Sullivan+Strumpf Contemporary Art Gallery Sydney, Australia and Singapore - Jan/Feb 2021

JAN/FEB 2021

Lindy Lee Karen Black Dawn Ng Angela Tiatia Tony Albert SannĂŠ Mestrom Dane Lovett

Editorial Directors Ursula Sullivan and Joanna Strumpf Managing Editor Harriet Reid Senior Designer & Studio Manager Matthew De Moiser Designer Angela Du Proofreader Nicholas Smith Production polleninteractive.com.au

SYDNEY

799 Elizabeth St Zetland, Sydney NSW 2017 Australia P +61 2 9698 4696 E art@sullivanstrumpf.com SINGAPORE

P +65 83107529 Megan Arlin | Manager E megan@sullivanstrumpf.com

sullivanstrumpf.com @sullivanstrumpf @sullivanstrumpf

Advertising enquiries art@sullivanstrumpf.com or +61 2 9698 4696

@sullivanstrumpf sullivan+strumpf

Subscriptions 6 print issues per year AUD$120 Australia/NZ $160 Overseas Subscribe at sullivan-strumpf. myshopify.com

FRONT COVER: Portrait of Lindy Lee, Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, photo by Anna KuÄ?era

Sullivan+Strumpf acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of whose lands the Gallery stands. We pay respect to Elders, past, present and emerging and recognise their continued connection to Culture and Country.

Artist Meagan Pelham at work on Love owls and mermaids singing in the rainbow pop, a mural by Mathew Calandra, Emily Crockford, Annette Galstaun, Lauren Kerjan, Jaycee Kim, Catherine McGuiness and Pelham of Studio A. Commissioned by the AGNSW in 2020 for Archie Plus. Generously supported by the Anita and Luca Belgiorno-Nettis Foundation Š the artists

Celebrating people, portraiture and the power of community Art Gallery of New South Wales Until 10 Jan Free entry Includes new work by Adrienne Doig Cherine Fahd L-FRESH The LION + Nardean Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Mathew Calandra, Emily Crockford, Annette Galstaun, Lauren Kerjan, Jaycee Kim, Catherine McGuiness and Meagan Pelham of Studio A Angela Tiatia Amanda Williams William Yang togetherinart.org

Lindy Lee Moon in a Dew Drop installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art Photo credit: Anna KuÄ?era

5

JAN/FEB 2021

The Future Is Ursula Sullivan+Joanna Strumpf

Happy New Year!

Let’s get into it! The global state of flux and the world leaning in to both positive and massive cultural change has put artists on an edgy front foot, stimulated to make powerful and impressive work. It is thrilling and precisely why we do what we do.

Our first Sydney curated exhibition titled The Future is Humanity, is a powerful statement and sentiment that our artists have risen to, underpinning much of contemporary art practice today. Is there any alternative way through, other than with humanity? This theme will be running through many of this year’s exhibitions, so please mark everything in your diary immediately! (see our 2021 programme on page 68).

In Singapore, Dawn Ng’s Into Air will take place in a derelict warehouse at Cavan Road – a fitting location for a beautifully poetic exhibition exploring time (and death) how long is now? How do we hold time? How do we let it go? Take the time to watch the video link in her article – it is a great introduction to her work overall, as well as this exhibition.

Hot off the back of her critically acclaimed survey show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lindy Lee is the cover girl of this issue and our first Sydney solo show for the year. Love Letters between the rain and fire, which opens mid-February, explores the differences deep within us all and our relationship to the land through the elements of fire and water. Hard to believe it’s our first Sydney solo with Lindy in four years!

Karen Black speaks with Sebastian Goldspink about everything - from growing up in country Queensland, working within the performing arts and how some very large brushes are helping her to make some bold changes.

Watch the full interview on page 50.

We’re also dropping in on Tony Albert in his studio as he prepares for his solo show in March; visiting Sanné Mestrom at home and eavesdropping on a beautiful conversation between Angela Tiatia and Genevieve Smart (the ‘Smart’ in high-end clothing label Ginger & Smart).

And last word goes to the indefatigable Liz Ann Macgregor OBE, fearless leader of the MCA and how her incredible Lindy Lee survey show almost didn’t happen.

Come and see us in person if you can! We have masks...

– Urs & Jo

Richard Lewer self-portrait, 2020 acrylic on mirror 94 x 78 cm Photo credit: Aaron Anderson

7

JAN/FEB 2021

10

Contents

10 24 27 30 42 52 58 62 66 68 70 74

Dawn Ng: Into Air Angela Tiatia: Change Maker Podcast: Angela Tiatia with Genevieve Smart Lindy Lee: Love letters between the rain and the fire Karen Black: They might be giants At home with: SannĂŠ Mestrom Dane Lovett: New publication, Flowers In the Studio: Tony Albert Last Word: Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE 2021 Program: The Future is Humanity Quick Curate: The Future is Humanity Up Next

9

Dawn Ng I Always Cry at Endings, 2020 (detail) archival pigment print 73 x 50 cm (each)

Dawn Ng: Into Air

Dawn Ng’s works have always been tinged with a sense of wistfulness. Their alluring colour palettes and artful compositions belie a poignant sense of loss, and a desire to remember – and memorialise – that which will soon be gone forever. Throughout her practice, an acute sense of time and its passing informs the making of Ng’s works; her art is, in many ways, an acknowledgement of the inexorable passage of time as well as an attempt to arrest or suspend it. Into Air coalesces and articulates these themes – along with other related strands of Ng’s practice.

By Tan Siuli

+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY DAWN NG ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

11

Dawn Ng: Into Air

01

JAN/FEB 2021

Tan Siuli (left) and Dawn Ng in Dawn’s studio, Singapore.

TIME

One of her earliest forays into the art world, a series of handmade objects titled Thirty One Kinds of Wonderful (2011) marked the intimations of a diaristic approach and Ng’s preoccupation with time. Assembled from found materials and salvaged trinkets collected from the artist’s daily rambles through the city of Paris, each unique object was made over the course of a day, and conceived of as a celebration of the quotidian. Collectively, however, they mark the passage of time, and the hours and labour given over to their creation may be likened to a kind of daily meditation: they stand as individual records of a certain day in Ng’s life. From this series, Yes Yesterday is emblematic of these preoccupations with time and the compulsion to hold on to fleeting moments. A series of vials houses mementoes of life lived and savoured: confetti from a party, tobacco shavings, pressed flowers from a lover’s gift.

These evocative residues are presented in clinical dropper vials, almost like medicinal essences preserved for a future where these memories can be administered like a salve.

