Peter ATKINS, Hume Highway Project (installation view) 2010, 12 colour screenprints, 30 x 30cm each. QUT Art Collection. Purchased 2010.
Daniel MCKEWEN, Kafka on the shore (installation view) 2014, gypsum and acrylic polymer, 245 x 91 x 10cm. QUT Art Collection. Purchased 2015.
Eugene CARCHESIO, The empty house V 2004, cardboard on canvas, 30.5 x 25.5 x 5.5cm, QUT Art Collection, Purchased 2004.
The new year often brings catharsis, a fresh approach not weighed down by the clutter of the past. This exhibition, drawn from the QUT Art Museum’s largely post-1960 collection, dallies with a contemporary impulse to minimise, downsize and the mantra of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle.’ Curator Katherine Dionysius identifies a niche in the institutional collection, finding artists since the 1960s whose work has a reductionist aesthetic, creating a show that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Art is about creating something, an object in the world, not reducing to less. In this sense, reductionist art is such an interesting contradiction.”
What emerges in an exhibition of work of all media from the 1960s to last year is a multiplicity of conversations across the room. A major painting series by Robert MacPherson titled Trace no.2 (1977) is a grid of square canvases that segue from black through a range of shades and surfaces, finally into grey and white.
It speaks in its pattern and repetition to George Ward Tjungurraya’s Tingari Cycle (2006). Peter Atkins’s Hume Highway Project (2010) also works the grid in square canvases, but his floating lozenges of colour have a visual echo in Rover Thomas’s Red Rock Stockyard, Bow River Station (1996).
On a different register is sculpture by Sam Cranstoun, Proposal for long term sustainability: Plano II (2013), compromising spindly white constructions atop green synthetic grass. While the impetus behind these works is not related, in their paring back of an aesthetic, each celebrates restraint, what Dionysius describes as “the artist’s pursuit of the next best thing to nothingness”.
Less Than: Art and Reductionism
QUT Art Museum
18 March – 21 May
The Victorian First Peoples Art and Design Fair debuts in partnership with the Melbourne Art Fair this weekend, offering a special preview of new and recent artworks from 37 Koorie artists and designers.
In her audacious new exhibition, the Filipina Australian artist Marikit Santiago skewers the myths of the western canon and give pleasure and power—as experienced by women of colour—an arresting new form.
French-born/Belgium-based Laure Prouvost animates her first major Australian survey with her hallmark absurdism. ‘Oui Move In You’ is a touring exhibition, and is now showing at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art.
For the Auckland-based artist Yona Lee, who has a new commission at the Melbourne Art Fair, function is a source of formal possibility and ordinary material moulds space in extraordinary ways.
The Future & Other Fictions, a landmark exhibition at ACMI, reflects both the cultural forces that determine our reality and the power of imagining our world anew.
Carol Jerrems’ intimate and revealing portraits of women, now showing at the National Portrait Gallery, are a touchstone for a generation of writers and photographers. For Josephine Mead, they also galvanise the power—and limits—of feminist legacy five decades on.
