Chris Saines, CNZM, Author at QAGOMA Blog

Ah Xian: Accomplished artist & generous donor

Posted by Chris Saines, CNZM ● 25 Oct 2019

Australian artist Ah Xian has been awarded the 2019 Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Medal in recognition of his enduring and impassioned contribution to the Gallery. We honour and celebrate the highly acclaimed artist and benefactor for his outstanding contribution to the QAGOMA Collection. His sustained and exceptional patronage places him among our most generous donors.

Ah Xian and his wife Ma Li with porcelain busts from his series ‘China China’ 1998 / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2000 with funds from The Myer Foundation, a project of the Sidney Myer Centenary Celebration 1899-1999, through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Ah Xian / Photograph: M Grimwade

A self-taught painter, Ah Xian began his career as a professional artist in the early 1980s, when his work was included in group exhibitions in his hometown of Beijing. He first came to Australia in early 1989 as a visiting scholar to the University of Tasmania’s School of Art, returning to Beijing only weeks before the violent and fatal confrontation in Tiananmen Square, which he witnessed. This deeply traumatic event prompted Ah Xian to settle permanently in Australia the following year, and informed much of his subsequent work — not least his 1991 ‘Heavy wounds’ series, a large part of which he gifted to the Gallery in 2012, following several previous private gifts from the series.

Works from Ah Xian’s ‘China China’ series, ‘Human human’ series, and ‘Metaphysica’ series on display in the Queensland Art Gallery Philip Bacon Galleries / Photographs: N Harth © QAGOMA

‘Human human – lotus, cloisonné figure 1’ 2000-01

In a conscious attempt to reconcile his heritage with life in his new country, Ah Xian began working with traditional Chinese materials such as bronze, jade, lacquer and cloisonné, applying contemporary innovations and approaches to his exploration of traditional cultural motifs and processes. The results constitute one of the most materially and aesthetically refined bodies of work in our contemporary Asian art collection.

Ah Xian’s deep engagement with this Gallery began with the inclusion of exquisite porcelain busts from his ‘China, China’ series in ‘Beyond the Future: The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT3) in 1999. In 2003, the Gallery staged a solo exhibition of Ah Xian’s works, featuring the life-sized sculpture Human human – lotus, cloisonné figure 1, a celebrated work that won the inaugural National Gallery of Australia’s National Sculpture Prize in 2001 before entering the Collection.

An extraordinary group of 36 bronze busts titled ‘Metaphysica’ featured in ‘The China Project’, presented at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in 2009, and a group of these also toured regional Queensland, visiting 14 venues between 2013 and 2015. While the busts were touring the state, an exhibition of early paintings — ‘Ah Xian: Heavy Wounds’ — was curated for the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) in 2014. Two years later, the Children’s Art Centre, GOMA presented ‘Ah Xian: Naturephysica’, an interactive project developed with the artist, which invited children and families to engage with his ideas and techniques. Currently, Human human – lotus, cloisonné figure 1 and several sculptures from the ‘China China’, ‘Human human’ and ‘Metaphysica’ series are a central feature of QAG’s Philip Bacon Galleries.

Not only is Ah Xian an accomplished artist and generous donor, but the beauty and resonance of his practice has motivated others to support the Gallery. Many more works by Ah Xian have joined the Collection with the assistance of benefactors such as Tim Fairfax AC, the Myer Foundation, Carrillo Gantner AO and Ziyin Gantner, Nicholas Jose and Claire Roberts, and the Dines Family. In itself, this is a further measure of the respect and admiration for Ah Xian’s work.

Ah Xian is the first artist to receive the Gallery Medal. Its previous recipients include former Chair of the Board of Trustees Richard (Dick) Austin AO OBE (1919–2000) who established the Asia Pacific Triennial; major donor and philanthropist Winifred (Win) Schubert AO (1937–2017); longstanding volunteer guide and donor Pamela Barnett; major donor and long-term Foundation Committee member James C. Sourris AM; and major donor Cathryn Mittelheuser AM.

In 2019, the Queensland Art Gallery Board of Trustees and I are very pleased to award the QAGOMA Medal to Ah Xian in acknowledgment of his enduring and inspiring contributions to our institution.

