Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 38 i Artist Profile

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IN JOE FROST’S STUDIO, WE DRINK WATER FROM HIS favourite smoked glass cups while we look at his current paintings. Most of them are unfinished canvases full of clamouring shapes, unrecognisable in content but pulsating with energy. He works on them little by little, letting one breathe while attending to another. Although many of these works are becoming pictures of places, they are painted here in the studio, through abstraction and memory. When asked “How do you know when to stop?” he replies “When the eye and the mind don’t hit any obstacles, and when the painting shows me something. In the best instances, the painting is ahead of my intentions.” Born in Sydney in 1974, Frost studied at the College of Fine Arts at the University of NSW from…

AN UNEXPECTED OUTCOME OF MY Beyogmos survey show at Wollongong Art Gallery in early 2014 was a resurrected desire to reconcile with one of my several pasts, by reconnecting with the rich cultural heritage of Vietnam. Thus in September 2014 I committed to two months in Hanoi with the aim of revisiting the art world and revising my neglected language skills. In Vietnam I strived to learn the language as often as I can: it helped me to see, think and feel from an alternative perspective. As in Australia, project opportunities come through people with aligned visions and circumstances, hence it was important for me to go on this research trip and circulate within the arts community. I believe 2014’s self-conducted residency was critical to the opportunities that arose for 2015…

THIS NEW BOOK PROFILING THE enigmatic American couple, Gordon and Anne Samstag, who laid foundational stones in the Australian art industry through their bequest of the Samstag Scholarships, has been 16 years in the making. It was only supposed to take a few years, but what was initially proposed to be an essay of 3000 words has developed into a densely rich monograph of nearly 400 pages, entitled The Samstag Legacy: An Artist’s Bequest. The Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships program is a remarkable gift to the Australian art industry, enabling Australian artists to participate on an international platform. From the Samstags’ $5 million cultural bequest, The Fine Arts Trust awards international study scholarships for Australian artists to study and develop their artistic skills and talents outside…

INTERNATIONAL SHOWCASES for contemporary art are now so prolific, and frequent, that they risk falling into the “blockbuster” trap of becoming a franchise. As biennials roll out the red carpet every two years – managed by a mix of public art museums, government agencies and philanthropic supporters – city marketing, cultural tourism and urban regeneration take centre stage in a bid to draw crowds in the thousands, serving its host city a cultural menu hidden with economical and political trans fats; the unwanted cellulite dimpling the skin of the art world. The commissioning of large-scale artworks and installations has given rise to a type of “festival art”, monumentally scaled, elaborately produced and veering towards the spectacular. Consequently, the public craves an equal, if not fuller plate each biennial, and to…

UNDER THE SUN Responding to Max Dupain’s ‘Sunbaker’ image, artists reimagine the iconic photograph and its hold on Australian identity. Until 17 April 2017 State Library, Sydney, NSW www.sl.nsw.gov.au NATHAN BEARD Selected for this WA Focus exhibition, Nathan Beard explores the fluid nature of cultural identities. 1 April – 28 May 2017 Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, WA www.artgallery.wa.gov.au VERSUS RODIN Key pieces by Rodin, the pioneer of modern sculpture, are brought into conversation with more than 100 innovative works of art by contemporary artists including by Louise Bourgeois, Antony Gormley, William Kentridge, Bharti Kher, Rosemary Laing, Ugo Rondinone and Kara Walker among others. 4 March – 2 July 2017 Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, SA www.artgallery.sa.gov.au WORKS OF ART FROM WARBURTON Known for its outstanding works, the…

WHAT LED YOU TO BE AN ARTIST? From a young age I was obsessed with drawing. My older brother, Tim McMonagle, is an artist, and he went to art school before me and opened up that idea of, yes, that is something I can do. Growing up as the youngest of six kids, you would have constantly been playing catch-up. What is your relationship with your brother like today? We are quite close, we shared a studio for many years and we are still in the same building with our studios at the moment. We give each other feedback with our work and it is quite handy to have someone as close, as you can trust they are going to be quite honest. What attracted you to watercolour? In art…

“Setting the whole thing up is like a performance and you just feel so silly, but you’ve got to have the belief that it’ll make sense, it’s that leap of faith. ANNA PLATTEN’S IMPETUS TO TELL ENGAGING stories led her to early Western high narrative painting traditions, partly for their craftsmanship where she says “you can see the glistening on nails”, and mostly for their symbolism. Stirred to tears by a Flemish painting that she saw in Antwerp, although its religious meanings eluded her, she was captivated by the notion that “everybody in that era was so engaged with that story, and now we live in a time when we don’t have that connection with each other, that shared history of what symbols mean.” Reflecting on her creative process, her…

EVERY NOW AND THEN AN ARTIST arrives on the scene and disrupts it much like a meteorite illuminates the night sky in one intense, extended moment. Such was the impact of American painter, James Doolin, in Australia in the mid-1960s. Yet Doolin’s contribution may seem almost apocryphal. First, because he lived in Australia for just a brief period (1965-67) and his intriguing career continued on after his return to the US, lasting until his untimely death in 2002. Secondly, because the work for which he was known in Australia was largely misunderstood, caught up as it was in the then stoush between “hard-edge” abstraction and the rest. Doolin was also “apocryphal” in the sense that many of us at the time thought we knew Jim even when we didn’t. I…

@ lopes_studio Artists on the Western Front, Painting trip/ exhibition to the battlefields of the First World War, April 24th – May 5th, France/Belgium Island of Misfits, Solo Show, 7th June – 1st July. Mitchell Fine Art, 86 Arthur St, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane www.mitchellfineartgallery.com Arnhem Land, Painting trip/exhibition to the vast wilderness area in the northeast corner of Australia’s Northern Territory with Euan McLeod, Peter Hudson & Franck Gohier. 30th August – 23rd September @ Mitchell Fine Art, www.mitchellfineartgallery.com…

EACH TIME I VISIT LONDON, ONE of my first calls is to Trafalgar Square and The National Gallery. This must be my favourite gallery anywhere – the temple of my soul! Walking through the galleries filled with the centuries of paintings that I would acknowledge with a nod, talk to with admiration and at times with love, I came to a smaller gallery in the centre of the building, the Sunley Room. Here is the Australia’s Impressionists exhibition. These much-loved paintings at home, icons of Australian art, seem to have shrunk in the presence of their forebears. They seemed light years away from the 400 years of painting that I had walked past. And “light” is the operative word. Tom Roberts’ ‘Trafalgar Square’ (c. 1884), strategically placed opposite the entrance,…

MY PAINTINGS ARE PRIMARILY concerned with the relationship between decorative and expressive gesture. Using gesture, a focus is drawn to the materiality of a work with attention to its whole structure – in other words, the fixtures and supports, the edges of a canvas, as well as its surface. I use decorative gesture and exemplify certain motifs in order to create the nolonger- decorative, and to objectively make a work look garish. These gestures and the materiality of a work are anti-technical and suggest a quickly finished work, boredom found during production, or a painting that sits in limbo without willingness for it to develop any further. This stage before a realised image – a gesture similar to a clouded thought – is fundamental to all my works. These motifs…