MAR/APR 2021
Tony Albert Glenn Barkley Sanné Mestrom Jeremy Sharma María Fernanda Cardoso Yang Yongliang
Editorial Directors Ursula Sullivan and Joanna Strumpf Managing Editor Harriet Reid
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Sullivan+Strumpf acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of whose lands the FRONT COVER: Tony Albert, Conversations with
Preston: Christmas Bells (detail), 2020 acrylic and vintage appropriated fabric on canvas 300 x 400 cm
Gallery stands. We pay respect to Elders, past, present and emerging and recognise their continued connection to Culture and Country.
CUR ATED BY NINA MIAL L
27 MARCH – 11 JULY 2021 twma.com.au Grant Stevens, Below the mountains and beyond the desert, a river runs through a valley of forests and grasslands, towards an ocean 2020 (digital render detail). Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney MAJOR SPONSORS
MAJOR PARTNERS
EXHIBITION SUPPORTERS
Sanné Mestrom, works in progress.
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Glenn Barkley nearwildheaven, 2021 earthenware 23 cm diameter
Level Up Ursula Sullivan+Joanna Strumpf
One of the greatest rewards as a gallerist/art dealer/ human is watching artists take their practice to the next level, become representatives of their generation and use that miraculous, silent, visual voice to start discussions about our world that need to be had. The four feature artists in this issue are all doing this – Tony Albert, Sanné Mestrom, Glenn Barkley and María Fernanda Cardoso – all in their own way, definitely leveling up, and definitely taking on the issues of our time. Angela Goddard, Director, Griffith University Art Museum and Chair of University Art Museums Australia, has known Tony Albert since he was 20 years old working as a junior trainee at the Queensland Art Gallery. She has seen him mature and develop from a young artist, into the (now 40) contemporary hero he is today. Her text for his exhibition Conversations with Margaret Preston mirrors the sensitivity in the work – Tony refers to it as: a bit like a velvet boxing glove – approaching this tricky but necessary conversation with the care and intelligence it demands. Sanné Mestrom is one of the most dynamic and challenging sculptors working in Australia today. Imogen Dixon-Smith draws parallels between Sanné and Dada artist Hannah Höch, and how they both explore creativity, labour and the female body. She challenges the giants who have gone before her, defiantly deconstructing, rearranging and questioning their legacy, the Modernist patriarchy.
Glenn Barkley is a disruptive force in ceramics today. His work – some so small they fit in the palm of your hand – reaches way beyond the traditional language of ceramics. At once beautiful, weird and hilarious, his latest work is a melting pot of the deeply personal and the overtly public social media: American presidents, Caesar, Mozart, bushfires, gardening, music, COVID, poetry. He represents life as we know it. So immerse yourself. Ahead of her 50th solo exhibition Gumnuts and Sandstone, we take a closer look at the remarkable career of María Fernanda Cardoso. Spaning over 30 years and three continents, her career has one common thread throughout – a fascination with the intrinsic geometry of the organic. From representing her homeland of Colombia at the Venice Biennale to performing her Cardoso Flea Circus literally everywhere from the Pompidou in Paris to Sydney’s own Opera House, we learn a little more about Cardoso before her May exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney. In this issue we also take a sneak peak into the studios of Yang Yongliang and Jeremy Sharma, curate a small but lovely selection of works on the timely theme of Renewal, and give the Last Word to our great friends and contemporary art supporters Rob Postema and Trish Jungfer. The rewards abound. Enjoy, Ursula & Joanna. 7
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Contents
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Sanné Mestrom: Body as Verb
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In the Studio: Jeremy Sharma
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Glenn Barkley: The Urn of Bitter Prophecy
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Tony Albert: Conversations with Margaret Preston
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María Fernanda Cardoso
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Yang Yongliang: Allegory of the cave
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Last Word: Do you Collect?
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Quick Curate: Renewel
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Up Next
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Sanné Mestrom, works in progress.
Sanné Mestrom: Body as Verb The distorted echos of Hannah Höch’s photomontages reverberate through Sanné Mestrom’s stone sculptures. The mashups of both women transform pre-existing images and forms into entirely new entities with inescapable references to modern life. Almost a century later however, Mestrom’s work lets us sit with the lived reality of Höch’s modernist legacy. By Imogen Dixon-Smith
Exhibition: April 15 - May 8
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Sanné Mestrom: Body as Verb
O
ne of the hallmarks of the English language is the provision of a substantial lexicon where one can find multiple terms to describe a single phenomenon, each with specific connotations that deviate ever so subtly. We can select from a list of synonyms a word that pinpoints with relative precision an action we wish to communicate and a particular feeling we wish to signify. We can hold, carry, bear or cradle a weight, each term’s accuracy changing with the context of the situation described. Sanné Mestrom’s new series Body as Verb formally and conceptually explores the complex relationship between support and agency, which is echoed in the slippage between these four words. Experimenting with notions of monumentality, permanence and precision, Mestrom has fashioned abstracted bodily forms of varying materiality, finish and size. She has intentionally designed the series, including six robust legs and a reclining body, to be both aesthetic and functional – to hold each other (and the viewer) up visually and physically.
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Mestrom’s practice has always worked to complicate understandings of sculpture, but has recently focused more intently on exploring the agency of sculpture and its accountability to public and private space and the people that inhabit it. For Mestrom, this research is inseparable from the personal: “like my body, particularly since giving birth and motherhood…every bit of me now has to ‘function’. My body has a job to do, it has a responsibility to the world, and to the beings in my life. Equally, these objects are not inert, they also have a responsibility to other objects, and to the world at large.”