Chris Saines CNZM is Director, QAGOMA

Feature image: Ah Xian awarded the 2019 QAGOMA Medal / Photograph: M Grimwade

#QAGOMA

Margaret Olley’s generous life

Posted by Chris Saines, CNZM ● 17 Jun 2019

The influence of Margaret Olley AC (1923–2011) on the history of twentieth-century Australian art exceeds even the impressive body of work she produced during her lifetime. Now, as during her long and productive career, Olley remains widely admired for her luminous, life-affirming approach to painting, and the constancy and bravura with which she pursued her intimiste vision. She was equally cherished for her roles as artist’s muse, discerning mentor and tireless donor.

Russell Drysdale ‘Portrait of Margaret Olley in blue dress’

Russell Drysdale, Australia 1912–81 / Portrait of Margaret Olley in blue dress c.late 1940s — Russell Drysdale, Australia 1912–81 / *Portrait of Margaret Olley in blue dress* c.late 1940s / Pen and wash on paper / 27.5 x 19.2cm / Bequest of Mrs I F Cantwell, 1990 / Collection: Macquarie University Art Collection / Photograph: Effy Alexakis, Photowrite / © Estate of Russell Drysdale

Each of these aspects of her life in art was characterised by a demonstrative generosity and an abiding interest in others. To those who knew her, Olley was an ebullient, highly engaged figure, as frankly determined in her views about the world as she was exacting in her critiques. Art, and painting in particular, was central to Olley’s being. It enabled her to cope with the burden of loss, while allowing her to share her profound love of nature and beauty.

Olley is revered across Australia, however her lifelong connections with Brisbane is where her love of art was seeded and lifelong friendships formed. She was born in Lismore, and in her early years her family moved between northern New South Wales and north Queensland. She attended Somerville House, a Brisbane girls boarding school, and in the early 1940s studied art at Brisbane Central Technical College. There Olley gained a reputation for circumventing the strictures of the academy, albeit she later graduated with first-class honours from what would become the National Art School in Sydney. Clearly, her art teacher at Somerville, Caroline Barker, who had trained at Melbourne’s National Gallery School and was a distinguished artist in her own right, had recognised more than Olley’s uncommon facility with drawing and painting.

Olley began exhibiting as a solo artist in 1948, and for the next three decades Brian Johnstone was her Brisbane gallerist, until the Johnstone Gallery’s closure in 1972. Since 1975 Olley has been represented by Philip Bacon Galleries. Her family home Farndon, in Morry Street, Hill End (now West End), near the Brisbane River, would remain an important touchstone for Olley after it tragically burnt down in 1980 and she relocated permanently to New South Wales.

Margaret Olley painting

Margaret Olley ‘Interior IV’

Margaret Olley, Australia 1923-2011 / Interior IV 1970 — Margaret Olley, Australia 1923-2011 / *Interior IV* 1970 / Oil on composition board / 121.5 x 91.5cm / Gift of the Margaret Olley Art Trust through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2002 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Marget Olley Art Trust

Olley’s struggled with depression in Sydney in the early 2000s, she ultimately overcame it to continue painting and, among other things, settle into her role as a noted mentor. Like Caroline Barker, Olley cared deeply about the development of young artists, including Cressida Campbell and Ben Quilty, and art museum directors such as Nick Mitzevich, in whom she saw passion and promise.

Margaret Olley and Ben Quilty

Olley developed an acute sense of the endless formal and expressive possibilities of the still life, while approaching her interiors of Farndon and her later Sydney residence in Duxford Street, Paddington, as putative self portraits. Olley’s more formally structured self-portraits, often depicted in mirrors, are replete with the curios and objets d’art that filled her homes. They bear witness to her incessant collecting habit, a kind of material evidence of her relentless search for beauty. In that, it is impossible not to compare her artistic project and preoccupations with those of French Intimist artists Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) and Pierre Bonnard (1867 1947). From within the confines of a modest home-based studio, barely more home than studio, an entire world of pictorial potential emerged.

Margaret Olley ‘Bedroom still life’

Margaret Olley, Australia 1923-2011 / Bedroom still life 1997 — Margaret Olley, Australia 1923-2011 / *Bedroom still life* 1997 / Oil on board / 61 x 91cm / Purchased by Maitland Art Gallery Society, 1998 / Collection: Maitland Regional Art Gallery / © Margaret Olley Art Trust

Other intriguing currents in Olley’s work, a series of nudes of young Aboriginal women, scandalous when first shown in conservative Brisbane in 1962, adopted an individualised approach to her sitter that was unusual for the more trenchantly modernist time, only a few years on from Arthur Boyd’s now iconic ‘Brides’ series. Composed in a manner that descends from Titian in the sixteenth century to Édouard Manet in the late nineteenth, they remind us of Olley’s constant attention to the history of art when framing and rephrasing her subjects within a particular genre.

