Portrait of Maria Fernanda Cardoso by Janie Barrett, Courtesy of The Sydney Morning Herald.
A wonderful feature article on MARIA FERNANDA CARDOSO in The Sydney Morning Herald today.
Quoted in the article, "I'm free. Being an artist for me is about freedom. I do anything I want. Any thought I have I can pursue. Nobody tells me what to do, only myself and my curiosity," she says.
ARC ONE is delighted to present Chivalry, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, Guan Wei.
An opening reception will be held on Wednesday 14 November, 6-8pm, with opening remarks by Claire Roberts.
Guan Wei is a storyteller. Throughout his more than 30-year art practice, his distinctive style
has combined Australian and Chinese influences to weave profound narratives of loss, migration, identity, colonisation, and place. Working across painting, sculpture and installation, he merges eastern and western philosophies, art histories, eras and empires, signs and symbols, to create imaginary cross-cultural realms that explore contemporary issues and hopes for a better world.
Guan Wei’s latest exhibition at ARC ONE Gallery presents three bodies of work: Chivalry, a suite of paintings laden with philosophical meaning; Mascot, playful bronze sculptures depicting humorously anthropomorphised mythical creatures; and the monumental Treasure Hunt, a major new tapestry woven by the Australian Tapestry Workshop.
In Chivalry, Guan Wei examines ideas of honour and virtue through a series of theatrical tableaux inspired by the Middle Ages. “I have been seeking new directions in my painting for many years”, says the artist, “exploring new possibilities and making breakthroughs from my existing style toward new territory. Quite unexpectedly, reading and learning about the knights of the Middle Ages was a turning point in me. I was mesmerised by their stories.” Utilising the flowing rhythm of Eastern ink painting, calligraphy, and sketching, Guan Wei brings the realm of medieval fantasy to life. Noble jousts, sword-fights, romantic adventures, and heroic gestures, play out across his canvases evoking ideals and values that were once used to navigate lives. In the face of increasing alienation, digitalisation, virtual reality, and global change, Chivalry invites us to reflect on our humanity.
Woven by Chris Cochius, Pamela Joyce, Jennifer Sharpe and Cheryl Thornton from the Australian Tapestry Workshop, Treasure Hunt is inspired by a large painted mural from Guan Wei’s exhibition Other Histories at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney in 2006. Drawing on Chinese and European mythologies, the work considers ‘other’ histories and the intersection of Indigenous and colonial cultural narratives. Through the depiction of the oceans, islands and desert interiors, Guan Wei references navigation, exploration, migration and the influence of, and response to, globalisation.
Guan Wei was born 1957, Beijing, China, and lives and works in Beijing and Sydney. He has won many awards, including the 2015 Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery; Sulman Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2002; and was selected for the prestigious 2009 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, National Gallery of Victoria. Solo exhibitions include: Cosmotheoria, White Box Art Center 798 Art District Beijing, 2017; Guan. Perspective, Scene Sense Art Gallery, Beijing, 2017; Salvation, ARC ONE Gallery 2016; Archaeology, ARC ONE Gallery, 2014; Spellbound, He Xiang Ning Art Museum, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, China, 2011; The Enchantment, ARC ONE Gallery, 2012; Other histories: Guan Wei’s fable for a contemporary world, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 2006– 07; Looking, Greene St Studio, New York, 2003; Zen Garden, Sherman Contemporary, Sydney, 2000; and Nesting, or the Art of Idleness 1989–1999, MCA, Sydney, 1999.
Major group exhibitions include: The Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes exhibition, AGNSW, Sydney, 2017; Closing the Distance, Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, Bundoora, Victoria, 2017; Borders, Barriers, Walls, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2016; Collaborative Witness: Artists responding to the plight of the refugee, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2011; Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai Museum, China, 2010; 10th Havana Biennial, Cuba, 2009; The China Project, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2009; Handle with Care, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Adelaide, 2008; Face Up: Contemporary Art from Australia, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin, 2003–04; Sulman Prize Exhibition, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 2002; Osaka Triennial, Japan, 2001; Man and Space, Kwangju Biennale, South Korea, 2000; Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999.
