IMANTS TILLERS Artist Talk @ Bundanon Trust

ARTIST TALK SUNDAY

In NSW this weekend, Imants Tillers is giving an artist talk at Bundanon.

Tillers will be in conversation with Sophie O’Brien (Head of Curatorial & Learning, Bundanon), exploring the cultural landscape for young Australian artists in the 1980s, both here and internationally.

In 1984, Tillers was one of three young artists in the exhibition An Australian Accent, presented at MoMA PS1, New York. Also including the work of Mike Parr and Ken Unsworth, the exhibition was one of several to articulate new Australian art to an international audience.

Tillers’ incredible painting ‘Pataphysical man’ (1984), from the collection of the AGNSW, is currently on display at Bundanon Art Museum as part of the group exhibition ‘Wilder Times: Arthur Boyd and the mid-1980s landscape’. ⁠

Tickets available here >

Imants Tillers: In Conversation
📅 Sunday, 6 October, 11am-12pm
📍 Bundanon, 170 Riversdale Road, Illaroo

IMANTS TILLERS featured in 'A Bigger View' at HOTA, Gold Coast

IMANTS TILLERS' iconic 1985 painting Mount Analogue is on display in A Bigger View at HOTA on the Gold Coast. Made possible through the Australian Government’s Sharing the National Collection initiative, this exhibition brings monumental works of art from the National Gallery of Australia to Queensland, where it will be on display for two years.

Mount Analogue has travelled with David Hockney's piece, A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998). These two works will be on display with major works from Bridget Riley, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori and William Robinson from HOTA's Collection.

IMANTS TILLERS' Pataphysical man (1984) on display Bundanon Trust

IMANTS TILLERS' magnificent Pataphysical man (1984) is currently featured in Wilder Times: Arthur Boyd and the Mid-1980s Landscape at Bundanon Trust.

Responding to fourteen powerful paintings by Arthur Boyd, WILDER TIMES brings together over 60 works by seminal Australian artists from the same time Boyd created this momentous body of work. The exhibition provides a window into a period of cultural dynamism in Australia, when ideas of landscape, land ownership and environmental protection were actively interrogated.

The exhibition continues until 13 October 2024.

IMAGE: Wilder Times: Arthur Boyd and the Mid-1980s Landscape. Installation view. Bundanon, 2024. Photography: Courtesy of Bundanon / Zan Wimberley

IMANTS TILLERS Reviewed by John McDonald in the Sydney Morning Herald

'Imants Tillers: The Mosman Years' has been reviewed by John McDonald in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Imants Tillers: The Mosman Years looks at the works produced from 1981-89, when the artist and his family lived on Sydney's North Shore. Tillers started to experiment with small, store-bought canvas boards that could be laid side-by-side, like tiles, to create wall-sized compositions.

The survey exhibition continues until Sunday 4 Feb at Mosman Art Gallery

Photo: Jacquie Manning

'Imants Tillers: The Mosman Years' opens at Mosman Art Gallery

Today marks the opening of 'IMANTS TILLERS: THE MOSMAN YEARS' curated by Kelly McDonald at the Mosman Art Gallery in Sydney.

The exhibition explores the pivotal moment in the 1980s when Tillers began creating large-scale canvasboard paintings while living in a small Federation duplex in Mosman. IMANTS TILLERS: THE MOSMAN YEARS features 25 works from the last four decades, and will include the first canvasboard work Tillers ever created in 1981.

Imants Tillers, View, 1989, oilstick, gouache, synthetic polymer paint on 72 canvasboards, nos. 21007–21078 228.6 x 304.8 cm Private collection

Imants Tillers awarded the University of Sydney's 2023 Alumni Award

Congratulations to Imants Tillers who has been awarded the University of Sydney's 2023 Alumni Award for Cultural Contribution. Awarded to alumni who have achieved excellence in the arts, culture or creative sectors, it recognises those whose efforts have promoted the understanding and values of cultural diversity.

Though he was studying architecture, Tillers was drawn to the arts and the culture around the newly-formed Tin Sheds galleries. The style he developed in this period has made him one of Australia's most recognisable post-modern artists.

Tillers recent exhibition at ARC ONE Gallery ‘After De Chirico’ explored a relationship which transcends the usual definitions of homage and influence. Maintaining an intimacy with the work of Giorgio de Chirico over five decades, Tillers interest in de Chirico is spurred on not only by the early so-called ‘metaphysical’ paintings that made him legendary amongst the early Surrealist artists, but also the once-controversial, much reviled ‘late’ paintings.