Frequent sojourns to the great galleries of Europe, particularly in France and England — one, in 1998, with the sole purpose of seeing a major new Bonnard survey at the Tate — and three visits to Papua New Guinea in the 1960s also provided inspiration for Olley. She was, on any measure, an inveterate traveller who integrated a multitude of objets d’art, exhibition posters, reproductions of favourite works and collectables into her compositions, as testament to her interest and enquiry in the world. Few Australian artists have so successfully incorporated exhibition posters and reproductions of favourite works (particularly those of Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne and Édouard Manet) into their own work to such authentic and visually compelling effect. Olley’s inclusion of these images is a generous gesture, an aesthetic homage that is as far from a postmodernist reflex as it could be. Despite an infamously chaotic domestic space in Duxford Street, in which we might otherwise strain to see these same images and objects, they became vital players in Olley’s iconography.

William Dobell ‘Margaret Olley’

William Dobell, Australia 1899–1970 / Margaret Olley 1948 — William Dobell, Australia 1899–1970 / *Margaret Olley* 1948 / Oil on hardboard / 148 x 118.5 x 13cm / Purchased 1949 / Collection: Art Gallery New South Wales / © William Dobell/Copyright Agency

Ben Quilty ‘Margaret Olley’

Ben Quilty, Australia, b.1973 / Margaret Olley 2011 — Ben Quilty, Australia, b.1973 / *Margaret Olley* 2011 / Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales / © Ben Quilty

Her friendships with artists are chronicled in their pictures of her, such as William Dobell’s 1948 Archibald Prize–winning painting, works by Russell Drysdale and Jeffrey Smart and, much later, Ben Quilty’s 2011 Archibald winning portrait. No other subject has won the Archibald twice (self portraits by Brett Whiteley and William Robinson aside), and the 63-year span between Dobell’s and Quilty’s pictures is a true reflection of Olley’s enduring influence on other artists. She is also present in Scottish-born artist Ian Fairweather’s cryptically titled painting MO, PB and the ti-tree 1965 (MO: Margaret Olley), and was one of only a few people invited to visit the reclusive artist on Bribie Island.

Ian Fairweather ‘MO, PB and the ti-tree’

Ian Fairweather, Scotland/Australia 1891–1974 / MO, PB and the ti-tree 1965 — Ian Fairweather, Scotland/Australia 1891–1974 / *MO, PB and the ti-tree* 1965 / Synthetic polymer paint on cardboard on hardboard / 87.7 x 113.3cm / Gift of Miss Pamela Bell 1996 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery / of Modern Art / © Ian Fairweather/Copyright Agency

Her love of Cézanne, Bonnard, Giorgio Morandi and Edgar Degas, among others, ripples through not only our nation’s galleries but also her own landscapes, still lifes and figuration, in which she makes stylistic tributes to these international artists. Australian artists across generations are also represented in Olley’s benefaction, including works by her forebear Ethel Carrick Fox, contemporary Margaret Cilento and younger artist Cressida Campbell.

As biographer Christine France notes in her interview in in Margaret Olley: A Generous Life, Olley followed her own vision and advised young artists to do the same.

Edited extract from ‘Introduction’, Margaret Olley: A Generous Life, QAGOMA, 2019 by Chris Saines CNZM, Director, QAGOMA.

Feature image detail: Margaret Olley painting at Farndon, 1966
#QAGOMA

Pannaphan Yodmanee draws on Buddhist cosmology to create her installations

Posted by Chris Saines, CNZM ● 8 Apr 2019

Thai artist Pannaphan Yodmanee’s extraordinary work In the aftermath 2018, commissioned for ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) was the subject of the 2019 Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) Foundation Appeal.

Watch the installation time-lapse

Pannaphan Yodmanee, Thailand b.1988 / In the aftermath 2018 / Found objects, artist-made icons, plaster, resin, concrete, steel, pigment / Site-specific installation, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) / Commissioned for ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) / Proposed for the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Collection / © Pannaphan Yodmanee / Courtesy: The artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

Hear from the artist

From the age of ten, Pannaphan Yodmanee learnt traditional painting techniques at her local Buddhist temple. She now draws on Buddhist cosmology to create site-specific installations that resemble both the details of murals in the ruins of old temples and the remains of demolished urban sites. Architectural settings are constructed using building materials, including slabs of concrete, exposed iron structures and walls primed with concrete and rocks, into which Yodmanee places objects and paints detailed imagery.