In 2019 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, will present a major installation of Guan Wei’s work, which will include his 18-metre-long multi-panelled painting, Feng Shui, and works from the MCA collection.
Guan Wei, Chivalry No. 11, 2018, acrylic on linen, 180 x 140cm.
Guan Wei, Chivalry No. 1, 2018, acrylic on linen, 130 x 80cm.
Guan Wei, Chivalry No. 5, 2018, acrylic on linen, 130 x 180cm.
Honey Long & Prue Stent, Rock Form III, archival pigment print, edition of 5, 72 x 108cm.
HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT are featured in issue 45 of Artist Profile, out today.
The collaborative artists have written about their process: "As two friends who first started working together when we were sixteen years old, our artistic process sprung from a place of curiosity, impulse and desire. This sense of playfulness has become the foundational element with which we continue to work. Although precognitive at the time, we seemed to recognise a mutual desire to explore our female bodies, sexuality and surrounding natural environment as a way of feeling connected to the space we were occupying."
PETER DAVERINGTON was interviewed on 2 November by ABC Sydney’s Christine Anu for her Evenings radio program. Peter had an in-depth conversation with Christine about The Raft of the CLAN, the work’s commission and unveiling at Parliament House, his practice, the meaning of the different elements within the work, and his beginnings as a graffiti artist.
You can listen to the interview here:
Peter Daverington, Raft of the Clan, oil and enamel on canvas, 260 x 397cm.
An interview with PETER DAVERINGTON's on his epic painting commission 'Raft of the Clan' has been featured on Daily Review. The work was recently unveiled by former Prime Minister Julia Gilliard at Parliament House, Canberra and commissioned by Care Leavers Australasia Network.
In the interview, Peter describes the creative process behind his work: "It was a very hard brief to be given. How do you represent institutional child sexual abuse? It’s really an impossible task. It took me a long time to reflect upon before I came up with a suitable approach. I focused on the idea of survival and chose the metaphor of a raft at sea to represent that. I wanted to make a painting that was victorious over the predators, an image of strength, pride, activism and defiance. A big part of my work is to look through art history and engage with the lineage of traditional masters in the craft of painting. So I went in search of raft paintings. I settled on Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, which portrayed French sailors abandoned by the government as they cling to life on a makeshift raft at sea. I saw a strong connection there. Our countries children were abandoned by the very government that was entrusted with their care, left to fend for themselves against predators who hide beneath the cover of religion and state."
Works from MARIA FERNANDA CARDOSO's series 'It's Not Size That Matters, It Is Shape' have been included in the exhibition 'Digital Animalities: Rendering' at CONTACT Gallery in Toronto, Canada. The exhibition explores human animal interactions, with a focus on the evolving space of animality in contemporary digital culture.
The exhibition is now open and continues until 15 December.
Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Intromitent organ of the Thelbunus mirabilis (Tasmanian harvestman) Opiliones from the series It’s not size that matters, it is shape, 2008-09, resin, glass, metal, 28 x 6 x 6cm.
PHAPTAWAN SUWANNAKUDT's work is included in the Bangkok Art Biennale. Her installation 'Knowledge in Your Hands, Eyes and Minds' consists of a soundscape, herbal aroma and a hanging mirror, as well as murals and paper cutouts of Thai folklore characters.
The Bangkok Art Biennale continues until 3 February, 2019.
Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Knowledge in Your Hands, Eyes and Minds, Installation View, Bangkok Biennale, 2018.
Jacky Redgate, Light Throw (Mirror) #4, 2009-10, C-Type phoograph (hand-printed from original negative), facemounted to UV perspex.
JACKY REDGATE and ANNE ZAHALKA are included in the exhibition Robyn Stacey: as still as life. Drawn from MGA's collection, Jacky Redgate and Anne Zahalka's works are part of an exploration of still life photographs, which place the genre and Robyn Stacey's work into context.
The exhibition opens 24 November and continues until 3 March 2019.
GUAN WEI has curated the exhibition Niche Construction at Vermilion Art, including the work of CYRUS TANG.
