Robert Owen, Split Gate, 1977, installation view from the 1978 Venice Biennale, ‘From Nature to Art, From Art to Nature’, marble, lead, aluminium, steel, Perspex, copper, electrical flex and fluorescent paint, 102 x 75 x 85cm.
CHARLES GREEN has written a brilliant essay in Kerry Gardner’s recently published book, Australia at the Venice Biennale: A Century of Contemporary Art. In his essay, Green writes on the return of three artists in 1978, two decades after Australia had withdrawn.
“By the time that Australia returned to Venice in 1978, Australian art had long become completely contemporaneous with American and European art and would remain so, with art just as innovative and significant as anywhere else. When Australia reappeared that year, it was represented by three immensely cosmopolitan, mid-career, white, male artists who refused to participate in the older tradition of Australian landscape painting of 1958. The idiosyncratic worldliness of each artist was quite a balancing act. Out of minimalism’s and conceptualism’s simple, serial structures, Ken Unsworth created an uncanny, theatrical mise-en-scene of absent bodies and dangerous suspension; ROBERT OWEN turned almost-identical geometric abstractions into luminous, metaphysical propositions; and JOHN DAVIS converted a bricolage of twigs from the bush near Mildura into five scattered, tower-like assemblages.”
Read an extract from Green’s essay here >
‘Australia at the Venice Biennale: A Century of Contemporary Art’ by Kerry Gardner is published by The Miegunyah Press.