While each individual object is autonomous, the group can be reconfigured in countless arrangements – prostrate, outstretched or squatting structures all offer up sturdy support for smaller components or real bodies in the space. Scattered across the lush green grass of her Blue Mountain’s yard, Mestrom moves her models around countless times allowing these humanesque contours to climb and cradle one another, a process that is equal parts chaos and nurture. The physical enactment of her creative process becomes a rumination on her own maternal body pulled in all directions as she works to sustain her loved ones and her career. She laughs as she describes to me how you would find her moving through life most days, “I’ve always got my baby in one arm, grocery bags in the other, I’m kicking the car door shut with my foot, phone on my shoulder; that’s kind of the picture of the working mum – everything is working, every bit of me has a job to do – my brain as an academic, my body as an artist, my heart as a mum.” The utilitarian state of the female body could not be more relevant to the lives we’ve lived over the past 12 months. Termed the ‘she-cession’ by researchers in the US, women have been disproportionately affected by the ongoing social impacts of the global pandemic. The situation is strongly tied to the realities of women’s labour. Female-dominated industries have been hit the hardest and the pressure on working mothers to juggle careers with caring responsibilities has intensified during periods of school shutdowns. The ambiguity of Mestrom’s raw, changeable forms enact visual and experiential cues that reflect the ambivalence linking the theoretical offerings and practical realities of liberation; the conundrum of keeping up fulfilling work both within and beyond the walls of the home.
Sanné Mestrom in her studio.
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Sanné Mestrom: Body as Verb
“Like my body, particularly since giving birth and motherhood...every bit of me now has to ‘function’. My body has a job to do, it has a responsibility to the world, and to the beings in my life. Equally, these objects are not inert, they also have a responsibility to other objects, and to the world at large.”
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Mestrom’s now distinctive curvilinear language has been developed, remoulded and refined in constant dialogue with male masters of modernism such as Brancusi and Picasso. Previously referencing particular works or archetypes of their stylistic legacy, here Mestrom shows a maturity that exceeds the deconstruction of extant historic objects and forms, instead manifesting the visual residue left from a lifetime of canonical exposure into novel forms that take on a life of their own. The inheritance of Modernism is still palpable, but here, the playfulness of her mutable sculptures share a resonance with a particular female figure of 20th century art. Pivoting away from her equivocation between reverence and defiance of male modernists, the parallels that can be drawn between Body as Verb and the work of Dada artist Hannah Höch offers a reappraisal of women exploring notions of creativity, labour and the female body in new contexts.
The echo of Höch’s cyborg-like ‘New Woman’ mashed together through the process of photomontage is palpable in Mestrom’s sculptures. Described by Matthew Biro as a “heterogenous constellation of fragments” these images of the archetypal modern ‘liberated’ woman – part machine, part human, part media – reflected both trauma and regeneration, the dual spirit of the interwar Weimar period. Like Mestrom, Höch used photomontage to move beyond plain political critique and transform pre-existing images and forms into entirely new entities, yes with inescapable references to modern life, but with their own agency and energy to perform. While Höch dealt with an unprecedented historic moment that saw women enter the political and professional sphere, almost a century later Mestrom’s work allows us to sit with the lived reality of the these modernist legacies. As our weight is lifted from the floor we can appreciate the value of supportive mechanisms, be they as conspicuous and tangible as a bench or as ineffable as maternal nurture. Imogen Dixon-Smith is a curator and writer currently based between Gadigal, Ngunnawal and Ngambri country. Exhibition: April 15 - May 8
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Sanné Mestrom, work in progress.
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Sanné Mestrom: Body as Verb Ursula Sullivan chats to Sanné Mestrom about Modernism, motherhood and modular art.
URS/ SANNÉ, I LOVE THE NEW WORK AND I’M INTRIGUED ABOUT THE AESTHETIC PROGRESSION FROM YOUR LAST EXHIBITION CORRECTIONS. BOTH BODIES OF WORK ARE BASED IN FIGURATION, BUT WHAT WAS CLEAN LINED, MODERNIST CURVES, HAS BECOME CHUNKIER, SOLID, WEIGHTY. CAN YOU TELL
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ME ABOUT HOW YOU ARRIVED HERE?
Sanné Mestrom, work in progress.
SM/ Yes, in a way the new works are more figurative than those in the Corrections exhibition, albeit still modular and somewhat contorted. The new works in Body as Verb consist of interchangeable component parts made from concrete, timber, plaster, steel and bronze. In each work the sculptural forms that loosely resemble body parts that are stacked on top of each other, but not so as to form a single body, but rather a single work might consist of one body holding another body. Like people holding people, they assume an obscure kind of intimacy - perhaps a comforting relationship between forms, or perhaps a menacing co-dependency. The irregularity of the forms is born out of their fairly frenzied process of production: they are all made by hand in a process of adding and subtracting materials and elements, of building and breaking, constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing, gathering and disbursing, sealing and healing.
Watch Sanné working on Body as Verb.