IMANTS TILLERS 'Credo' reviewed in Artist Profile

IMANTS TILLERS’ selected essays ‘Credo’ is reviewed by Brooke Boland in the newest issue of ARTIST PROFILE:

‘The recycling, mosaic-like, pieced together nature of Tillers’s practice is similar to the pieced together feeling of his new collection of essays, ‘Credo’, 2023, published by Giramondo Publishing. “Everything exists to end up in a book,” he quotes the French poet Mallarme in this essay “Journey to Nowhere,” 2018. Tillers’s various essays and contributions to journals including Art & Text, Art and Australia, and Heat, among others, art no exception.” – Brooke Boland on ‘Credo’ in Artists Profile

Pick up a copy of Credo when visiting Tillers’ new exhibition AFTER DE CHIRICO at ARC ONE Gallery.

IMANTS TILLERS 'Thrown into the World' Documentary Screening

SPECIAL CINEMA EVENT

Please join Art Atlas for an exclusive screening of the feature-length documentary 'Thrown into the World', directed by Antra Cilinska of Juris Podnieks Studio , which offers unique insight into Tilers’ creative proces and cross-cultural identity.

See the documentary at Kino Cinemas in the CBD, before heading across to ARC ONE to view Tillers' current exhibition 'After de Chirico'. Bookings essential (see below for details)

DATE: Wednesday 31st May
TIME: 10am for a 10.30am start
VENUE: Kino Cinema , 45 Collins St, Melbourne BOOKING: Places are strictly limited. Please book via this link to reserve your ticket: htps:/www.trybooking.com/CIFUU

IMANTS TILLERS - After De Chirico Exhibition Opening & Artist Talk

OPENING THIS AFTERNOON

IMANTS TILLERS: AFTER DE CHIRICO opens at ARC ONE Gallery today, Saturday 27 May, 3-5pm.

In a relationship that transcends the usual definitions of homage and influence, Imants Tillers has maintained an intimacy with the work of Giorgio de Chirico over five decades.

Please join us for an artists talk with Ian McLean and Clare Fuery-Jones on Tillers, de Chirico and the nature of influence and homage in his work.

IMANTS TILLERS in 'Photography and the Performative'

Imants Tillers has a fascinating work comprised of 189 Polaroid images that is now on display at 'Photography and the Performative' exhibition at the Chau Chak Wing Museum in Sydney curated by Katrina Liberiou.

'If I close my eyes' (2021) is a conceptual work comprises Polaroids made between 1980 and 1982. Tillers documented those he encountered, asking his sitters to close their eyes. Interspersed with these portraits are landscape scenes depicting the view from his flat overlooking Sirius Cove.

IMANTS TILLERS, [details from:] If I close my eyes, 2021, 189 Polaroids 1980–1982, nos. 112966–113161, 10.7 x 8.9 cm (each); 75 x 239 cm (overall). Collection: University of Sydney

IMANTS TILLERS presenting at The Bendigo Writers Festival

BENDIGO WRITERS FESTIVAL

Today and tomorrow (5-6 May 2023), IMANTS TILLERS is speaking at two events at the Bendigo Writers Festival.

Catch Tillers with art historian Ian McLean on the topic of 'Art and Influence', today at 1PM.

Tomorrow at 3PM, Tillers will join botanist Tim Entwisle and festival director Rosemary Sorensen as they discuss the significance of 'Influence and Inspiration' in their careers.

IMANTS TILLERS 'Credo' Reviewed in the Canberra Times & Saturday Paper

Imants Tillers' ‘Credo’ was reviewed by Sasha Grishin in The Canberra Times and Miriam Cosic in The Saturday Paper last Sat 18 Feb.

“Now aged in his early 70s, there is a distilled wisdom in his late pronouncements, where he makes no attempt to dazzle or impress the reader and admits that, as a university graduate, he had never heard of Duchamp and that many of the breaks and changes in his career came about by chance. He frequently happened to be at the right time at the right place and encountered people who were to have a profound impact on his art.” - Sasha Grishin

Click the link to read the articles >

NEW RELEASE: IMANTS TILLERS 'Credo'

NEW RELEASE

A collection of Imants Tillers' writing, 'Credo: Selected Essays', has just been published by Giramondo Press:

"These essays express an aesthetic credo which has larger implications for both literature and art created out of the experience of migration . . . What he calls ‘the revolt of the margins’ is evident in the provocative nature of his writing too, in its wit and irony and intelligence."

Perfect Christmas gift for the art lover in your life. Available now in stores and on Giramondo Publishing’s website.

IMANTS TILLERS features in current exhibition 'Captivate: 100 Years of the National School'

IMANTS TILLERS, Millers Point Morning, 2022, Synthetic polymer paint, gouache on 9 canvas boards.