A similar approach may be observed in Windowshop (2014), a collection of cabinets housing curiosities and common objects scoured from homes and local junk stores.

These former belongings or personal possessions are re-assembled into vitrines, each functioning as “a personal memory theatre” that is quietly – and quirkily – revealing about what people choose to keep, and then discard. A close cousin of the work, A Thing of Beauty (2015) is a series of photographic ‘portraits’ of sundry objects. With a keen eye for the aesthetic, Ng assembles motley collections of unrelated objects – a back scratcher, a juicer, nail clippers and a scouring sponge – grouped by colour, into surprising compositions that re-train our eyes to focus on these everyday objects anew, to properly see what the artist describes as the “invisible normal”. By reframing these quotidian items in beautifully composed images, Ng invites viewers to cherish the mundane minutiae of everyday living, the fleeting moment of the here and now.

Similarly, the vignettes of overlooked or disappearing sights and scenes in Singapore’s constantly evolving cityscape, captured in Everything You Ever Wanted Is Right Here (2012), are snapshots of the everyday at a particular point in time. While many have commented on the nostalgia implied in these images, cued by their documentation of vanishing trades and the charm of old ‘mom and pop’ shops, the artist is insistent that this visual documentary was not motivated by sentimentality. Rather, it is driven by an acute awareness that a particular moment in time will be lost and gone forever: one cannot step into the same river of time twice. The ache of the ephemeral, the realisation that the present which we experience is constantly disappearing, is behind the impulse to seize the moment, and to memorialise it. Objects and physical spaces are always, for Ng, emotionally bound up with time and life lived; they are “fossils and emblems of people”. Tellingly, when speaking about a series of photographs of domestic interiors, the artist shares: “I chose to document homes that were lived in for at least 10 years because I think what differentiates a home from a house is the passing of time – the accumulation of everyday life, events and memories that manifest itself in the unique clutter of a space.

Anthropologically, it was the most fascinating and intimate part of the project.”

13

Dawn Ng: Into Air

JAN/FEB 2021

02

Dawn Ng GREEN, A THING OF BEAUTY, 2015 photographed installation 90 x 120 cm

LIGHTNESS AND LEVITY, WEIGHT AND MONUMENTALITY

Many of Ng’s earlier works convey a sense of lightness and airy suspension. A siteresponsive installation for the Open House art festival in 2009, Paper Planes, captures this perfectly, the swarm of white aeroplanes carefully installed to create an impression of soaring flight and weightlessness, while harking back to the levity of classroom pranks and youthful play.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Ng’s subsequent projects also feature the use of balloons or inflatables, for instance in her popular pop-up sculpture Walter. Its guerilla nature aside, perhaps what Walter gestures towards, once again, is the fleetingness and impermanence of that chance encounter, which is then meticulously documented in a series of surprising images. Balloons – that perfect symbol for transience and dreams of flight – feature once again in a commissioned work, White (2015), where they evoke a dreamy cloudscape. Another work, Cirrus Clouds (2013) gestures towards those shapeshifting wisps of vapour on which we pin our hopes and daydreams.

These images are light-hearted, but also quietly barbed (as with Ng’s invocation of the prohibitive signage found all over Singapore). The image of the balloon, while whimsical and ethereal, is always tinged with the poignancy of its ephemerality: it can float away from one’s grasp if not tethered, or burst.

As a final mention, Ng’s commissioned work for Facebook’s Singapore headquarters, Bang (2016), creates the illusion of a shower of confetti permanently floating down the stairwell: an arrested moment of effervescence, a celebratory climax captured for posterity. And yet, there is a sweet ache to this (futile) attempt to hold on to this flash of happiness; as one walks over the confetti on the floor and steps, one cannot help but feel that one has missed a moment of joy – a moment that has passed forever.

Ng’s recent works have moved in the opposite direction to the lightness and levity of her earlier oeuvre. They have taken on more weight, and become more solid and monumental. How To Disappear Into A Rainbow (2016), commissioned for Hermès Singapore’s art space, reprises the soft pastel palette of Ng’s earlier projects. This time, however, the washes of colour are realized in solid, three-dimensional form, taking the shape of plinths that act as walls within the space, creating a prismatic labyrinth for visitors to explore. A similar approach to form can be observed in Merry Go Round (2020), the installation’s elliptical structure recalling the forms of classical architecture such as amphitheatres.

A notable movement may be observed in the successive iterations of Perfect Stranger. Initially realised in 2018 as an installation of large paper sheets on a white floor, the work’s first form was a wash of gradient hues that again conveyed a sense of evanescence. Its ‘sister series’ Monument Momento (2018), arguably a second iteration of Perfect Stranger, transposed the distilled conversations onto hefty blocks of coloured marble. These records of the artist’s dialogue with a psychologist over the course of a year now took on a new permanence and monumentality, reflecting perhaps a desire to memorialise or to pin down memory into something solid and lasting, before it slips away. In the third and most recent iteration of Perfect Stranger, the coloured sheets of text are displayed on uniform rows of plinths in the atrium of the Asian Civilisations Museum. An austere solemnity hangs over this installation, a graveyard of time and memory.

If lightness and levity are metaphors for the ephemeral – for people, things, and times that slip away all too easily, then perhaps weight is a metaphor for the memorial, the heaviness of loss.

15

Dawn Ng: Into Air

03

INTO AIR

In Perfect Stranger, perhaps the seeds of Into Air were sown. Speaking about the former, Ng reflected: “This work is … a re-imagination of a self-portrait, and a narrative time capsule of oneself right here, right now. After all, what is each of us, but a vessel of vanishing selves? And the things we thought and felt in a passing moment, the only remnants of the day?”

Into Air is precisely a record and remnant of vessels (of time and colour) as they vanish ‘into air’. Created over a span of three years, the body of work in Into Air continues Ng’s preoccupation with time and her attempts to capture and convey its emotional tenor and elasticity, as opposed to the cold and factual progression of numerals commonly used to tell and record time.

In three distinct bodies of work, Ng explores how time can be documented and manipulated. Clocks is a series of photographs of giant blocks of frozen pigment, each image capturing the changing face of each ice block as it slowly melts. These lodestones of colour replace the sterile faces of conventional clocks, and seek to express a more poetic means of telling – and holding – time: what, for instance, does the ‘face’ of four o’clock look like? Time Lost Falling In Love comprises time lapse videos that record the complete disintegration of each block of frozen pigment. The laborious capture of up to 20 hours for each ice block is condensed into a video of 20 minutes, effectively ‘bending time’, the strangely hypnotic and cathartic cascade of melting pigment serving as a visual metaphor for the flow of time. Ash, the final body of work in Into Air, is a series of what the artist terms ‘residue paintings’, created by blanketing the liquid remains of each melted coloured block with large sheets of paper. Left to rest in a vat over weeks until all the liquid has evaporated, the sheets are slowly stained and marbled with tributaries and pools of pigment, a process that Ng has likened to ‘sieving time’.