URS/ THERE IS SOMETHING IN YOUR WORK THAT HARKS
URS/ AS LONG AS I’VE KNOWN YOU, YOU’VE BEEN
BACK TO MODERNIST WORKS, AND YET THEY FEEL
PASSIONATE ABOUT PUBLIC ART, THE WAY WE LIVE
DIFFERENT, LIKE MODERNISM HAS BEEN SUBVERTED
WITH SCULPTURE AND ALSO THE USE AND FUNCTION
BUT IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY REALISE IT YET… IS THERE
OF SCULPTURE. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THIS IN
A SUBVERSION/ DECONSTRUCTION/ FINGER UP TO
REFERENCE TO THE NEW WORK?
INTERVIEW
MODERNISM?
SM/ Initially my practice was deeply engaged with post-modern discourse - a critique of Modernism. But over time the work has moved away from such explicit assumptions. Certain ideological critiques are embedded in my practice, as they are in me as a person, but these days my creative process is a much more intuitive one. I spend a long time - a year or more - moving slowly towards a body of sculptures. Over this time period, as I continue to proliferate in the studio - continuously testing, experimenting and playing with forms - the works themselves come into view sometimes leisurely, sometimes sluggishly. It’s a bit like moving through a fog, where you can only take one step at a time and you just hope like hell that you’re moving in the right direction. But the most important thing is just to keep on moving. Looking back on a body of work, once it’s near completion, things all look so obvious the forms, the materials, the ideas coalesced - but the process of getting there can be harrowing.
SM/ I’m really interested in sculpture being integrated into our everyday lives, rather than an inert object that sit politely in a corner or on a pedestal. This is why I’m interested in what I think of as ‘playable sculpture’: something that is integrated into public life by inviting physical engagement, alongside the works more traditional artistic, intellectual and cultural value. Ultimately, I’m interested in adding to intergenerational and child-friendly art experiences in the public realm. This has become of increasing interest to me since becoming a mother, and seeing the world down on my knees, through my son’s eyes. A child's experience of public space consists largely of steps, eaves, drains, gutters, corners, potholes and reflections - the very features of public space that are largely invisible to adults. Too often they are a neglected amenity of urban design. I’m interested in exploring what role art can play in redressing the world as it’s seen through a child’s eyes so that public space can become less threatening and more curious, dynamic and alive.
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In the Studio:
Jeremy Sharma
My studio is located in a building dedicated for artist studios. It is modest in size with windows, quite untypical, and the setup changes every three years when I reconfigure it for the types of projects I’m developing. Right now it looks a little like a work station and jamming studio as I have many musical instruments lying about, a little library and a section dedicated to storage. It’s an organised mess. I have my older works stored at the back, where I’ve built a storage system. I have a huge work table with my electronics gear, and the other space is like a living area when I house my musical instruments. I generally make my large drawings downstairs in the multipurpose hall and my little ones on my kitchen table in my apartment. If it’s video editing I do it mostly at home, too. I try to spend time in the studio as much as I can. Right now it’s every week, but it gets intense sometimes. For me, art and music don’t necessarily influence each other, but I think most artists are into music. Music is more abstract and formless and uses a different part of your brain that goes beyond the visual field, and hence I think it’s more free. Maybe because I’m not schooled and I don’t have to explain to anyone what my music means, so I try to adopt that sensibility in my art. Art has crept into music for me in the way that sound and music are legitimate disciplines or mediums in contemporary art and interdisciplinary practice. It is really about doing what interests you. Music can produce images and images can produce music too, either through data translation or just imaginatively. In a way, music can be the subject of art and art can be the subject of music.
MAR/APR 2021
Jeremy Sharma at Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney June 10 - July 3
“For me, art and music don’t necessarily influence each other... Music is more abstract and formless...”
Interview
Jeremy Sharma in his studio.
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In the Studio: Jeremy Sharma
MAR/APR 2021
Jeremy Sharma Changi, 2020 carbon on paper 23 x 31 cm
Jeremy Sharma The Bathers 2 (after Géricault), 2020 carbon on paper 24.9 x 34.5 cm
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Australian Contemporary Art Magazine
On Fire: Climate and Crisis Until 20 March 2021
ima.org.au 07 3252 5750 420 Brunswick Street Fortitude Valley QLD
Gordon Bennett, Naomi Blacklock, Paul Bong, Hannah Brontë, Michael Candy, Kinly Grey, Dale Harding, Tracey Moffatt with Gary Hillberg, Erika Scott, Madonna Staunton, Anne Wallace, Judy Watson, Warraba Weatherall, Tintin Wulia, and Jemima Wyman. Curated by Tim Riley Walsh.
The IMA is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, the Australian Government through Australia Council for the Arts, and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian Federal, State, and Territory Governments. The IMA is a member of Contemporary Art Organisations Australia. This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Image: Jemima Wyman, Haze..., 2020, 124.5 x 183 cm, handcut digital photo collage. Courtesy the artist, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, and Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney.
Glenn Barkley Apocalyptic splash back (detail), 2021 earthenware 9.5 cm each (dimensions variable)
Glenn Barkley: The Urn of Bitter Prophecy Anna Dunnill visits Glenn Barkley at home in his sprawling garden. It’s a revealing perspective of the artist, who describes the language of ceramics as a compost — an ancient pile, as old as people, holding shapes, designs, glazes, cooking traditions, stories and the buried thumbprints of millennia. By Anna Dunnill
Exhibition: April 8 - May 8
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Glenn Barkley: The Urn of Bitter Prophecy
01. Glenn Barkley Jefferson with butter chicken tumour, 2021 earthenware 13 x 6 x 5 cm 02. Glenn Barkley Mozart Stink Bottle with classical base, 2021 earthenware 11.5 x 10.5 x 4 cm 03. Glenn Barkley Caesar Stink Bottle, 2021 earthenware 9 x 5.5 x 2.5 cm 04. Glenn Barkley Small flouro vase, 2021 earthenware 9.5 x 7.5 cm 05. Glenn Barkley onthatjaggedshore, 2021 earthenware 23 x 14 cm 06. Glenn Barkley Stinky Little Baby Bottle, 2021 earthenware 10.5 x 8.5 x 4 cm
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Glenn Barkley: The Urn of Bitter Prophecy
“Good years follow bad, the earth renews itself, trees fruit, flowers bloom. Fire and flood and plague and war pass over the surface, leaving fragments in their wake.”