Within this raw built environment, Yodmanee delicately paints scenes depicting historical events in South-East Asia, including conquests and battles, as well as journeys across land and sea, applied with gold leaf and using the vivid blues of Buddhist painting. The works also feature handmade sculptures and icons. For her work for APT9, the artist has created thoughtful connections to local history. Yodmanee is particularly interested in the roles that faith and religion play in our lives — their capacity to foster peace and happiness, and their implication in conflict and violence.

Steeped from childhood in traditional Buddhist painting techniques, Pannaphan Yodmanee is part of a new generation of Thai artists. Yodmanee’s In the aftermath is a sharply resolved composition of painted, sculpted and found materials that coalesce into an enthralling mise en scène. Its primary foundations are demolished concrete walls, abstractly ‘grid-lined’ by steel-reinforcing wire. It is as if the impact of an earthquake has ruptured a temple courtyard, its surviving fragments of beauty reduced to ruin. At one level, In the Aftermath is a meditation on the coexistence of faith and civic life. At another, it materially collapses the splendour and pageantry of Thailand’s past in order to reflect on recent civic upheavals.

Chris Saines CNZM is Director, QAGOMA

QAGOMA Foundation

The Foundation, the Gallery’s vital fundraising body was established in 1979 and has raised more than $140 million, with generous support enabling the acquisition of more than 8,300 artworks, over 45 per cent of the State’s Collection.

The Foundation’s 40th anniversary and 2019 artwork appeal for In the aftermath 2018 was an opportunity to reflect on the generosity of the Gallery’s many supporters who have contributed over the past four decades. Find out more about the QAGOMA Foundation.

Know Brisbane through the QAGOMA Collection / Delve into our Queensland Stories / Read more about Australian Art / Subscribe to QAGOMA YouTube to go behind-the-scenes

Feature image detail: Pannaphan Yodmanee In the aftermath 2018

#PannaphanYodmanee #APT9 #QAGOMA

APT9: An open platform for artists to flourish

Posted by Chris Saines, CNZM ● 22 Dec 2018

‍While the APT has evolved significantly over its now 25 years, ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ shares many of the ambitions and ideals that so keenly influenced the first, back in September 1993. Then, as now, there was no thematic rubric. However, like the first, APT9 was built on curatorial travel and research in the field; through experiences and conversations had in studios, homes and local restaurants in global Asian cities and distant Pacific island archipelagos. What determines the character of the APT is its remarkable network of personal and professional connections. Past and present APT artists, curators, writers and untold others hand us along to otherwise unknown agents of the next – that is what keeps this exhibition series so alive.

In 1993, the Queensland Art Gallery became the first major art institution to commit itself to a triennial that would address the contemporary art of Australia, Asia and the Pacific, for at least three successive iterations. Its artworks, installations and performances — the work of 76 artists selected by a national committee from 12 countries and Hong Kong — struck a chord locally, which quickly reverberated around the region.

In many of those countries, there was little in the way of a contemporary art ecology and even less biennial or triennial exhibitions – with Gwangju established in 1995, Busan in 1998 and Fukuoka in 1999. For all their intrepidness, those early APTs needed to skillfully negotiate a range of cross-cultural issues then relatively untilled by Australia’s major art institutions, let alone major institutions elsewhere in the world. As the distinguished Thai art historian, Dr Apinan Poshyananda noted, trenchantly at the time, Asian contemporary art was not ‘invented on the banks of the Brisbane River’. There was never a want of critical tension! There were always bound to be issues around trust and integrity, familiarity and consistency, expertise and network building. Indeed, without that formative tension, the APT would not be what it is today.

Dadang Christanto’s performance For Those Who Have Been Killed from APT1

It soon became evident that an ostensibly ‘open’ platform for art and ideas – which was axiomatic to that first Triennial – could flourish despite the extraordinarily diverse range of cultural and community stakeholders. Among them, was the need to balance the strictures of the academy, in countries such as China, which had an established art pedagogy, with the demands of the next generation, who wanted to slip from its grasp. That said, what distinguished the APT’s tenor and tone from the much less crowded field of biennial and triennial exhibitions then was: its commitment to contemporary practice from our region, including commissioning and collection-building; the equivalence with which it valued and staged contemporary and customary work; a new contemporaneity; its pioneering collaborations with artist-led projects to engage with children; and, not least its depth of regular field-based research built on an expanded network of national and regional in-country collaborators.

