a metallic paint to form a filigree at the edges of the composition – largely ignored. No influence was out of bounds: the palettes of Tintoretto, Tiepolo and Canaletto, the terrazzo of a palazzo, Atomic espresso makers, stars from the Basilica di San Marco, Burano lace, the Rialto fish market, the hue of mortadella; all embracing the spirt of an ‘accelerationist’ aesthetic, wilfully ignoring sobriety and engaging a salmagundi of form and colour. The aim was to achieve concentrated intensities, oscillating pictorial spaces, chromatic collisions of rhythmic linear patterns and finely rendered objects, darting and bobbing across the eye, analogous to the visuality of the city itself. What you see here are the results. Buon appetito! Stieg Persson
Doubt in Venice There’s a painting by Stieg Persson that I remember very well, paradoxically because I find it so hard to call to mind. It was on (I think) the bottom floor of his 2018 retrospective Polyphonic at the Ian Potter Museum of Art. The King Sends His Own Physician (1990) was a large dark canvas in which clouds of black paint disperse momentarily to reveal a lighter scumbled background across which a series of ominous words are written, although you can’t exactly read what they say. Above it all towards the top floats a tenuous white curlicue, looking as much as anything like the marks you make on a sheet of paper when you can’t get your pen to start. I remember standing there in the gallery, trying to get a fix on what I was looking at. I sought to hold the work in my eye, but it somehow kept slipping away from me. I almost had the feeling that I was looking at a someone’s tattooed skin under a gently flowing stream that led out the bottom of the painting. It was like staring at ripples of water that suddenly caught the light and blinded you. I just couldn’t see or at least focus on what was right there on the wall. There seemed to some invisible veil between me and what I wanted to look at. The painting appeared to be moving before my eyes, although I knew it was perfectly still. Kelly Gellatly, one of the curators of the show, writes in the catalogue that at the origins of Persson’s practice is a kind of doubt. She makes the point that at the time he began in the 1980s painting was thought to be dead, and his first series of work – of which The King Sends His Own Physician is a version – arose out of a kind of personal crisis in which Persson was unemployed and made himself use only black paint in order to cut costs. Indeed, the first work in the catalogue – reminding us a little of that crossed-out table that is Gerhard Richter’s Number 1 – is nothing less than a painting of a donkey, or we might even say ass, as though Persson is admitting the absurdity, but perhaps also the stubbornness, of what he is doing. As the retrospective went on, there were all kinds of different moments to be seen from Persson’s career. There were the scary Norwegian death metal portraits (The Gothenberg Crosses series, 1996-7). There were the Gothic church leadlights with eyes (Domkryka, 1998). There was the introduction of the colour green in the diptychs South (1998) and The Sacrifice (1998). There were the intricate arabesque scrolls (Middle Management, 2003) and then the scrolls with lettering (Judgement of Paris, 2007). There were the satires of the yuppie lifestyle (Philosophy of Individualism with Goji Berries, 2012-3) and satires of yuppie restaurants (Snowflakes with Bilberries and Green Coffee Beans, 2017). But throughout it all – and Gellatly was quite right to emphasise this – there ran a constant thread of scepticism or self-questioning. When Persson did something “positive”, like create horror or introduce green, and even when he criticised others, as in the satires of yuppie “wellness”, it was fundamentally a reaction to his own uncertainty, either by pretending it didn’t exist or displacing and deflecting it onto someone else.
Now Persson has come up with his Venetian Paintings for Martin Browne. The works are elegant, assured, self-confident and a masterful synthesis of everything that has come before. In the yellow bows of Carne (2019), for example, we have a version of the boney cross of History Painting (2006). In Erbe Italiane (2019), we have something of the filigrees and curlicues of Middle Management. And in the text he has written to accompany the show, Persson suggests that this current series of works represents something of an overcoming of previously held restraints and strictures. “Reflecting on a survey exhibition of some 35 years of my paintings”, he writes, “I was baffled by my own use of colour, almost always in service of a conceptual value or intellectual conceit, of ‘disegno’ over ‘colore’, as it were”. And to help him liberate himself, he has turned to a whole series of Venetian Rococo and Baroque masters: Tintoretto, Tiepolo, Canaletto… But these current works would not have the resonance they have if they were not also inflected by all we have come to know about Persson. For all of their striking colours and bold declarative designs, there is also a subtly retrospective quality about them: not just in their obvious allusions to prior moments of Persson’s career, but also in their unbending and straightening out of previous pictorial devices. There are scrolls and arabesques here, but they are less ornate. There are collages of font and design, but they are more regular. There are vivid seas and skies, but they are complementary. What’s finally moving about the series is that we can see Persson still struggling. He’s moved further away from that black room with which he began. But we can see him looking nervously back. For our part, if we were going to compare him to another Venetian painter, it would be to Sebastiano Santi and his painting of the Resurrected Christ with Thomas the Apostle of 1828 at the Church of Santi Apostoli on the northernmost outskirts of Venice. Like St Thomas there, for all of his works’ order and symmetry and the seemingly inexorability of their progression, we can almost see Persson standing before each one brush in hand wondering what to do next. Rex Butler