I
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collect ceramic shards from my garden. They show up with surprising regularity, broken fragments emerging from the rich clay soil along with a beetroot or a clump of mallow. When I brush off the dirt I can conjure the vessel-bodies they came from, filling in the blanks of a china plate or a patterned tile, following the curve of a heavy brown-glazed flowerpot. Buried for years, perhaps decades, they rise to the surface, disturbed by plant roots, by the swelling and evaporation of water, by digging. In 2020 I got really into plants; when the usual routines and milestones dissolved into a soupy blur I clung to the cycles of nature to prove that time had passed. And it did pass, slowly, steadily. The earth doth like a snake renew. It sheds its exhausted old skin, emerges a gleaming creature. Green shoots emerge, uncurl, sprout buds. I became very invested in our compost bin with its jewel-bright worms. I marvelled at the transformation of rancid food scraps and torn paper into dark rich sweet-smelling soil, which we dug back into the garden, beginning again. Glenn Barkley describes the language of ceramics as a compost. It’s an ancient pile, as old as people, holding
shapes, designs, glazes, cooking traditions, stories, the buried thumbprints of millennia. Fossicking through, he pulls out an amphora—a large round urn with two handles, scored with geometric shapes—made in Cyprus around 2700 years ago. A salt-glazed ‘Beardman’ jug from 17th century Germany, found on the wreck of the Batavia, off the Western Australian coast. A bust of Abraham Lincoln. A clay pipe. A Japanese glaze. A 1980s mass-produced ceramic platypus. A 1789 Wedgwood medallion depicting a classical Greek scene, made using clay dug by Arthur Phillips from present-day Sydney cove, within days of landing. The compost of history is eaten by worms and excreted as contemporary culture. “Worms are like the selfextruders, in the same way that an artist might be,” Barkley said in a 2015 interview. “When you read and you look at history and look at objects, and you go to museums and you look at ceramics, all this passes through you into the work, in the same way as the worm passes molecules and wastes through its body.” My notes from our conversation are a catalogue of extruded scraps: Fire, plague. Classicism. Internet language. Protest. Folk tradition. Op-shop aesthetic. The Founding Fathers.
Glenn Barkley beforethefirstfarflash, 2021 earthenware 59 x 33 x 37 cm
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“Worms are like the self-extruders, in the same way that an artist might be.”
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Glenn Barkley pox pot with tokens and handles, 2021 earthenware 51 x 32 cm
Glenn Barkley: The Urn of Bitter Prophecy
Surfaces textured and pitted, Barkley’s tiles and pots are adorned with fragments pulled from the pile. A beard, an ear, a pattern, a stamp; cast, pressed and moulded, glazed in brilliant colours that defy the false purity of classical white marble. These pots are monumental in size, huge urns heavy with accumulated histories transformed into something new. Barkley’s pots also bear texts sifted from the humus of literature, from ‘The Lark Ascending’ to Judith Wright’s ‘Black Cockatoos’ to a Guns’N’Roses song (‘I used to do a little but a little wouldn’t do’, the refrain of both addiction and capitalism). The exhibition’s title, and the texts on several pots, are drawn from the final chorus of Hellas, a narrative poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Written in 1822, the poem recounts the ongoing war between Greece and Turkey. At its end, a chorus of captive Greek women plead for the end of war and death: The world’s great age begins anew, they prophesy; we return to the beginning of the cycle and history repeats itself, an ouroboros, a perpetual worm. Clay, Barkley says, is “inherently scatalogical, the same way that gardening is”. He tells me about his garden:
four acres, which he manages to the point of being “sort of in control but not really.” He likes “blowsy flowers”, colourful untidy things like dahlias and camellias, like the pops of colour in his glazes. “We’ve had the biggest dahlias we’ve ever had, this year,” he says, “because of the rain. It’s been rainy—really hot—rainy—really hot. We’re going to have a bumper crop of citrus too. It’s been a really great year for the garden, after a really bad couple of years.” Good years follow bad, the earth renews itself, trees fruit, flowers bloom. Fire and flood and plague and war pass over the surface, leaving fragments in their wake— potsherds, poems, battleground debris—that sink down into the clay and decompose, or wait there until they’re disturbed by roots, by water, by digging. Exhibition: April 8 - May 8
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Tony Albert Conversations with Preston: Fennel Flowers and Sturt’s Desert Pea, 2020 acrylic and vintage appropriated fabric on Arches paper 62 x 57 cm
Tony Albert: Conversations with Margaret Preston An important strand of Tony Albert’s practice is appropriated and abstracted Aboriginal designs, symbols and caricature images of Aboriginal people, under a loose banner termed ‘Aboriginalia’. In this latest series of works ‘Conversations with Margaret Preston’, Albert turns to the well-known oeuvre of Australian modernist printmaker and painter Margaret Preston (1875-1963). By Angela Goddard, Director, Griffith University Art Museum