Zico Albaiquni, Indonesia b.1987 / The Imbroglio Tropical Paradise 2018 — Zico Albaiquni, Indonesia b.1987 / *The Imbroglio Tropical Paradise* 2018 / Oil, synthetic polymer paint and giclée on canvas / 120 x 80cm / Purchased 2018. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / © Zico Albaiquni

Dadang Christanto, Indonesia b.1957 / For those: Who are poor, Who are suffer(ing), Who are oppressed, Who are voiceless, Who are powerless, Who are burdened, Who are victims of violence, Who are victims of a dupe, Who are victims of injustice 1993 installed at APT1, QAG / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 1993 with funds from The Myer Foundation and Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Dadang Christanto

That first APT had a cultural insistence and an unmistakable urgency – it was a courageous commingling of optimism and real-world pragmatism. It is impossible to forget the all-but-shamanistic performance of Indonesian artist Dadang Christanto on the opening weekend, and the upwelling of poesy and generosity it unleashed from the Brisbane public. It should come as no surprise that Dadang’s impact remains with us to this day, in a stilled homage given by Zico Albaiquni, a generation later. Similar qualities attached to Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s sombre performance for her late father, Roberto Villaneuva’s uncanny courtyard excavation, and Montien Boonma’s monument to his Buddhist faith. Today, another Thai artist, Pannaphan Yodmanee ruptures the legacy of Boonma’s spirit, and Htein Lin, from Myanmar, lays Buddhism bare. It is this sheer diversity of overlapping, intersecting and challenging of worldviews, and the new insights they bring, that energise each APT in turn. It is what inexorably links the first through to the next.

Montien Boonma, Thailand 1953-2000 / Lotus sound 1992 installed at APT1, QAG — Montien Boonma, Thailand 1953-2000 / *Lotus sound* 1992 installed at APT1, QAG / Terracotta, gilded wood / 390 x 542 x 117cm / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 1993 with funds from The Myer Foundation and Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © QAGOMA

Pannaphan Yodmanee, Thailand b.1988 / In the aftermath 2018 installed at APT9, GOMA — Pannaphan Yodmanee, Thailand b.1988 / *In the aftermath* 2018 installed at APT9, GOMA / Found objects, artist-made icons, plaster, resin, concrete, steel, pigment / Site-specific installation / Commissioned for APT9 / © Pannaphan Yodmanee / Courtesy: The artist and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore

Works of art are freighted with meanings that accrue to them in their context of production. They carry elements of political, social and moral belief systems of individual artists, communities, countries and cultures. Think of Indigenous Australian artist Jonathan Jones’s poetic response to the murmuration of birds on the wind, echoed in fleeting moments of Bangladeshi artist Munem Wasif’s becalmed tone poem to Old Dhaka. In the context of Australia’s socio-political orthodoxy, there is also the question of how to exhibit work that, were it shown at home, could be read as an incitement to political dissent or disobedience, and thus be grounds for censorship, the exile or imprisonment of the artist, or worse. That problem remains alive for the Asia Pacific Triennial to this very day, and is one with which we continue to struggle.

Jonathan Jones, Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi peoples, Australia b.1978, with Dr Uncle Stan Grant Snr AM, Wiradjuri people, Australia b.1940 / (untitled) giran 2018 installed at APT9, GOMA — Jonathan Jones, Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi peoples, Australia b.1978, with Dr Uncle Stan Grant Snr AM, Wiradjuri people, Australia b.1940 / *(untitled) giran* (and detail) 2018 installed at APT9, GOMA / Bindu-gaany (freshwater mussel shell), gabudha (rush), gawurra (feathers), marrung dinawan (emu egg), walung (stone), wambuwung dhabal (kangaroo bone), wayu (string), wiiny (wood), 48-channel soundscape / Sound design: Luke Mynott, Sonar Sound / © The artists / Photograh: Natasha Harth © QAGOMA / This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body; the NSW Government through Create NSW; and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. This project has also been supported by Carriageworks through the Solid Ground program.