According to Guan Wei's curatorial statement: ‘Niche Construction is an idea borrowed from evolutionary biology. It refers to the process whereby living organisms, through their activities and choices, modify their own and each other’s environment. In the context of culture and art, niche construction is a process in which individuals, although living in a unique and protected space, connect, collaborate, compete, and have influence on one another.
The artists in this exhibition come from diverse cultural backgrounds and have different lived experience. They come from or have lived in mainland China, Pakistan and Hong Kong. What they have in common is that they all currently live in Australia and have been influenced by eastern culture. The inevitable clash of cultures fosters the creation by the artist of niches in which their artistic expression can flourish. Importantly the viewers and their interactions with the art, and the impact of the art on the society at large are a vital part of niche construction’.
The exhibition continues until 10 November.
For more information, click here.
Cyrus Tang, Lacrimae Rerum - 4505.00 s, 2016, Archival pigment print, 100 x 100 cm.
A beautiful image of ANNE ZAHALKA laying down her carpet of letters from her grandmother Margarete for her exhibition The Fate of Things: Memory Objects and Art at the Sydney Jewish Museum.
Her artist statement reads: ‘Following the death of my mother in 2016, I began the melancholic task of sorting her belongings. Salvaged amongst these were a collection of letters, diaries, photographs, recipe books, embroideries and linen that had been carried across countries and oceans to finally rest here on this shore. As the child of a Holocaust survivor, I became the keeper of these family relics with only partial knowledge of the stories they contained. Sifting through this archive and working with these objects, I have developed artworks to reconstruct this fractured history, to remember those lost and to honour the bonds that bind me. As an inheritor of this trauma, I grieve for my mother, for her loss and the family I was never to know’.
The Fate of Things: Memory Objects and Art will be open from 2 November - 28 February 2019.
For more information, please click here.
Julie Rrap, Yaw, 2004, pure pigment prints on acid-free rag paper, 167 x 152 cm.
JULIE RRAP is included in the exhibition Compass at the MCA, Sydney.
Curated by Clothilde Bullen, the exhibition draws works from the MCA collection considering the trajectories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women practices in dialogue with one another. "Aboriginal artists illustrate their distinctive relationships to their cultures and Countries and provide commentary on the multiple, interlocking oppressions of what it means to be a black woman in Australia. Non-Aboriginal artists narrate concepts around the presentation of women in contemporary western society; utilising the figure and forms of the self to reflect universal themes of ‘being’ and ‘doing’ female."
Compass opens on 9 November 2018, continuing until 3 February 2019.
For more information, click here.
Cyrus Tang, Stupa (Still), 2017, 3 channel video in loop, 6.14 mins.
This weekend, as part of OzAsia Festival, three of CYRUS TANG's video works will be shown as part of a collaboration with Speak Percussion.
The project, titled Assembly Operation will be showing in the Adelaide Festival Centre from 27 -28 October 2018 and draws upon the visual, sonic and conceptual qualities of the famed Chinese one yuan note.
PETER DAVERINGTON was interviewed last Monday by Dan Bourchier of ABC Breakfast Canberra about The Raft of the Clan, the work commissioned by Care Leavers Australasia Network. The artwork, launched 22 October at The Great Hall, Parliament House, Canberra, celebrates the remarkable triumph of Care Leavers who endured cruel and abusive childhood in Australia’s Orphanages, Children’s Homes, Missions & Foster Care that were run by State Governments, Churches and Charities.
You can listen the interview here:
Congratulations HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT!
HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT’s work 'Salt Pool has been acquired for Gallery at HOTA’s collection.
The acquisition was awarded last night as part of the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award.
Honey Long & Prue Stent, Salt Pool, 2018, archival pigment print, 72 x 108cm.
Peter Daverington, Portrait of Rafael Bonachela, 2018, oil on canvas, 199 x 153cm.
Congratulations PETER DAVERINGTON for his selection as a finalist in the 2018 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize with his stunning portrait of Rafael Bonachela, the director of the Sydney Dance Company.
Cyrus Tang, A Simple Life (118), 2018, archival pigment print, 65 x 65cm.