Exhibition: March 18 - April 10
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Tony Albert I feel the weight of the world on my shoulder, 2020 acrylic and vintage appropriated fabric on Arches paper 57 x 76 cm
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Tony Albert: Conversations with Margaret Preston
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ow acknowledged as Australia's preeminent modernist between the wars, Preston enjoyed immense popularity in art and design communities in Australia from the 1920s for several decades, with many of her articles published in The Home magazine and Art in Australia encouraging readers to take designs and symbols from Aboriginal art to devise a uniquely Australian cultural expression. One of the most popular of these was her 1930 article ‘The Application of Aboriginal Designs’ in which she called for all Australians to ‘be Aboriginal’.(1) However benevolent in intent, an expression of a larger interest in Aboriginal art and culture informed by her travels throughout Australia, these exhortations have since been criticised by subsequent generations for their casual lack of understanding of the appropriation of sacred designs. As curator Hetti Perkins has said of Preston’s use of Aboriginal motifs: ‘It's like speaking in a French accent without speaking French. The accent is there, the intonation is there, but the meaning is not.’(2)
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Many contemporary Indigenous artists have since engaged with Preston’s appropriations, calling out her lack of acknowledgment of individual makers and sources, including Trevor Nickolls, Marshall Bell, Richard Bell, and perhaps most determinedly, Gordon Bennett. Bennett took motifs including the male Aboriginal figure from Preston’s ‘Expulsion’ and the black swan from a 1923 woodcut and tangled them in Piet Mondrian’s high modernist grid in his ‘Home Décor’ series (1995-2013), and directly quoted from a suite of designs Preston published in Art in Australia in 1925. In his later series of abstract paintings ‘Home Décor: After M. Preston’ (2008-13), Albert has primarily been drawn to Preston’s
hand coloured woodcut still lives of native flowers. These works were incredibly popular but often dismissed as ‘decorative’ by critics and the art establishment. Preston herself was dismissed as a mere flower painter by many powerful art world figures such as Norman Lindsay and John Reed, for her privileging the decorative and avoiding realism or literary references in her work. Albert’s interest lies in the consequences of Preston’s encouragements - these kitsch caricatures of Aboriginal designs and motifs still found on tea towels, tablecloths, table runners, handkerchiefs, placemats, and lengths of fabric, rather than the sophisticated abstraction she envisioned. Albert’s own relationship to these objects is affectionate - he has collected these items since childhood, tempered with a keen awareness of the cultural inappropriateness and disregard for the spiritual significance they embody. His collection of fabric accumulated over decades, sourced from op shops, eBay and friends, has in part been seen in an earlier body of work ‘Mid Century Modern’ 2016 as backgrounds to vintage ashtrays where ‘Aboriginal faces and bodies were once receptacles for hot ash and cigarette butts.’(3) Their motifs include a mélange of caricatured Aboriginal faces, stylised boomerangs and other weapons; motifs and animal shapes borrowed from Yolgnu and Tiwi bark paintings, to north Queensland rainforest shields and jawun baskets, to desert body painting designs, all mixed in together. These are cut into shapes and glued onto Arches paper or canvas, ringed with painted black borders. Albert chooses source prints by Preston for the graphic strength of their hand-coloured flat planes of Cubist-influenced modernism.
Tony Albert Conversations with Preston: Peace Lily (detail), 2020 acrylic and vintage appropriated fabric on Arches paper 153 x 103 cm
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Tony Albert: Conversations with Margaret Preston
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LEFT: Tony Albert
Abstract: Aboriginal Art IV, 2020 acrylic and vintage appropriated fabric on Arches paper 76 x 57 cm RIGHT: Tony Albert
Conversations with Preston: Abstraction (Curtain Design), 2020 acrylic and vintage appropriated fabric on Arches paper 153 x 102 cm
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Tony Albert: Conversations with Margaret Preston
Albert’s major diptych ‘Conversations with Preston: Christmas Bells’ 2020 is based on Preston’s handcoloured print ‘Christmas Bells’ 1925, held in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection. The reds and yellows of the native Blandfordia nobilis are made up of strong black outlines on bright red fabric. The vase, which was black and inscribed with a white V pattern in Preston’s original, is here made up of squares of mostly linen tea towels, many of them with the text ‘Australian Aboriginal Art’ with glimpses of both a calendar and a map of the continent.