Munem Wasif, Bangladesh b.1983 / Kheyal (still) 2015–18 — Munem Wasif, Bangladesh b.1983 / *Kheyal* (still) 2015–18 / Single-channel video, 16:9, 23:34 minutes, black and white, sound / © The artist and Project 88, Mumbai / With support from Bengal Foundation

Moreover, in 1993, when the drawing together of Asia and the Pacific with Australia was ground-breaking and contentious enough on its own, the inclusion of the term ‘contemporary’ was similarly loaded. Four years earlier, in 1989, when Jean-Hubert Martin’s Magiciens de la Terre opened at the Pompidou in Paris, it created a fissure in the art world with its even-handed embrace of Western and non-Western work. It was a powerful curatorial response to a question begged by William Rubin’s ‘Primitivism’ in 20^th Century Art, at MoMA in New York in 1984. Martin was arguing for a global art in which we might consider tribal practices from the Pacific and Africa as something more than sources of inspiration for the Modern avant-garde of the Euro-Americentric world.

Today, the region looks very different to the one that APT1 assayed in 1993, as Paul Keating’s Australia sought to project itself into the region, rather than overlooking it on the way to Europe or the United States. The geopolitical plates have moved radically and multiple times since, most recently with the retreat of the United States from the region and China’s rampant advance, leaving Australia on the horns of a dilemma. The countries of the Pacific – many of them small and vulnerable archipelagos of islands that have to deal first with rising sea levels – have found the geo-political spotlight like never before. Foreign infrastructure investment ‘loans’ and aid dollars have never been more tightly interwoven with economic, political and military reach. Nationalism has risen triumphant over globalism, at least for the time being, which provides cover for a troubling increase in authoritarianism.

In this climate, how should the APT continue to host the work of artists who raise their voices against these forces – the non-elemental ones? The right response is to continue to provide an open and safe platform for art and artists to flourish by widening the audience for this discourse.

Chris Saines CNZM is Director, QAGOMA. This is an edited version of Chris Saines’s welcome address to the APT9 Symposium at QAGOMA, Monday 26 November 2018.

Visit APT9

Free, and curated for audiences of all ages, ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) profiles artworks by more than 80 artists, groups and projects from over 30 countries, and is presented across the Queensland Art Gallery and the Gallery of Modern Art until 28 April 2019.

APT9 publication

Read more in The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art available online or in store. The publication represents an important and lasting document of the current artistic landscape of Asia and the Pacific.

William Robinson deconstructs ‘Rainforest and mist in afternoon light’

Posted by Chris Saines, CNZM ● 16 Apr 2018

The monumental work Rainforest and mist in afternoon light 2002 by esteemed Queensland painter William Robinson depicts the Springbrook landscape, part of Queensland’s Gold Coast Hinterland, where Robinson’s studio was situated at the time. The artist spoke to QAGOMA Director Chris Saines in his home studio in suburban Brisbane.

William Robinson, Australia b.1936 / Rainforest and mist in afternoon light 2002 — William Robinson, Australia b.1936 / *Rainforest and mist in afternoon light* 2002 / Oil on linen / 167.5 x 243.5cm / Purchased 2017. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art/ © William Robinson

CHRIS SAINES | You’ve painted a number of pictures connected to [the Springbrook National Park] area — you must have walked through it numerous times. Did you take a sketchbook with you or did you just develop a knowledge of the landscape by being in it so regularly?

WILLIAM ROBINSON | I did take a sketchbook most of the time, but my sketches were never photographic. I used words, too. They were just sort of descriptive of the day, the feeling. We went up there virtually every morning that we stayed up there.

CHRIS SAINES | There is a sense of the seasons, and of the day, in flux. You’ve got the mist in the foreground as the early morning light heats up the landscape, and areas where it looks like it’s later in the day, when the sun’s striking the mossy green edges of the Antarctic beeches. It looks at one point like small raindrops are coming down. I was getting a sense of things you would have seen over a period of time, a cumulative effect rather than a moment.

WILLIAM ROBINSON | Definitely, because most of my landscapes developed from ’84 brought in that time sequence, particularly with the ‘Creation’ series.¹ And then there were other [works] with time sequences in them, too, and then different viewpoints, even showing things that were, strictly speaking, behind you. So it never had anything to do with setting up an easel and painting.

CHRIS SAINES | You’ve used this ‘multiple’ view of the landscape as if you’re moving through it, and as you walk, your gaze shifts — because in the bush you’re constantly looking up, down and around, getting your bearings and maintaining your balance. In the picture, I see one fern in one place and another that looks like it’s on a hill in the distance. And the whole thing strikes me as though they were both folding around and through space.