Congratulations CYRUS TANG!
Cyrus Tang received the Colour Factory Honourable Mention for her work 'A simple life (118 minutes)', 2018 from her series 'Golden hour', as part of the William & Winifred Bowness Photography Prize.
HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT and CYRUS TANG have been selected as finalists in the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award 2018. The winner of the art price will be announced on 19 October, and an exhibition with the finalists will open on 20 October and run until 25 November at HOTA in the Gold Coast.
For more information, click here.
Honey Long & Prue Stent, Salt Pool, 2018, Archival pigment print, 106 x 157 cm
ANNE ZAHALKA will be part of Civilization: The Way We Live Now, a major photography exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea (MMCA). The exhibition, which comprises over 300 works depicting life in the 21st century, will be open from 18 October to 17 February 2019, and will then travel to different art institutions around the world, including the National Gallery of Victoria.
Zahalka will be showing her Open House series from 1995.
To view Zahalka’s Open House series, click here.
For more information, click here.
Anne Zahalka, Sunday, 2:09, 1995, Duratran and Light Box, 125 x 190 x 25 cm
Peter Daverington, Wall Street, 2018, Oil and Acrylic on canvas, 198 x 152 cm.
New York-based Australian artist Peter Daverington returns to ARC ONE with an exhibition of new paintings, titled Surface Zero.
A contemporary artist with a rare mastery of oil techniques, Peter Daverington’s practice centres on his unparalleled capacity to work across a wide range of pictorial languages and artistic styles. With a foundation in graffiti and street art, his oeuvre critically engages with legacies of Western art history from a contemporary context; seamlessly integrating a vast array of disparate images, styles and references in an aesthetic maximalism relevant to our time.
In Surface Zero, Daverington forces together opposing attitudes in art to consider the potential of images as zones of conflict. A clash of viewpoints, opinions, and perspectives plays out across his layered canvases as hard-edge abstraction, classical figuration and Romantic landscape painting are severely juxtaposed in a heady aesthetic mélange.
Surface Zero is a disaster point of explosive force. Landscapes by the great Hudson River School painter Albert Bierstadt, and figurative works by the Flemish Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens, have been deftly appropriated, with the brushwork, colour, and technique reflecting the originals as closely as possible. Bright, geometric, hard-edge line work interrupts these representational paintings creating a tension within the pictorial space between formalism and figuration. For Daverington, this interlocking of clashing styles is “a reflection on twenty-first century disorientation,” it is “like looking at life from multiple viewpoints simultaneously – whether different points in history, different cultures, different perspectives and so on. I like the stark contrasts of life, the very natural struggle between viewpoints and opinions. The only way I can express this is by trying to compress a wide range of pictorial languages to capture the bewildering spectacles of being human and of life itself.”
Peter Daverington (b. 1974, Melbourne, Australia) has held more than sixty group and solo exhibitions in Australia, Europe, the Americas, and Asia since 2003. In 2006 Daverington completed an MFA at the Victorian College of the Arts where he received the prestigious KPMG tutorship to teach in the painting department. He has received two Australia Council for the Arts project grants, in 2005 and 2010 respectively; the John Coburn Emerging Artist Award in 2008, and the Rupert Bunny Fellowship in 2011 for his first moving image work. Solo exhibitions include Daverington does de Chirico, Susan Boutwell Gallery, Munich (2017); Before the Apocalypse, Shanghai Mass Art Centre, Shanghai (2016); Iconophilia, The Lodge Gallery, New York (2015); Lacuna, Chasm Gallery, Brooklyn, New York (2015); and Weltlandschaft (2016), Because Painting (2014), From the Future with Love (2013), and Poiesis (2011), all ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne. Recent group exhibitions include Latent Content Analysis, The Lodge Gallery, New York (2017); The Oasis, Gitler_& Gallery, New York; Divine Abstraction, Justin Art House Museum, Melbourne (2016); Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2015-16); The Garden, QUT Museum, Brisbane (2015); 100 Little Deaths, Bravin Lee Programs, New York (2013); Peekskill Project V, Hudson Valley Centre of Contemporary Art, Peekskill, New York (2013); and Currents 2012 & 2014 – Santa Fe International New Media Festival, Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has been shortlisted for numerous prestigious art awards including the Moran Prize (2018), the Archibald Prize and the Sulman Prize (2014 and 2013); the Fleurieu Art Prize, (2013); and the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize (2012). His work has been acquired by several major collections, including Artbank, KPMG, MacQuarie Bank, Geelong Gallery and Gippsland Art Gallery, as well as private collections throughout Australia and abroad.