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Interestingly, fake Preston works abound in op shops and on the internet, and Albert has used several questionable Prestons as source images further extending a complex web of appropriation and cultural theft, such as his three depictions of single protea flowers. Albert has also used one of Preston’s mysterious late religious works in this series. Her 1952 colour stencil, gouache on thin black card ‘Expulsion’ was part of a series of biblical themed works, popular perhaps due to post-war religious revivalism that also saw the inauguration of the Blake Prize for Religious art in 1951. Never sold by the artist, the work was gifted by her widower in 1967 to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. On a flat background, at the very top of the composition, a white God presides symmetrically like an icon figure, with a whip in one hand and a sword in another. Instead of an archway to the garden, a corrugated iron fence and a wire gate, secured with a padlock as the central focal point. Adam and Eve are depicted as Aboriginal people – they have dark skin and wear loincloths, being driven from the garden into an Australian landscape overrun with scotch thistles. Adam holds an object aloft, appealing to the God who has forsaken him; Eve holds a baby. This work is confounding in its casting of the sinners as black, and god as white. It could perhaps be seen as depicting the Christian biblical allegory to describe how Aboriginal people were cast out from their own country, by the misuse of Christianity itself, but
this is reading too much into the work of an artist who avoided political statements herself on the realities of life for Aboriginal people. Preston saw the use of Aboriginal imagery as a vehicle, a way for Australian artists to make truly original contributions to the pursuit of Modernism. Art historian Ian MacLean asks if Bennett’s works both parody Preston as well as participate in and reproduce her framing of Aboriginality within modernism.(4) Albert is also doing this and more - not making a damning call to denounce Preston, but, as the title of this series title suggests, answering her call to dialogue with Aboriginal art and motifs with his own conversation, while also demonstrating that the ambition to ‘be Aboriginal’ has resulted in the sometimes grotesque caricatures we see in these fabrics, which counteract the positive spirit of her making. Albert says: At the core of my work is a kind of reconciliation with these racist objects’ very existence. Yes, they are painful reiterations of a violent and oppressive history, but we cannot hide or destroy them because they are an important societal record that should not be forgotten. I’m trying to reconcile those two positions.(5) This project of constructive reconciliation has multiple implications. Albert highlights Preston’s formidable skill at rendering the humble still life into the most graphically powerful expressions of Modernism in Australia, while also reminding us of the consequences of using sacred images without acknowledgment or respect. His intention is dialogue; a conversation, which is not to say these conversations will not be confronting and uncomfortable, but will hopefully and ultimately also be productive. Exhibition: March 18 - April 10
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Tony Albert Conversations with Preston: Protea (attributed) III, 2020 acrylic and vintage appropriated fabric on Arches paper 76 x 58 cm
Endnotes 1. Margaret Preston, ‘The Application of Aboriginal Designs’ Art in Australia, 3rd series, no 31, March 1930. 2. Hetti Perkins quoted in Alexa Moses,’ Shadow cast over a painter's legacy’, Sydney Morning Herald, July 25, 2005, p.11. 3. Bruce Johnson McLean, ‘Invisible truths’, Tony Albert: Visible [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2018, p.18. 4. Ian McLean, ‘Gordon Bennett's Home Decor: the joker in the pack’, Law Text Culture, 4, 1998, p.290. 5. Tony Albert interviewed by Maura Reilly, ‘I am important: An interview with Tony Albert’, Tony Albert, Art & Australia/ Dott Publishing, Paddington, NSW, 2015, p.49.
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Watch Tony working on Conversations with Margaret Preston.
Tony Albert Abstract: Aboriginal Art II, 2020 acrylic and vintage appropriated fabric on Arches paper 153 x 102 cm
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Tony Albert Conversations with Preston: Peace Lily, 2020 acrylic and vintage appropriated fabric on Arches paper 153 x 103 cm
Tony Albert Conversations with Preston: Ranunculus, 2020 acrylic and vintage appropriated fabric on Arches paper 153 x 103 cm
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María Fernanda Cardoso Three continents and 30 years of art making.
The work of María Fernanda Cardoso has a consistent feature – looking at the different ways geometry manifesting itself in living creatures. Cardoso has developed a powerful body of work based on the intrinsic forms of animals and plants, and combining them in unexpected ways. Her work evolves in series that are developed over a long periods of time, from sculpture to scientific research, through to public performance. Initially when Cardoso still lived in Colombia, she would take local materials and native dead animals in order to build sculptures and enigmatic objects alluding to pre-Columbian myths and indigenous traditions. Typical objects such as totumas, earth soaps, homemade glue, bocadillos, and other elements pertaining to local cultures were combined in surprising works. Pieces with flies, grasshoppers, snakes, wall lizards and frogs are considered key pieces of contemporary Colombian art: one of them, Corona para una princesa Chibcha(Crown for a Chibcha Princess) was awarded the first prize for the II Biennial at Bogotá’s Museum of Modern Art in 1990.
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In the early 1990s, Cardoso moved to the United States, where she began her research on fleas – a ubiquitous domestic parasite. A few years later, the Cardoso Flea Circus, initially a performance belonging to the realm of art, becomes an authentic mass show. Simultaneously, Cardoso investigates the behaviour of insects, with a particular interest in the phenomenon of camouflage, characteristic of some species that may be seen as a reflection of the immigrant’s will to belong and to become one with her context. After living in San Francisco for several years, Cardoso moved to Sydney, Australia. This led to a renewed investigation of different traditions and materials, such as sheep’s wool and emu feathers, while preserving
an emphasis on the intrinsic geometry of the organic. Cardoso devotes long periods of time to her series, with her work on fleas taking a whole decade. Since the beginning of this century, the artist has undertaken an investigation into the incredible formal diversity of the reproductive organs in some animals, particularly at the microscopic level, in a long-term project on the morphology of reproductive organs of small animals and insects, featured in the Museum of Copulatory Organs (MoCO). In the last decade, Cardoso has delved further into her research on plants and animals, often resorting to scientific tools and processes to create images otherwise impossible to attain. The Naked Flora series shows close-ups of reproductive organs of flowers, composite images obtained by a complex optical and digital setup. On the Origins of Art I and II and the Actual Size series focus on the elaborate courtship “dances” of miniature Peacock spiders. In recent years she has created several large-scale public works: Sandstone Pollen, scientifically accurate pollen models digitally carved in sandstone. While I Live I Will Grow, a living urban sculpture that embodies non-human timeframes as a powerful commentary about the transience of monuments, and Tree Full of Life, a large tree whose foliage is entirely composed of insects that resemble leaves. Gumnuts, her latest series, uses seeds from various species of Australian trees to create vibrant optical pieces that highlight the intricate morphologies of this overlooked but ever present feature of the local landscape. José Roca & Alejandro Marin Excerpts from: Animalario de María Fernanda Cardoso. Bogotá: Seguros Bolívar, 2013. p5 Exhibition: May 20 - June 5
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PREVIOUS PAGE: María Fernanda Cardoso with her work
Eucalyptus Gumnuts Kuru Alala, Photo credit: Jillian Nalty
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LEFT: María Fernanda Cardoso
Emu Flag #1, 2007 emu feathers, fibreglass netting, metal rod, glue 209 x 180 x 20 cm RIGHT: María Fernanda Cardoso
Reversible B (Emu rectangle worn), 2006-2008 180 x 120cm
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María Fernanda Cardoso: Timeline CALABAZAS
1987 — Moves to NY from Bogota, Colombia – completes Masters of Fine Arts, Sculpture at Yale University 1990. CORN COIL AMERICAN MARBLE