Into Air then is a complete ‘cycle’, charting the lifespan of a block of frozen pigment as it is exposed to the elements, melts, and then returns to air. The works are all traces and residues of each block’s existence, and record the movement of its states from solid to liquid, and eventually to air: from weight to lightness, monumentality to nothingness. If some of Ng’s works suggest a progressive desire to memorialise, to pin down the abstract or evanescent in a more durable or lasting form, then this body of work cycles in reverse, surrendering to the inevitable dissolution of matter and form.

Dawn Ng Walk with me Suzy Lee through the Park and by the tree, 2020 digital print 118 x 153 cm

17

JAN/FEB 2021

Dawn Ng: Into Air

Arguably this is also the first time Ng has ‘surrendered’ her artistic agency, in allowing time and the elements to be the co-creators of her residue paintings. Her previous works, informed by her design sensibilities, have always been meticulously planned and calibrated, from the careful arrangement of objects in boxes, to the precise graduation of hues and calculated placement of objects within a space. Every single nuance has been planned. This time however, Ng relinquished control over the eventual outcome of her work, working instead as a collaborator with agents of time and change, and intervening only at the end of each process. For instance, some of the evocative scapes in her Ash paintings were created by the artist peeling away layers of the fraying paper surface to reveal a lighter patina underneath.

Into Air captures the in-between moments, the transitions in the life cycle of pigment blocks. Given this, Cavan Road was the perfect exhibition venue for this body of work, the space itself a time capsule, suspended between its former life as a ship repair workshop and residence, and its future incarnation as a boutique development. Its walls, washed with the patina of time, are a poetic backdrop for the fluid scapes of Ng’s Ash paintings, while the dated domestic interiors of the residences upstairs lend a poignancy to the idea of lives lived and the accumulation of time.

In mapping her works to the space, Ng once again departed from her modus operandi of meticulous placement, choosing to respond more intuitively to the nuances of the site. The works that one first encounters within the space evoke a spring and summer-like palette. Pastel hues give way to more vibrant swathes of colour, in tandem with the openness of the space, and suggestive of the first flush of youth and its subsequent full bloom. Upstairs, in the more intimate residential spaces, a corresponding change in scale and palette can be observed, with autumnal and wintry hues evoking the later seasons of life. The movement of the exhibition hence approximates the rhythm of a life cycle, the flow of artworks punctuated by traces of lives lived; the detours into smaller rooms, small surprises in unexpected spaces, and closed doors a metaphor for the journey.

The intimacy of the encounter, so keenly felt in relational works like Sixteen and 11, is key to the experience of Into Air at Cavan Road. Framing the fluid abstracts of the residue paintings or the photographs of melting ‘clocks’, and exhibiting them in a conventional ‘white cube’ gallery space would have hemmed in and blanched these evocative images of their emotional palette. Displayed ‘bare’ on the unadorned and distressed walls of Cavan Road, the works are allowed to ‘breathe’ and come into their own, as lyrical odes to time, transience, and dissolution. For a brief moment, during the span of the exhibition, they are held there in suspension, poised for an intimate encounter. After which, this corpus of work and the contours of the space as it is now, will also disappear, into air.

+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY DAWN NG ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

Dawn Ng I Believe I Believe I Believe Everything is Out to Sea, 2020 residue painting on acid free watercolour paper 123 x 137 cm

19

JAN/FEB 2021

Dawn amongst her major work Perfect Stranger at the Asian Civilisation Museum, Singapore.

21

Dawn Ng: Into Air

JAN/FEB 2021

Watch Dawn in her studio working on the Waterfall series.

RIGHT: Dawn Ng I Know Time Moves Slow at 12:59, 2020 residue painting on acid free watercolour paper 178.5 x 130 cm

23

JAN/FEB 2021

Angela Tiatia: Change Maker

PAGE 24,27: Angela Tiatia photographed for the Ginger & Smart CHANGEMAKERS series.

Photo credit: Waded

Angela Tiatia is a multimedia artist exploring contemporary culture and its relationship with gender, neo-colonialism and the commodification of the body and place, often through the lenses of history and popular culture.

In 2017 she went to Heron island to learn more about the climate crisis from renowned Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery. There, she met Genevieve Smart, co-founder of the iconic Australian fashion label, Ginger & Smart and was recently featured in their Changemakers campaign with six other influential women. She talks to Genevieve about creativity, her favourite works and her passion for the environment.

Extract from the Ginger & Smart Changemakers series.

25

Angela Tiatia: Change Maker

Genevieve Smart (GS)/ HOW DO YOU DREAM UP THE

CONCEPTS FOR YOUR MAJOR WORKS?

Angela Tiatia (AT )/ It's a combination of researching archival images of real life and constructed events/films/ stories, then imagining and drawing different outcomes.

Walking is my thinking space and time, and I often come up with the foundation of my works by walking through neighbourhoods or in nature either very early in the morning or late at night when no one is around.

GS/ YOU SPENT TWO DECADES AS A MODEL. HOW HAS THIS INFLUENCED YOUR WORK INVOLVING WOMEN'S RIGHTS AND THE FEMALE BODY?

AT/ Being in the industry for so long influenced my practice in being hyper aware of the power of having a camera in my hand. The camera and its images are a powerful force - it is even more powerful when placed in the hands of a woman. When this occurs, she is no longer the object to be viewed and instead becomes the subject.

GS/ WHAT DOES CREATIVITY MEAN TO YOU? AT/ Creativity is having the curiosity to always ask questions. To me it means having an open mind.

GS/ Your list of achievements in the art world is so impressive! To name a few… In 2017 your video installation The Fall, which captured the 1942 battle the Fall of Singapore in a single take with a cast of 30, was met with widespread acclaim and made you of a household name. You have been awarded the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, the most

lucrative professional art prize of its kind in Australia.

You have also been a finalist for the coveted 2018 Archibald Prize. AS AN ARTIST, WHAT ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF?

AT/ I have two works that I am most proud of. My very first work ever made - Hibiscus Rosa Sinensis. Made on a whim, very quickly. And Narcissus, a high production work which involved working with over 80 very talented industry professionals and will be showing at the National Gallery of Victoria in December for the 2020 Triennial. This work took one year to make and was a very involved process from start to finish. Both works are in striking contrast to each other in every way.