LIST OF WORKS Filetti di Alici con Capperi, 2018, oil on linen, 92 x 77 cm (opposite) Carpaccio, 2018, oil on linen, 92 x 77 cm Fragole, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Salame di Cervo e Mortadella, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Olive, 2018, oil on linen, 92 x 77 cm Bocconcini, 2019, oil on linen, 92 x 77 cm Cacciatori, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Carne, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Ciliegie, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Erbe Italiane, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Fagioli Borlotti, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Nocciole, 2019, oil on linen, 92 x 77 cm Funghi, 2019, oil on linen, 92 x 77 cm Riso Arborio e Piselli, 2018, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Gorgonzola, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Farfalle, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Limoni, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Biscotti alle Mandorle, 2019, oil on linen, 92 x 77 cm Mandorle, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Patate, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Polpo, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Alici Bianche, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Pomodori, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Rana Pescatrice, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Stelline, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Torroncini, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm Pomodori Secchi, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Filetti di Alici con Capperi, 2018, oil on linen, 92 x 77 cm
Carpaccio, 2018, oil on linen, 92 x 77 cm
Fragole, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Salame di Cervo e Mortadella, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Olive, 2018, oil on linen, 92 x 77 cm
Bocconcini, 2019, oil on linen, 92 x 77 cm
Cacciatori, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Carne, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Ciliegie, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Erbe Italiane, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Fagioli Borlotti, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Nocciole, 2019, oil on linen, 92 x 77 cm
Funghi, 2019, oil on linen, 92 x 77 cm
Riso Arborio e Piselli, 2018, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Gorgonzola, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Farfalle, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Limoni, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Biscotti alle Mandorle, 2019, oil on linen, 92 x 77 cm
Mandorle, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Patate, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Polpo, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Alici Bianche, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Pomodori, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Rana Pescatrice, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Stelline, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Torroncini, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
Pomodori Secchi, 2019, oil on linen, 97 x 77 cm
STIEG PERSSON 1959 Born Melbourne, Australia Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2021 Venetian Painting, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney 2018 Polyphonic, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne 2018 Stieg Persson: How we live now, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne 2014 The Fragonard Room, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 2012 Melbourne Art Fair, Melbourne 2010 Crypsis, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 2009 Works on Paper, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 2008 Old Europe, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney 2006 History Painting, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 2005 Anna Schwartz Gallery at the Depot Gallery, Sydney 2004 The Fall, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 2002 Backmasking: The art of Stieg Persson, Bendigo Art Gallery; Wangaratta Exhibitions Gallery; Hamilton Art Gallery 2001 Backmasking: The art of Stieg Persson, Glen Eira City Gallery, Melbourne 2000 Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
COLLECTIONS Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Artbank Australia Auckland Art Gallery Bayside City Council, Victoria Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo City of Port Phillip, Melbourne Geelong Art Gallery, Geelong Griffith University, Brisbane Hamilton Art Gallery, Hamilton, Australia Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Metropolitan Museum, New York Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney National Gallery of Australia, Canberra National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Shell Collection of Contemporary Australian Art St.Kilda City Council, Melbourne UQ Art Museum, Brisbane University of Melbourne, Melbourne Vizard Foundation of Contemporary Art, University of Melbourne Waikato Museum of Art and History, Hamilton Private and corporate collections
GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2020 2020 Mosman Art Prize, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney 2019 2019 Experimental Print Prize, Castlemaine Art Museum, Victoria 2019 Never the same river, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 2019 MORNING, NOON AND NIGHT, Selected works from the Bus Collection of Australian Art, Latrobe Regional Gallery 2019 Geelong Acquisitive Print Award, Geelong Gallery, Geelong 2019 Manifesto, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne 2019 The Len Fox Painting Award, Castlemaine Art Museum 2017 Collective Vision: 130 Years, Bendigo Art Gallery 2017 The National 2017: New Australian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2017 Romancing the Skull, Art Gallery of Ballarat 2017 2017 Geelong Acquisitive Print Awards, Geelong Art Gallery 2017 Every Brilliant Eye: Australian Art of the 1990s, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 2017 Artist Profile: Australasian Painters 2007-2017, Orange Regional Gallery 2016 Black to Blackest, curated by Una Rey, Geelong Art Gallery 2016 Painting, More Painting – Chapter 2, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2014 Luminous World-Contemporary Art from the Wesfarmers Collection, Tasmanian College of the Arts, Inveresk 2014 Luminous World-Contemporary Art from the Wesfarmers Collection, National Library of Australia, Canberra 2013 Theatre of the World, La Maison Rouge, Paris 2013 Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 2013 Mix Tape 1980s Appropriation, Subculture, Critical Style, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 2012 Luminous World-Contemporary Art from the Wesfarmers Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth 2012 Negotiating This World: Contemporary Australian Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 2012 Recent Acquisitions, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville 2012 Museums in the Incident, Faculty Gallery, Monash University, Melbourne 2012 Theatre of the World, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart 2012 Drawing Out 2012, Global Centre for Drawing, University of the Arts, London