1990 Arte Colombiano de los 80: Escultura. Centro Colombo Americano. Bogota, Colombia.
CARDOSO FLEA CIRCUS (1994-2000)
2006
1992
CROWN FOR A CHIBCHA PRINCESS
Collection: Perez Art Museum, Miami
1994
1990
1989
2003 Zoomorphia: María Fernanda Cardoso. MCA Museum of Contemporary Art. Sydney
2002
1999 Modern Starts: People, Places, Things, Museum of Modern Art. New York, U.S.A
1994 Ante America. (Touring exhibition). Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, Bogota, Colombia. Collection: Tate Modern, London and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
BUTTERFLY DRAWINGS SERIES (2002-2003)
CEMETERY / VERTICAL GARDEN (1992-1999)
II Bienal de Bogotá. Museo de Arte Moderno. Bogota, Colombia. First Prize Collection: DAROS Latinamerica Collection Returns to Bogota. 1991 — Moves to California.
Cardoso Flea Circus, live performances and exhibitions including , San Francisco Exploratorium, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Sydney Opera House. Collection : Tate Modern, London, UK WOVEN WATER / SUBMARINE LANDSCAPE (1994-2003)
2003 Woven Water. 50th International Art Exhibition Venice Biennale. ILLA Pavillion, curated by Irma Aristizábal. 2015 Contingent Beauty: Contemporary Art from Latin America. The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, USA. Collection: Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston 1997 — Moves to Sydney.
EMU SERIES (2006-2009)
IT’S NOT SIZE THAT MATTERS IT IS SHAPE (2008-2011)
SANDSTONE POLLEN (2014-2016)
Museum of Copulatory Organs (MoCO). 18th Biennale of Sydney. Sydney, Australia.
International Convention Centre ICC, Darling Harbour, Sydney. Commissioned by Lend Lease.
Collection: National Gallery of Australia MARATUS SERIES (2014-PRESENT)
On the Origin of Art, Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). Hobart, Tasmania. Collection: Tate Modern, London and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney
2015
2009
2014
2008
MUSEUM OF COPULATORY ORGANS (MOCO) (2008-2012)
GUMNUTS KURU ALALA (2009-21)
WHILE I LIVE I WILL GROW (2015-2018)
2011 Kuru Alala, Tjampi Desert Weavers residency
Green Square Public Art Program Commissioned by the City of Sydney Council.
2009-12 Kuru Ala: Eyes Open Tjanpi Dessert Weavers. María Fernanda Cardoso, Alison Clouson – a nation-wide touring exhibition
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Agua Tejida Blanca / Woven Water White, 2003 Blue Starfish, metal dimensions variable Included as Colombia’s representation in the 50th International Art Exhibition Venice Biennale. ILLA Pavillion, curated by Irma Aristizábal. Venice, Italy.
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Yang Yongliang: Allegory of the cave
MAR/APR 2021
In the lead up to his June exhibition, Yang Yongliang chats about New York and its influence on his work.
Yang Yongliang Early Spring, 2019 giclee print on fine art paper 200 x 135 cm edition of 7 + 2 AP
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Yang Yongliang: Allegory of the cave
YOU MOVED TO NEW YORK FROM SHANGHAI IN 2018. WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
Yang Yongliang ( YYL)/ I moved to New York from Shanghai in the summer of 2018. I was thrilled to find a cozy studio office in Garment District in midtown Manhattan. It was a dream come true. Throughout the turbulent year of 2020, I stayed in the city and experienced the ups and the downs with it. In the hardest time, I’ve seen New York’s vulnerability as well as its strength. New York used to be a dreamland to me. But after 2020, it started to feel like home. I grew a sense of conviction with New York along with its hardship. Strangely, it gives me a sense of belonging. From February 2020 until now, small businesses moved out from Manhattan one after another. By the time my lease ended in November, most of my neighbours on my floor were gone. To me, it also doesn’t make sense to keep an office aside from home. I extended my office lease until my home lease ended, before leaving Manhattan by the end of January 2021. Now I’m happily relocated in a loft space in Long Island City, Queens. Moving to Queens is liberating, I have to admit! DO YOU WORK PRIMARILY USING A COMPUTER? WHAT KIND OF STUDIO DO YOU HAVE? WHAT WOULD YOUR DREAM STUDIO BE?