GS/ HOW DOES ART HAVE THE POWER TO BRING

AWARENESS TO ISSUES AND ULTIMATELY AFFECT CHANGE?

AT/ It allows for different perspectives on issues that a viewer may not have been aware of. Maybe if we are lucky as artists, this may inspire the viewer to talk to the artist or curator or others - and may even lead to a change in how they think about something or someone in a positive way.

GS/ WHAT IS YOUR SIGNATURE STYLE? AT/ I am a classic casual dresser - blue jeans, a t-shirt and

sneakers.

GS/ WHAT IS YOUR WISH FOR CHANGE IN THE FUTURE? AT/ My everything is focused on the environment. We have 7 years to make a change - it's time for all of us to act together on climate emergency.

+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY ANGELA TIATIA ACCESS

JAN/FEB 2021

THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

Podcast: Angela Tiatia with Genevieve Smart

In this delightful, meandering conversation, contemporary artist Angela Tiatia chats with Genevieve Smart, co-founder of the iconic Australian fashion label, Ginger & Smart, about the climate crisis, art and fashion.

It’s a fascinating discussion between two kindred spirits who met in 2017 at a climate crisis workshop on Heron Island, organised by renowned Australian environmentalist, Tim Flannery.

Angela was also featured in Ginger & Smart’s recent Changemakers Series with six other influential women. She chats with Genevieve about art, fashion and their shared passion for the environment including how they express that in their work.

+ LISTEN TO PODCAST

27

Subscribe Lean back, Sullivan+Strumpf magazine is now available in print.

Email art@sullivanstrumpf.com or complete the form below to get your copy delivered.

6 print issues per year AUD$120 Australia/NZ or $160 Overseas. Subscribe at sullivan-strumpf.myshopify.com or complete the form below.

Please enter my print subscription to Sullivan+Strumpf magazine Details

Payment

Name:

Cheque / Credit Card

Company:

Visa / Mastercard / American Express

Address:

Card No: Expiry Date:

Postcode:

Phone:

Cardholders Name:

Email:

Signature:

RETURN: 799 Elizabeth St, Zetland, Sydney, NSW 2017, Australia EMAIL: art@sullivanstrumpf.com

Australian Contemporary Art Magazine

Kirsten Coelho

Kirsten Coehlo creates functional forms and vessels of otherworldly perfection. In Kirsten Coelho, the first major publication on a practice spanning thirty years, author Wendy Walker traces the evolution of Coelho’s textured practice, in which an ever-expanding framework of art historical, literary and cinematic references has driven a succession of formal shifts – a shaping of changes.

This beautiful, lavishly illustrated book of 176 pages will be released in September 2020. For pre-orders and enquiries, please contact publisher Wakefield Press at info@wakefieldpress.com.au or phone +61.8.83524455.

Lindy Lee: Love letters between the rain and the fire

By Neha Kale

For Lindy Lee, wisdom isn’t about what you think you know. It’s about the knowledge that registers in the body over the course of a life. The acclaimed Australian Chinese artist recalls talking philosophy with a group of friends as a teenager in Brisbane. Her youthful certainty, she says, has given way to the gift of hindsight.

+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY LINDY LEE ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING

JAN/FEB 2021

YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

Lindy Lee works rolled during installation.

Photo credit: Aaron Anderson

31

Lindy Lee: Love letters between the rain and the fire

“Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about time – as 16-yearolds at lunchtime, we would talk about the wisdom of all things,” she says. “I remember a friend of mine saying, ‘I think you can be young and wise.’ [But] I’m in my sixties and not so young.” She laughs. “Wisdom grows because you meet life as it unfolds. Time is the only vehicle through which our bodies can realise our experiences.”

As 2020 draws to an end, Lee is caught up in a particularly reflective moment. It’s been two months since she installed Moon in a Dew Drop, which opened at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art in October and surveys three decades of artistic output.

JAN/FEB 2021

The exhibition holds a mirror to the many selves Lee has wrestled with in her lifetime. There’s the daughter of Chinese immigrants who tries to understand her place in Western art history by photocopying the faces of Renaissance painters, blacking out their features.

There’s the rising artist who finds a language she didn’t know she was looking for in ‘flung ink’ painting, a technique conceived by monks who lived centuries before her. Later, the Zen Buddhist whose questions about race and identity transform into deeper enquiries about our place in the cosmos and the nature of existence.

Lindy Lee Moonlight Deities, 2019-2020 (detail) mixed media dimensions variable Photo credit: Anna KuÄ?era

33

Lindy Lee: Love letters between the rain and the fire

“The strongest weather experiences we have in Australia are to do with fire and water – the lack of water in the desert is part of our psyche, the floodplains of Brisbane are part of our psyche.”

JAN/FEB 2021

“It’s gratifying to see the breadth of work and the consistent enquiry that I somehow unconsciously carried through,” she says, referencing No Up, No Down, I Am the Ten Thousand Things, a room-sized 1995 installation for which she splashed Chinese calligraphy ink on over a thousand pieces of paper. “When I first made that work, a friend of mine who is a Zen master thought it was good but didn’t think the gesture had enough confidence.” She pauses. “But I’ve learned so much in doing it the second time, twenty years later.”

Certainty, of course, is currency in a world shaped by a global pandemic and a breakdown of historical institutions. But Lee believes that contradictions are part of our nature, a defining force. Five years ago, the artist moved to the Byron Bay hinterland, home to ancient subtropical rainforest. Last summer, bushfires raged

through the region. The week before we speak, intense storms battered the local coastline. For Lee, there’s a parallel between our internal battles and this tug-of-war between the elements. It gave rise to Love letters between the rain and the fire, opening at Sullivan+Strumpf in February, her first commercial show in Sydney in four years.

“The strongest weather experiences we have in Australia are to do with fire and water – the lack of water in the desert is part of our psyche, the floodplains of Brisbane are part of our psyche,” she says. “We live through these cyclical seasons of bushfire which are getting worse.”

In October 2014, Lee collaborated with the artist Lyndal Jones to conceive The Garden of Fire and Water, a project that commemorated the story of Chinese immigration to Avoca, a 19th century town on the Victorian goldfields.

TOP: Lindy Lee in her studio, 2020.

Photo credit: Zoe Wesolowski-Fisher BOTTOM: Work underway for Love letters between the rain and the fire.

