PETER DAVERINGTON

October 10, 2018

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

October 10, 2018

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).

GUAN WEI

October 6, 2018

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney has announced its 2019 exhibition program, with a major installation by GUAN WEI.

In October 2019, the Museum of Contemporary Art will present 'Feng Shui', an immense 18-metre-long multi-panelled painting by Guan Wei. 'Feng Shui' will be presented alongside two of Guan Wei’s key 1989-90 series of works on paper, from the Collection.

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