Peter Daverington lives and works in New York.
Imants Tillers, Fiction of Place, 2018, synthetic polymer paint, gouache on 132 canvas-boards nos. 106258- 106389, 279.4 x 426.72 cm.
ARC ONE is delighted to present Imants Tillers’ latest exhibition, Joy Knows No Mercy, across two locations: ARC ONE Gallery
(4 September – 6 October) and Sydney Contemporary (13 – 16 September).
As one of Australia’s most important living artists, Imants Tillers has been at the forefront of conceptual painting for over four decades. Since his first solo exhibition in 1973, he has forged a reputation as a rigorously intellectual and sophisticated artist with a singular visual language. Tillers juxtaposes layers of complex art historical, political, literary, personal, and philosophical references to create thought-provoking works that explore themes relevant to contemporary culture, identity, displacement, assimilation, and distance.
In Joy Knows No Mercy, Tillers employs his signature modular formations of small canvas-boards to form a series of profound and expansive tableaux. The monumental Fiction of Place (2018) is the centrepiece of the exhibition. It is the culmination of the artist’s Metafisica Australe series, an important chapter that explores the remarkable aesthetic connection between certain aspects
of contemporary Western Desert painting and European art. Tillers has based this large 132
panel work on Francesco Guardi’s Venetian scene, Bucentaur Departing for the Lido (c. 1775-80). However, what appears to be the sky is an appropriated section of Papunya Tula artist, Kenny Williams Tjampitjinpa’s, Kuniya Dreaming at Karriwarra (2004) which denotes a Western Desert landscape in Central Australia. Simultaneously, the interrelation of the colours and stylised zigzag patterning here evokes a de Chirico-esque rendering of water or a Post-Impressionist sky. As Tillers asserts, Fiction of Place “depicts the collision (or maybe the reconciliation) of the two worlds: the Aboriginal and the European.” This is a concept explored throughout much of his oeuvre.
The sources of Tillers’ imagery are significant. In Joy Knows No Mercy, Tillers references European artists and writers such as Guardi, de Chirico, Odilon Redon, Hilma af Klint, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Phillip Otto Runge. He has then juxtaposed these references against works by Australian and New Zealander artists such as Arthur Streeton, John Glover, Colin McCahon,
and Julian Daspher, acknowledging that distant, provincial cultures depend on imports from dominant cultures for much of their artistic inspiration and imagery. This layering of text and art references has become a powerful visual language for Tillers in his exploration of distance and issues of locality and identity, and constitutes a key feature of his practice, the ever unfolding Book of Power.
Imants Tillers has exhibited widely since the late 1960s, and has represented Australia at important international exhibitions, such as the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1975, Documenta 7 in 1982, and the 42nd Venice Biennale in 1986. Major solo surveys of Tillers’ work include Journey to Nowhere, Latvian Museum of Art, Riga (2018); Imants Tillers: works 1978–1988 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1988); Imants Tillers: 19301, at the National Art Gallery, Wellington (1989); Diaspora, National Art Museum, Riga, Latvia (1993); Diaspora in Context at the Pori Art Museum, Pori (1995); Towards In nity: Works by Imants Tillers, Museum of Contemporary Art (MARCO) in Monterrey, Mexico (1999); and in 2006 a major retrospective of his work, Imants Tillers: one world many visions, was held at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Tillers was the winner of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Wynne Prize for landscape painting for two consecutive years (2012-2013). He has received numerous awards and commissions, such as the Osaka Triennale Prize (Gold in 1993, Bronze in 1996, and Silver in 2001), and the inaugural Beijing International Art Biennale Prize for Excellence (2003).