Photo credit: Zoe Wesolowski-Fisher

35

JAN/FEB 2021

LEFT AND RIGHT: Lindy Lee, Moon in a Dew Drop, installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art Photo credit: Anna KuÄ?era

37

Lindy Lee: Love letters between the rain and the fire

JAN/FEB 2021

Lindy Lee Blossoms of the Floating World, 2020 (detail) Chinese ink, fire and rain 316 x 139.5 cm Photo credit: Aaron Anderson

“I started to burn things and play with these elements,” Lee recalls. “They are extremely volatile – we can’t live without them, but they can also kill us.”

Love letters between the rain and the fire features Dewbursts (2020) and River Confetti (2020), part of a series of new ‘weather paintings,’ an evolution of pieces on show as part of Moon in a Dew Drop. To make the works, the artist flings Chinese ink. She burns holes in the paper with a soldering iron, creating delicate constellations that recall the way droplets creep across glass or stars radiate outwards, in thrall to unearthly energy. “[The works] are left in the rain to receive the water and the ink,” she grins.

Lee tells me that she’s making wooden sculptures for the first time. “One piece that I’ve been working on is electrocuted,” says Lee, who’s drawn to artists who worked with wood like Isamu Noguchi and Constantin Brâncuși.

“It’s [about] transformation and alchemy, participating in the laws of nature.”

“Something as insignificant as a dewdrop contains the union of opposing elements, a love letter between fire and water in miniature.”

Part of the joy, for Lee, is surrendering her role as an artist, entering into a collaboration with the elements.

“When I’m looking at River Confetti, you see the burn marks through the centre,” she says. “But there’s no way I can anticipate with any precision what the rain is going to do with the ink.”

Fire and water play a starring role in Chinese mythology.

They comprise the final hexagram in I Ching, the book of divination that influenced Confucianism and Daoism and went on to shape the work of artists like John Cage and Walter De Maria. Chinese dragons, Lee explains, are also associated with this dance between the elements.

“The dragon is the master of water,” she says. “It crawls across the sky. Thunder and lightning are its voice.”

Love letters between the rain and the fire will include new drawings inspired by Chen Rong. The Daoist painter is famous for intricate handscrolls of dragons that emerge from swirling flames and thunderclouds, made in the 13th century, often as part of rainmaking rituals.

“Water has three states – solid like ice, vapour as in mist and fluid and these drawings are very much caught up in morphing and changing,” she says. “The story of the dragon and its purpose is very fitting.”

Our lives are often defined by tensions and transformations. In 1953, Lee’s mother, Lily, arrived in a Queensland shaped by the White Australia Policy after grappling with the rise of communism in mainland China.

Lee’s life, she says, has always been about division, about what the German philosopher Nicholas of Cusa calls “the coincidence of opposites.” But living between these opposites, however painful, can also be the source of our wisdom, the sum of everything we are. Something as insignificant as a dewdrop, she says, contains the union of opposing elements, a love letter between fire and water in miniature.

“A dewdrop is a fragile thing that gets burned off at first light, but it has taken the power of the universe to make it,” she says. “And it has taken the entirety of time to make us.”

Lindy Lee: Love letters between the rain and the fire shows at Sullivan+Strumpf from February 11 to March 13, 2021.

+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY LINDY LEE, ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

References https://repository.asu.edu/attachments/97809/content//tmp/packageAtZAnO/Chao_asu_0010E_12427.pdf https://www.christies.com/features/2017-highlight-Fujita-Museum-dragonscroll-8799-1.aspx https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/i-found-myself-having-toaddress-this-really-repressed-part-of-me-20200917-p55wql.html https://www.wsj.com/articles/walter-de-marias-i-ching-sculpture-comes-toupstate-new-york-1461875773 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cusanus/

39

JAN/FEB 2021

Left: Lindy Lee, Fire in the Immanence of Unfolding, 2020 Chinese ink, fire and rain 316 x 139.5 cm Photo credit: Aaron Anderson

Centre: Lindy Lee Fire and Dew, 2020 Chinese ink, fire and rain 316 x 139.5 cm Photo credit: Aaron Anderson

Right: Lindy Lee Quiescent Mind, 2020 Chinese ink, fire and rain 316 x 139.5 cm Photo credit: Aaron Anderson

41

Karen Black: They might be giants ‘What giants’? Asked Sancho Panza.

‘The ones you can see over there’, answered his master, ‘with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long’. ‘Now look, your grace’, said Sancho, ‘what you see over there aren't giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone’.

‘Obviously,’ replied Don Quixote, ‘you don't know much about adventures’.

— Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

By Sebastian Goldspink

+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY KAREN BLACK, ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

Karen Black, Proposal for feeling, 2020 (detail) oil on canvas 122 x 304 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny

43

Karen Black: They might be giants

JAN/FEB 2021

Karen Black in her studio. Photo credit: Anna KuÄ?era

“Ultimately I make for me, the works are an extension of my history and knowledge and what I’ve collected along the way”

T

he term quixotic pertains to the actions and beliefs of the titular character of Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote. A man so obsessed with undertaking a quest that he manufactures an enemy to fight in the form of windmills that he imagines as giants. The term is often used in derision but in reality contains a large dose of wistful joy and understanding of the impulse to seek adventure and purpose against a world lapping with mundanity. In some ways contemporary painting is a fundamentally quixotic undertaking - painters grapple with monsters of their own creation, problems of surface and texture and the biggest foe of all the leviathan of meaning.

Karen Black stands poised in her Sydney studio surrounded by various paintings in differing states of completion. These large works sit on walls encompassing the artist like imposing guests at a dinner party. The artist works between them, mixing paint on the canvas as a palette – taking pigment from one work and adding it to another. They are large and generous and abound with a beautiful sense of colour that is rendered in muted tones. Through the layers of paint, figures are starting to emerge from the fog of underpainting. Plants and books overflow from shelves and ceramic works cover tables. It is a visually rich environment reflective of an inquisitive and perhaps impulsive mind.

The tableau of the artist’s studio sits a million miles away from her youth growing up in Toogoolawah in Queensland. Black reflects on her childhood fondly.

She describes watching her father, a school teacher in the varied disciplines of manual arts, toil at weekend construction projects of objects as disparate as guitars and boats. She remembers working alongside him at home and being proudly chosen amongst her siblings to have the task of painting their skirting boards, an occupation that required equal parts steady hand and courage. Her father’s lead gave the young artist an

ability to incarnate, to create something from ideas and available materials, a boundless passport for manifestation limited only by imagination. In some ways, her father also gave her a work ethic evident today in her studio practice, however one, could argue that with artists such as Black that drive is innate.