IMANTS TILLERS painted ‘Millers Point Morning’ (2022) for the exhibition ‘Captivate: 100 Years of the National School’, which is currently on display at NAS Gallery. Imants completed two ‘Summer Schools’ at East Sydney Tech / National Art School when he was 16 and 17 years old. This nine panel painting quotes the work ‘Millers Point, Morning’ 1952 by John Passmore who was an influential painting teacher at ESTC in the late 1950s.

SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY 2022

Welcome to ARC ONE at SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY

From today will be showing a selection of major artworks from some of Australia's most significant contemporary practitioners, including PAT BRASSINGTON, LYNDELL BROWN / CHARLES GREEN, PETER DAVERINGTON, MURRAY FREDERICKS, JANET LAURENCE, HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT, DANI MARTI, JULIE RRAP, IMANTS TILLERS, GUAN WEI, CATHERINE WOO, and JOHN YOUNG. We are also proud to be presenting, for the first time, the work of internationally acclaimed artist DESMOND LAZARO.

Our booth is showcasing brand new artworks, alongside some of the most iconic works from ARC ONE Gallery, in celebration of these artists and their significant contribution to contemporary art in this country.

Fourth anniversary of IMANTS TILLERS retrospective at the Latvian National Museum of Art

Four years ago this month 'Imants Tillers: Journey to Nowhere' opened at the Latvian National Museum of Art. Celebrating the outstanding carer of IMANTS TILLERS. The retrospective presented 64 artworks spanning 50 years of practice, with an opening address given by Rupert Myer.

"The images that Imants creates for us are clearly not just for our visual appreciation...They are puzzles to be figured, maps to be decoded. The placement of words and expressions requires a high level of viewer participation. We linger on a phrase. Its position on the canvas matters. Its adjacency with another phrase or a graphic is a clue." - Rupert Myer.

IMANTS TILLERS on display at THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF AUSTRALIA

IMANTS TILLERS, Mount Analogue, 1985, oil and synthetic polymer paint, 279 x 571 cm.

IMANTS TILLERS’s momentous, postmodern icon ‘Mount Analogue’ (1985), in The National Gallery of Australia’s new collection display.

Pictured here with its forebear, Eugene von Guérard’s majestic landscape ‘North-east view from the northern top of Mount Kosciusko’ (1863).

Congratulations to IMANTS TILLERS and the late KUMANTYE (M.N) JAGAMARA

Imants Tillers and Kumantye (M.N.) Jagamara, The Call from Papunya, 2018, 202.2 × 283.5 cm. Tate, London

We are thrilled to announce that ‘The Call from Papunya’ (2018) has been acquired by Tate, London. The painting is one of 16 collaborative works completed by Kumantye (M.N.) Jagamara and IMANTS TILLERS over the past two decades. This is the second work by Imants to be acquired, following the acquisition of ‘Kangaroo Blank’ (1988) in 2018, and the first work by Jagamara to be acquired by Tate.

The central element in ‘The Call from Papunya’ is Possum Love Story – a tale of forbidden love which has been told for thousands of years in Jagamara’s Warlpiri tradition. It is one of the five stories depicted in his iconic painting ‘Five Dreamings’ (1984).

Imants has expanded the central image with line-work referencing both the Papunya artist Kenny Williams and the Italian Metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico. Fragments of philosophy and poetry have also been incorporated.

The painting’s title refers to Jagamara’s habit of calling Brisbane daily (and occasionally Cooma) on the public telephone at Papunya general store, to chat about his work, enquire about projects, update his needs for shopping or simply to give a weather report.

IMANTS TILLERS FINALIST IN 2020 WYNNE PRIZE

Congratulations to IMANTS TILLERS who is a finalist in the Wynne Prize 2020! His work Prayer for rain will be on view at the AGNSW from 26 September. 

Read Imants’ poignant artist statement below:

“A flower meadow is an unusual subject for an Australian landscape – we are more familiar with the harsh realities of fire, drought and flood. Yet such gentle, quiet and fecund places exist on our continent – notably in the subalpine areas of NSW, Victoria and Tasmania. And indeed proximity to the summer meadows of the Kosciusko National Park was one of the reasons I moved with my family to Cooma, 25 years ago. But here the meadow of daisies is also a metaphor for the self. So we pray: ‘MINE THOU LORD OF LIFE, 
SEND MY ROOTS RAIN’.”

More information >

Imants Tilers, Prayer for rain, 2020, synthetic polymer paint, gouache on 54 canvas boards, 227 x 212 cm

FRAN CLARK INTERVIEWED FOR ART COLLECTOR MAGAZINE

Art Collector recently visited ARC ONE Director Fran Clark to see what's in our gallery stockroom.

Hear what she has to say about some key works that are currently available here.

“The key thrill of an artwork’s power is if the work makes me ask questions, questions about wanting to know why and what the connections are”, she says, invoking the diverse references in IMANTS TILLERS’ work Stillness Speaks.