WILLIAM ROBINSON | That’s true, but not like looking into or out of a goldfish bowl. There’s no magnification. It is definitely about things that are above you, probably slightly behind you, too. But the picture does still have to be constructed in a way that has a believable resolution. I have been criticised for not necessarily always having a believable resolution. I did teach perspective at the Central Technical College for quite a few years. I made use of perspective, but wasn’t a slave to it.

CHRIS SAINES | It’s organic rather than mathematical. It’s not multiple perspectives or viewpoints all converging in the distance.

WILLIAM ROBINSON | It’s certainly not like Cubism or Futurism or any of those that have different ideas about movement . . . I often think, well maybe there is a resolution, but I don’t believe that Picasso has the same sort of resolution that Cezanne had. I like a certain amount of resolution . . .

William Robinson, Australia b.1936 / Rainforest and mist in afternoon light (detail) 2002 — William Robinson’s *Rainforest and mist in afternoon light* (detail) 2002

CHRIS SAINES | There are elements along the edge of the painting that seem to be pulled through the painting and folded back up again. It’s a feature of the hills in the lower right of the painting.

WILLIAM ROBINSON | Well, that space [on the right side of the painting] (illustrated) is the space of the Numinbah Valley. On the western side of Springbrook we come up a rather bushy gum track until we reach the ridge at the top. Some people can’t drive that drive very easily. They get vertigo. I’ve tried to have the swing of the space of the air above the Numinbah Valley.

CHRIS SAINES | The sublime landscape of the baroque feeds into this picture. Thinking of the work of artists like Jacob van Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema, there were paintings in which the sky has much more volatility or shift in it than this one. This picture feels more anchored, like you’re really in the ground at a very low angle or viewpoint, and then the sky acts as a foil in the background.

WILLIAM ROBINSON | Up to a point. The cumulus cloud on the left (illustrated) is a solid object trying to get through a cliff. But as it goes through, it becomes transparent, and that’s part of that landscape down there, where the clouds are low and they can be below you.

You mention the baroque period and it does fit in very well with baroque music, doesn’t it? The fugue working from various voices [and] upside down inversions. And Bach’s fugues have these voices which sometimes the subject starts up, and then later on it may be inverted or registering again at another level all the time.

CHRIS SAINES | It’s a landscape that evokes more than the sum of its ecological parts, one in which you lose your imagination, and are forced to dwell on thoughts other than just the material form in front of you. This seems to me to move into a spiritual realm. The creation story is in this painting, I think, every bit as much as it is in the paintings where you’ve explicitly invoked it.

WILLIAM ROBINSON | It is. After all, the Antarctic beech trees are left over from a time when the continents were joined. Gondwanaland. Those particular Antarctic beeches up there are reputed to be a couple of thousand years old. They’re not huge, but they’re twisted. And, of course, in that damp climate, they grow an enormous amount of moss. You’re looking at something which is older than something like [France’s] Chartres Cathedral. When we first saw Chartres Cathedral, it had little trees growing out of it on the outside. It was just green in colour due to the moss. Inside it was a great heavenly place, but outside it reminded me so very much of an ancient rainforest. And it does evoke questions about creation.

CHRIS SAINES | When you’re in that cathedral, it is a bit like being at the bottom of the forest floor and looking up and seeing this shaft of light entering through the building into the eye, and it’s not at all unlike this kind of experience I imagine.

WILLIAM ROBINSON | Well, that’s why I suppose, hopefully in a subtle way, I have shown the breakup of white light into the various colours throughout the whole picture.

CHRIS SAINES | I was struck by the consistency of the light that’s passing across the landscape. It’s all coming from the one position. So there is a single sun.

WILLIAM ROBINSON | Certainly with this picture, yes. With other pictures I may have moved the sun — if they were very long pictures which brought in time, there may be some movement of the sun, or even some twisting of the earth.

CHRIS SAINES | Rainforest and mist in afternoon light is a very big painting.

WILLIAM ROBINSON | You’ve got to be prepared to stand up for four or five hours a day straight for weeks on end to do something like this, so a big painting is a major job. I have to be content. But even with still lives, or any other thing I try, I think: if I can show something which has humanity in it, it will automatically have a degree of spirituality in it. But spirituality is always in the heart of the beholder, not something they can ask me to explain if they can’t see it for themselves.

Chris Saines spoke with William Robinson in the artist’s home studio in September 2017. Chris Saines, CNZM is Director of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)

Endnote
¹ For more on the ‘Creation’ series, see Hannah Fink, ‘Light Years: William Robinson and the Creation Story’, Artlink, December 2001, www.artlink.com.au/articles/2555/light-years-william-robinson-andthe-creation-stor/, accessed 24 October 2017.