In her teenage years Black became obsessed with sewing and replicating European fashions from imported fashion magazines. Eventually this background lead her to a unlikely chance interview for the role of Head of Wardrobe at Opera Queensland. She was successful and took her background of working with limited resources and creative problem solving to Queensland’s main stages, including working for the Queensland Theatre Company, Queensland Ballet, the now defunct TN! Theatre company, and the Queensland Performing Art Centre. She states, ‘I never thought about that time as being an artist but when I look back on it we were painting costumes, there was a visual literacy to it. What was the surface of the fabric, was it sheer, what does that look like on a stage?’

Throughout this time of intense work Black juggled having a family whilst taking evening and weekend art classes in painting. At some point she made a conscious decision to leave the opera and enrol in the Queensland College of Art. She describes her art school experience as being defined by ‘making and play and chance and that really suited me’. In talking to Black, one gets the sense that throughout this period she in some ways felt like an imposter or at least an outsider - that it was solely through chance that she found herself in this theatrical and artistic world a million miles from the dusty skirting boards of her childhood Toogoolawah. However, whilst at art school her father revealed a hidden family secret that her great-grandmother was Mary Gill whose family formed the Gill’s brothers circus and the inherited link to the creative and theatrical was made.

45

JAN/FEB 2021

Karen Black: They might be giants

Black is in the middle of a series of new works for an upcoming group exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf that form a starting point for a suite of paintings that marry her duel backgrounds of art and opera. They represent scenes from historic tragic librettos but rather than seeking to depict a specific scene or tableau, they contain scenes within scenes that cross over from the operatic tradition into the artist’s everyday life. She states, ‘I don’t have a compulsion to make. I need to be in a certain space to make. I have a life as well that runs beside that practice. That life informs everything.

Ultimately I make for me, the works are an extension of my history and knowledge and what I’ve collected along

the way’. One gets the sense that although discreet about her personal life Black uses it as a counterpoint or even a compliment to her artistic endeavours. They sit at times in opposition but inherently linked. A surface tension. This organic melding of art and performance evokes the history of the early 20th century Parisian ballet company Les Ballets Russes that brought together interdisciplinary visionaries as diverse as Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel. Black works in this tradition of artistic cross pollination and a definitively theatrical attempt to make works that aren’t passive but rather reach for the viewers response, aware of their place on the stage.

Karen Black Proposal for touch, 2020 (detail) oil on canvas 122 x 304 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny

Black wields a large horse hair brush that she’s had waiting in the wings for years. She purchased it on a trip to Shanghai but up until this point has been too afraid to use it. Its purpose as an ink brush theoretically made it unfit for oil painting but due to a change in painting medium, Black has discovered that it has added a physical element to the process. Instead of stirring and swirling paint the brush forces Black to push and pull the paint across the canvas. Working with this brush is a tussle, a struggle but one that the artist clearly enjoys. In her hands, it becomes a sword for fighting giants.

+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY KAREN BLACK, ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

47

JAN/FEB 2021

Karen Black: They might be giants

Karen Black Proposal for action, 2020 oil on canvas 122 x 304 cm Photo credit: Mark Pokorny

49

JAN/FEB 2021

Watch Karen Black in her studio with Sebastian Goldspink.

Now showing, Free entry mca.com.au

Exhibition Strategic Sponsor

A major survey exhibition by influential artist Lindy Lee. The artist’s meditative and thoughtprovoking works explore art history, cultural authenticity, identity and the cosmos.

Exhibition Major Partner

Exhibition Supporting Partner

Exhibition Patrons

GRANTPIRRIE Private Susan Rothwell Government Partners

Supporting Exhibition Patrons

Publication Sponsor

Gutman Family Foundation Jennifer Stafford & Jon Nicholson

Front to back: Open as the Sky, 2020, mirror polished bronze; Under the Shadowless Tree, 2020, synthetic polymer paint, beeswax, oil on Alucabond, installation view, Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2020, image courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, © the artist, photograph: Anna Kučera

51

At home with: Sanné Mestrom

WHO LIVES IN YOUR HOME? CAN YOU DESCRIBE IT?

Sanné Mestrom (SM)/ In early 2019 our little tribe moved from Melbourne (VIC) to Woodford, Blue Mountains (NSW). We’re a ‘modern family’ household, with both me and my son Danté and his dad Scott living together, with whom I co-parent. People are always curious how we manage this arrangement, but it’s a surprisingly harmonious dynamic. It’s a fairly large house so there’s plenty of room for us to do our own things.

On the property I have two studios – one inside, which is for clean work (drawings, maquettes, painting, etc), and another outside where I get to make a glorious mess.

The outside studio is a simple, very modest garage, filled to the brim with tools, machines, materials and worksin-progress. Finished works sprawl over the garden and driveway. While my finished works always look fairly stark, the process of creating them involves a wild chaotic mess and for me it’s really important to have a space I don’t need to worry about getting dirty – I work fast and furiously with concrete, resin, plaster and steel and everything gets splattered.

YOU’VE MOVED AROUND A BIT IN YOUR LIFE. DOES IT

TAKE LONG TO FEEL ‘AT HOME’ IN A PLACE? HOW DO YOU DO IT?

Interview

SM/ Yep, I’ve moved around a lot. We moved from Holland to New Zealand in 1983 when I was a 3 years old, and then I branched off and came to Australia to start art school at RMIT University in 1998. Since coming to

Sanné Mestrom I REST / YOU FOLD / WE WAIT, 2021 concrete, steel, fibreglass, bronze 60 x 170 x 120 cm Photo credit: Karina Pires

Australia I’ve lived in more places than I can count – inner city, regional and rural, across Australia.

“A home is basically a large inhabitable sculpture, so when setting up a house I relate to it in the same way as I would making a work of art.”

In my experience, these many shifts are symptomatic of a kind of rootlessness in me – which I believe comes from being an immigrant: I’ve never felt like I belonged anywhere in particular, and I’m very adaptable to my physical surroundings. As such, home is right where I am, wherever that might be at that particular point in time.

In daily-life I like to be mobile, agile and light. I generally move around on my e-scooter with a little bag just big enough to fit my laptop, iPhone, e-book, headphones and charger so that I can work from anywhere at any time – on a train, in a plane, at a café, the bus stop, a park, on a step, absolutely anywhere. I juggle a lot in a day, and every moment is accounted for: as well as being an artist, I’m a full-time academic at Sydney College of the Arts, and of course a mum to a toddler, so there’s never an empty minute in the day.