YYL/ Yes, on daily basis I work primarily using a
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computer. At the moment, I have a home office with many screens in it, in which I refer to as my cave. I like my cave for what it is right now. However, due to the travel restriction that have pretty much grounded me for a year, my dream studio would be the same cave with mobility. It would be wonderful if the cave can travel freely.
HOW DO CONCEPTS FORM FOR YOU? YYL/ I believe good concepts form naturally. Concepts
form naturally for me, at least. The one thing I know to do is to be patient with myself. I also believe that concepts are very personal. It has to do with the places one has lived in, the cultures one has experienced, the languages one has spoken and the people one has cared for. I try not to change the concepts before new concepts were naturally formed. Recently I’ve been thinking about a new series of works that are more deeply tied to nature. Even though I still live in the city, I don’t necessarily interact with it. Instead, I go to upstate New York every other week for open air. Nature has given me new impact in the year of 2020. WHAT ARE YOU READING RIGHT NOW? YYL/ A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking), Homo
Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Yuval Noah Harari), and Killing Commendatore (Haruki Murakami). Exhibition: June 10 - July 3
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“I also believe that concepts are very personal. It has to do with the places one has lived in, the cultures one has experienced, the languages one has spoken and the people one has cared for.”
INTERVIEW
Yang Yongliang in New York City.
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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
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n C o p e // J e n n i f e r H e r d // G o r d o n H o o k e y // L a u r i e N i l s e n // V e r n o n A
UQ ART MUSEUM
Last Word:
Do you collect? Robert Postema and Dr Patricia Jungfer
W
hether it is the opening of a commercial gallery’s latest offering or a curated exhibition at a public gallery, contemporary art has its protocols and rituals. The attendees are frequently dressed in a neutral colour, more probably than not in black, so as not to overwhelm the art that is on display. If you go to these events often enough, the faces become familiar. There is an acknowledging nod and smile. You start to chat with others. Connections and commonalities are explored, with the work closest to you often the focus of a shared commentary before the ritual of engagement follows a predictable path.
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Following preliminaries, the conversation moves on to ‘have you bought anything in the show’ (commercial exhibitions) or ‘are you familiar with the artist’ (public exhibitions). Not infrequently, the question then arises ‘are you a collector?’ We can recall the first time this question was posed. We looked at each other and the provocateur, not knowing what to answer. As time has gone by, we understand we do ‘collect’. To us it means supporting a sector of the community that is brave and prepared to document and comment on the issues of our time. It also means we have a hopeless addiction to buying art. Of course, and almost inevitability having made the ‘we are collectors’ admission, the next question is ‘what is the focus of your collection’ Our hearts would sink again
because we would then have to confess that there is no focus, no theme and we cannot even stick to a genre. Behind our cheery façade, we worry ‘what does the person asking this question make of us’ because we have an ‘eclectic’ collection. The polite description of what we have accumulated over the years. We admire the collector who sets out to buy only women artists, time-based media art or some other defined or erudite theme. We are in awe of the discipline that comes with buying exclusively conceptual or minimalist work. However, these are not characteristics we possess. Alas, as well as having little self-control, we appear to have no focus in our collection. Initially we would then smile and quickly shift the conversation to what the other person’s focus was. We knew this was safer ground and terminate the squirming discomfort that reminded us of our childhood and being caught being naughty or undisciplined. We don’t worry about this question anymore. We have worked out we just like seeing, experiencing and immersing ourselves in contemporary art. We can cope with the dreaded question now. We can even afford a knowing smile, when it comes up. We do in fact have a theme to our collection. It reflects who we are and how we view the world. No, we don’t collect one type of art or one medium or whatever. We just collect what we love and what speaks to us!
Sydney Ball, Infinex #45 (2019), in Robert and Patricia’s home.
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“As time has gone by, we understand we do ‘collect’. To us it means supporting a sector of the community that is brave and prepared to document and comment on the issues of our time. It also means we have a hopeless addiction to buying art.”
Tony Albert, Brothers (The Prodigal Son) 1 (2020), in Robert and Patricia’s home.
Sanné Mestrom, Garden commission (2016), in Robert and Patricia’s garden.
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Quick Curate:
Renewel
Grant Stevens The Waterfalls III, 2016 archival ink on archival paper 82.5 x 55 cm edition of 3 + 2AP AUD $1,950
Sam Leach Boucher x Superstudio, 2020 oil on wood 50 x 50 cm AUD $18,700
Sam Jinks Untitled (Babies), 2012 silicone, pigment, resin, human hair 36 x 36 x 18 cm edition 3 of 3 + 2AP AUD $38,500
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Up Next
TONY ALBERT CONVERSATIONS WITH MARGARET PRESTON 18.03.21
GLENN BARKLEY THE URN OF BITTER PROPHECY 08.04.21
SANNÉ MESTROM THE BODY IS A VERB 15.04.21
JUNE
MAY 20.05.21
María Fernanda Cardoso Gumnuts and Sandstone
10.06.21
Yang Yongliang
10.06.21
Jeremy Sharma
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.
Tony Albert, History Repeats, 2020 acrylic and vintage appropriated fabric on Arches paper 76 x 57 cm
SYDNEY 799 Elizabeth St Zetland, Sydney NSW 2017 Australia P +61 2 9698 4696 E art@sullivanstrumpf.com
SINGAPORE P +65 83107529 Megan Arlin | Gallery Director E megan@sullivanstrumpf.com