William Robinson and Chris Saines in the artist’s home studio, September 2017 / Photograph: Chloë Callistemon — William Robinson and Chris Saines (left) in the artist’s home studio, September 2017 / Photograph: C Callistemon © QAGOMA

#QAGOMA

From the Director: Putting Marvel in the Museum

Posted by Chris Saines, CNZM ● 20 Jun 2017

The comic book is one of the most ubiquitous and influential pop cultural artefacts of the twentieth century. Coming of age in an era of unprecedented global upheaval, the comic book Super Hero flourished in the wake of two world wars and was again pressed into action during the Cold War. Teams of champions assembled, expanded and evolved over decades and into the twenty-first century. At the very moment visual effects technology caught up with the world-changing powers deployed by these hand-drawn protagonists, their stories began to be adapted for live-action film.

The characters we see in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have their roots in the Silver Age of Comics, spanning the late 1950s and the 1960s, when a fruitful partnership between artist Jack Kirby and writer Stan Lee at Marvel Comics gave rise to the memorable characters Thor, Hulk, Iron Man, Ant-Man and Black Panther. They also enlisted Captain America, who Kirby had created with Joe Simon in 1941, to join their supergroup, the Avengers. The final issue of the short-lived title Amazing Fantasy introduced the Steve Ditko-drawn Spider-Man. Around the same time, Ditko debuted Doctor Strange in the pages of Strange Tales, while Lee, Don Rico and Don Heck welcomed Black Widow in Tales of Suspense.

Ryan Meinerding / Captain America / Concept art for *Captain America: The First Avenger* 2011 / © MARVEL 2017

These characters have endured in the pages of countless titles since, and over the past decade have transformed into icons of contemporary visual culture as part of the unstoppable box office phenomenon, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Visually astounding, keenly self-aware and intricately interlinked, the series of Marvel Studios films, beginning with 2008’s Iron Man, has confounded the conventional Super Hero mould — achieved, in part, by combining genres, from spy thriller to space opera, and delivering fresh, crowd-pleasing entertainment on the grandest scale.

But why examine popular culture in an art museum, and, in particular, this art museum? QAGOMA has long been interested in all aspects of contemporary visual culture, and our Australian Cinémathèque, which looks at film as an art medium, has provided us with the means to explore rich and diverse cinematic worlds unlike any other Australian art museum. By examining the sources of these contemporary stories — and the processes by which they reach the cinema screen — we expand our visual literacy and examine a global phenomenon within a wider critical dialogue.

‘Marvel: Creating the Cinematic Universe’ follows a selection of flawed heroes and their villainous foes from comic books to high-definition screens. We present the original visions of Kirby, Lee and Ditko and their contemporaries, and look at the creative teams who transform these stories using concept art, storyboarding, production design and computer-generated imagery. We also showcase the painstakingly crafted props and sumptuous costumes that give these unreal worlds a tangible presence.

Installation view of the majestic Asgardian throne room from the upcoming Marvel film *Thor: Ragnarok* 2017, ‘Marvel: Creating the Cinematic Universe’, GOMA 2017

This project has its precedents in our cinema surveys but its scope — the entire ground floor of GOMA, including our Cinémathèque — and the diverse materiality of its objects and images is unprecedented.

TICKETS: CINEMA | EXHIBITION | UP LATE / BUY THE PUBLICATION

Marvel‘s enthusiasm and cooperation in presenting their characters in an art museum context has been outstanding. Developing this exhibition has been a heroic journey of a different kind for the Gallery, as we’ve grappled with presenting diverse material on characters loved by millions around the world — and the result is spectacular. ‘Marvel: Creating the Cinematic Universe’ is a thrilling exhibition of larger-than-life subjects and their epic journeys.

DELVE DEEPER INTO THE EXHIBITION AND THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE

‘Marvel: Creating the Cinematic Universe’ has been organised by the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in collaboration with Marvel Entertainment. The exhibition has received vital support from the Queensland Government though Tourism and Events Queensland (TEQ) and Arts Queensland. The Gallery acknowledges the support of UNIQLO – Principal Partner and exclusive sponsor of ‘Marvel: Creating the Cinematic Universe’ Up Late.

Chris Saines, CNZM is Director of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)

Author: Chris Saines, CNZM