53

LEFT: Sanné Mestrom

I FLOW / YOU HOOK / THEY CONTINUE, 2021 fibreglass, bronze, steel, stone 160 x 30 x 60 cm Photo credit: Scott M Jackson RIGHT: Sanné Mestrom in her studio.

JAN/FEB 2021

Photo credit: Scott M Jackson

55

At Home with: Sanné Mestrom

In spite of my mobility, at home I’m a real nester. I love setting up a house and really settling in. As a sculptor I suppose I have a fairly intuitive sense of form, space, weight and light, and a home is basically a large inhabitable sculpture, so when setting up a house I relate to it in the same way as I would making a work of art. Walking around it for as long as it takes to feel out it’s proportions, watching how the light moves over the course of a few days, and then composing the house as I would an artwork - adding and subtracting elements until it simply works.

EMOTION AND PLACE OFTEN GO HAND IN HAND –

WHAT DO YOU FEEL WHEN YOU ARE AT HOME? WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE OTHERS TO FEEL?

SM/ In spite of the number of times I have moved in my life, I am actually a real homebody. I am an introvert and like a lot of solitude. These days I find quiet-time in the cracks between things, when I’m trail-running in the bush, or working in the studio late at night. Yet in spite of my introvert-ness, much of the week our home is actually very lively – while it’s just the three of us living here, we have managed to build really wonderful friendships within our local community. Due to COVID, and the need for us all to work from home, we’ve all gotten to know each other really well. There are a number of neighbours with kids under 5, and a few times a week we have a bunch of kids playing together on our large deck outside, overlooking the Blue Mountains – the kids entertain each other which gives all us parents a mini-break. during COVID I also ran a number of kids art workshops from home, to give the kids something to look forward to at the end of the week when everything else had shut down. This formed it’s own little community of kiddo creatives.

YOU HAVE A BEAUTIFUL THREE YEAR OLD, DANTÉ –

HOW IS HE WITH PRECIOUS OBJECTS, SUCH AS YOUR ARTWORK?

JAN/FEB 2021

SM/ Hahahaha! He’s actually really good. I’ve never kept anything out of his reach, or child-proofed anything in the house. Since day dot I have explained to him that

“I have explained to him that not all objects are equal – which is particularly important as a number of my small sculptures do actually look like toys.”

not all objects are equal – which is particularly important as a number of my small sculptures do actually look like toys. He understands that there are three categories of objects in our house: general toys, special toys that need to be handled with care, and artworks. All I have to say is ‘this one’s a special toy’, which might be a small bronze sculpture for example, and he knows he can pick it up and explore it but has to treat it with care and put it back where he found it. And the ceramic artworks are for viewing only. We’ve only had one or two casualties, which is fine because breaking something is ultimately the best way for kids to learn what ‘fragile’ actually means.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE ROOM?

SM/ My idea of a favourite room is based on where I can work away in peace, and this depends on the time of the day. I’m always moving around the house with the laptop, depending on where the light is coming from, so I work in almost every room throughout the day: the dining table, the library, my bed, my art room, on the floor in Danté’s room, at the kitchen bench. All-in-all daily life is a moveable feast.

+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY SANNÉ MESTROM, ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

Interview

SannĂŠ and her son DantĂŠ. Photo credit: Scott M Jackson

57

New publication: Flowers,

Dane Lovett Dane Lovett’s flower paintings both embrace and eschew their historical, thematic and allegorical roots. Dark, often monochromatic and subtly tonal in their palette, the scores of works that populate the Melbourne-based artist’s debut book Flowers gesture towards the syntaxes of minimalism and seriality as resolutely as they do the still life. It’s an intriguing dynamic, which expands and further articulates Lovett’s culturally savvy, reference-rich painting practice.

Where earlier works saw the artist construct still life arrangements from indoor plants and pop-cultural ephemera – VHS cassettes, vinyl records, CDs, ageing tech and the like – Lovett’s recent practice has seen him embrace repetition and delicate variation, with an unmistakably reductionist and art historical bent.

Here, he recasts French artist Henri Fantin-Latour’s 1864 still life Flowers: Tulips, Camellias, Hyacinths in countless murky, monochromatic iterations – a single vase of flowers becoming a site for sustained painterly exploration, variation and rhythm. Extended series of foxgloves and waterlilies in various unnatural tones follow.

“More than many others in the art world, Lovett seems to recognise the fundamentally democratic nature of meaning. His subjects are everything and nothing.”

As the curator and academic Rosemary Forde writes in her essay for the book, Lovett’s repetitions ‘each seem to emote uniquely’, his dark and muddy images allowing us to project ‘our own familiar scenes, moments, memories, aspirations, sorrows’. More than many others in the art world, Lovett seems to recognise the fundamentally democratic nature of meaning. His subjects are everything and nothing, laden and null. He offers us a rich framework, only to leave us to our own devices.

Perimeter Editions November 2020 Dane Lovett AU$49

+ AVAILABLE NOW AT

JAN/FEB 2021

sullivan-strumpf.myshopify.com

Dane Lovett Foxglove 9, 2019 charcoal, pastel and acrylic on aluminium composite panel 123 x 98.7 cm

59

Dane Lovett Foxglove 20, 2019 oil and acrylic on poplar panel 60.6 x 40.6 cm

Dane Lovett Foxglove 21, 2019 oil and acrylic on poplar panel 60.6 x 40.6 cm

61

In the Studio:

Tony Albert

DO YOU HAVE A STRICT REGIME OF ATTENDING THE STUDIO?

Tony Albert (TA)/ There is a perceived luxury as an artist that you get to work your own hours, however, I am quite strict on myself. I try to set up my day, like that of having a regular job with set hours. I then straddle this with what I would call ‘creative bursts’ where there is this energy and want to continue that is uncontrollable. In those instances I don’t try to forcibly stop – I just keep going. This can be days and nights of non-stop work, it’s a great feeling.

It is not uncommon for me to have multiple projects on the go. I love having something creative to do into the evening at the dining table or whilst watching Law and Order SVU or a murder mystery.

ARE BOTH YOUR THINKING AND MAKING ALL DONE INSIDE

JAN/FEB 2021

THE STUDIO? TA/ The studio is a creative hub and contains all my books and reference material as well as art making supplies. If I am not making and creating I love to spend time in the studio researching and looking through folders. I love organising and rearranging my collection of Aboriginalia.

It is a bit cathartic and nostalgic. I think way too much about everything - all day everyday. I think in depth about

a lot of issues. So much of my work is inspired by personal interactions or politics that I then go on to research and pull apart further. My phone has become a jumble of notes and voice recordings. Sometimes I get great sparks of creative genius at midnight that I will jot down in a note pad next to my bed. In the morning when I read there is usually a realisation that I was completely delusional.

ORGANISED CHAOS/ ORGANISED ORDER? MESSY/ NEAT? TA/ I’m like a virus, I spread and take over spaces. Maybe I have too many White friends as I have learned bad behaviour in colonising spaces.

TELL US ABOUT STORAGE? TA/ Storage is still a massive problem for me, but I have gotten slightly better as I’ve grown. I’m more organised than I have ever been in my artistic career (and life) and for the first time ever I am in the vicinity of my collection and research material. Everything is in one spot. This excites me, I definitely feel an amalgamation of the past and present, the future is looking so bright – I may need new sunglasses!

+ TO SEE AVAILABLE WORKS BY TONY ALBERT, ACCESS THE VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

Interview

“Sometimes I get great sparks of creative genius at midnight that I will jot down in a note pad next to my bed. In the morning when I read there is usually a realisation that I was completely delusional.�

Tony Albert in his studio, 2020.

Photo credit: Rhett Hammerton

63

JAN/FEB 2021

Tony Albert in his studio, 2020.

Photo credit: Rhett Hammerton

65

Last Word:

Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE

As the Covid-19 crisis unfolded and we went into lockdown, closing the museum to the public and retreating to working at home, I had to make one of the most difficult phone calls of my career. I had to tell Lindy Lee, with whom I had been working on one of my all too rare curatorial projects for nearly two years, that we had to postpone her show and that I had absolutely no idea when, or indeed if, it would happen.

As an independent organization that generates over 75% of our income from non-government sources, the impact of the restrictions on our income was devasting. Even during the Global Financial Crisis we had managed to keep this income flowing through adept management by the team. Not so this time. Like so many in the hospitality and tourism industry, we fell off a cliff. So not only did I have to tell Lindy about the postponement, but I also had to indicate that it would be impossible for us to commit to the installation costs of the major public artwork for the square in front of the Museum, even if the show did proceed.

JAN/FEB 2021

Dark days indeed. Lindy responded with typical pragmatism and we decided that we had to keep working on the show and hope that the crisis would not last too long. For me, continuing to work with Lindy kept me sane, as wrestling with endless financial scenarios to cope with the loss of income became my daily reality.

When I was finally able to make the decision to present the exhibition as our major show over the summer, so much had changed. The Black Lives Matter movement had erupted, racism against people of Chinese heritage had become more overt, lockdowns across the world had forced people apart from family and friends and the environmental crisis was pushed aside as other priorities to combat the pandemic took precedence. Think Keep Cups!

In this new context, Lindy’s exhibition seemed even more pertinent. Her journey to reconcile living between two cultures, her family story of separation and immigration, her exploration of Zen Buddhism with its emphasis on connection, to each other and to cosmos were topics that had gained an additional urgency. To be able to discuss these topics through the extraordinary work of an artist who so beautifully articulates them has been such a joy.

A joy that we have seen in the reaction of our visitors who are slowly returning to the Museum, drawn into this mesmerising and absorbing exhibition.

It truly is a show for our times which makes the argument so poetically for the power of art: to help us reconnect, to resolve our differences, to think about the world in a new light.

Thank you Lindy.

Lindy Lee’s “Moon in a Dew Drop” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney until 28 February 2021.

Lindy Lee (left) and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor (right) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Photo credit: Anna KuÄ?era

67

2021 Program The Future is Humanity The Future is Humanity is a powerful statement and sentiment influencing much of contemporary art practice today and will be informing our program of exhibitions and events for the coming year. After a year of turmoil, is there any other way through, other than with humanity?

JAN

FEB

MAR

APR

MAY

JUN

28

18

18

8

13

10

JAN/FEB 2021

Curated Show: The Future is Humanity

Lindy Lee: Love letters between the rain and the fire

Tony Albert: Conversations with Margaret Preston

Glenn Barkley

15

SannĂŠ Mestrom: The Body is a Verb

Maria Fernanda Cardoso Sullivan+Strumpf debut solo

Yang Yongliang

TBA

Jeremy Sharma

JUL 8

Michael Lindeman

15

Lynda Draper Sullivan+Strumpf debut solo

AUG

SEP

OCT

NOV

DEC

12

2

7

18

TBA

Sam Jinks

Kirsten Coelho

TBA

Jemima Wyman

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran

14

Tim Silver

TBA

Richard Lewer

Michael Zavros

69

Grant Stevens Phalaenopsis I, 2018, archival ink on paper 82.5 x 62 cm

Quick Curate:

The Future is Humanity

Jemima Wyman Flourish (No.5), 2019 hand-cut photos on paper 149.5 x 119 cm

Hiromi Tango Open Heart, 2020 neon and textiles dimensions variable Photo credit: Aaron Anderson

+ TO SEE MORE WORKS ACCESS THE FUTURE IS HUMANITY VIEWING ROOM BY ENTERING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

71

JAN/FEB 2021

Sam Leach how to relax with Al and archizoom, 2020 oil on linen 51 x 51 cm

73

Up Next

DAWN NG INTO AIR 22.01.21 – 21.02.21

CURATED SHOW THE FUTURE IS HUMANITY 28.01.21 – 04.02.21

JAN/FEB 2021

LINDY LEE LOVE LETTERS BETWEEN THE RAIN AND THE FIRE 18.02.21 – 13.03.21

SYDNEY 799 Elizabeth St Zetland, Sydney NSW 2017 Australia P +61 2 9698 4696 E art@sullivanstrumpf.com

SINGAPORE P +65 83107529 Megan Arlin | Manager E megan@sullivanstrumpf.com

THIS SUMMER SEE THE WORLD THROUGH ART AND DESIGN OVER 100 ARTISTS & DESIGNERS FROM 33 COUNTRIES FREE ENTRY

Aïda Muluneh Seed of the soul 2017 (detail) from the A Memory of Hope series 2017 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2018 © Aïda Muluneh The NGV warmly thanks Triennial Major Supporter Bowness Family Foundation for their support.

PRESENTING PARTNER

PRINCIPAL PARTNER

NGV.MELBOURNE

MAJOR PARTNERS

NGV TRIENNIAL CHAMPIONS

LOTI & VICTOR SMORGON FUND

|

JOHN HIGGINS AO & JODIE MAUNDER

LEIGH CLIFFORD AO & SUE CLIFFORD |

NGVWA

|

|

BARRY JANES & PAUL CROSS

PAULA FOX AO & FOX FAMILY FOUNDATION

|

|

FELTON BEQUEST

NEVILLE & DIANA BERTALLI

|