Miranda Skoczek

Suggesting Icons
Nicholas Thompson Gallery
Melbourne
To March 3

The Etruscans and the afterlife 2018 oil on linen 168 x 122 cm.

Installation photo Miranda Skoczek.

All the things you are 2019 oil and acrylic on linen 40 x 50 cm

Michael Cusack

Michael Cusack
No history but in things
Olsen Gallery

Sydney

To March 17
 

Figure head 2019, mixed media on poly cotton, 168 x 137 cm.

Iceblink 2019, mixed media on board, 144 x 96.5 cm.

Capital Theatre

Found sign, Presgrave Place. Capital Theatre, Swanston Street, Melbourne, architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin 1924.

Found sign Capital Theatre

Presgrave Place, Melbourne

Capital Theatre Ceiling

I remember the ceiling of the cinema in the 1970s. It had alternating pale green and pink lights shining on the facets heightening the three dimensional effects.

Robert Ryman

‘... one of the most important American artists to emerge after World War II, a Minimalist who achieved a startling non-Minimalist variety in his paintings even though they were mostly white and usually square, died on Friday at his home in Greenwich Village in Manhattan.

... Mr. Ryman preferred the square, he said, because it avoided representational suggestions of doors, windows and landscapes. His works could be small squares of stretched canvas alive with fat, juicy, commalike strokes of oil paint. They could be pieces of cold-rolled steel, four feet square, brushed perfunctorily with a thin matte enamel. They might feature thick, methodical horizontal bands of shimmering white with slivers of brownish raw linen glinting between them, a little like plaster and lath.’ New York Times, Feb, 10, 2019. 

Liminal

Cathy Blanchflower
Vivian Copper Smith
Bryan Spier
Karl Wiebke
curated by Emma Langridge
To Feb 16
Five Walls
Galleries 1 & 2
Suite 2, level 1 / 119 Hopkins St, Footscray
Open Wed-Sat 12-5pm

Bryan Spier 

Painting by Cath Blanchflower
L-R: Aaron Martin (founder of Five Walls), Peter Summers and Misuzu Ueda.

‘A limen is the threshold or boundary which marks the transition from one space to another.
The four artists in this exhibition each capture a narrow yet penetrable visual territory, articulated variously via colour, form, line, and texture. This shallow, but nonetheless perceivable space, forms a stratum beyond the work’s surface, confounding the fullness of pictorial depth.’ Emma Langridge.

Vivian Copper Smith photo Emma Langridge.

Karl Wiebke

Karl Wiebke

Liminal is the first in a series of Guest and Committee curated group shows in 2019.

James Langer

Indeterminist

To Feb 16

Five Walls 

Gallery 3

suite 3 level 1 / 119 Hopkins St Footscray

Open Wed-Sat 12-5pm

Installation

‘Indeterminist is part of an ongoing visual exercise that probes the tension between cause and effect, and free will.

The are no answers here to the question about whether things are concurrent and therefore predetermined, or the accumulation of choices. The relationship is hard to discern, even in its most basic form.

Together the work is a cluster of abstraction combining a digital drawing method with silkscreen printing and paint. It depicts growth by progressively manipulating parts of a whole, adapting to environment and obstacles. It emulates entropy and evolution, two sides of the same process. It exemplifies nature as it exists in my mind: a series of confluences, expansions, and metamorphoses.’ Five Walls website

Peter Summers

Pink Cliffs 
Five Walls 
To Feb 16 
Gallery 4 
suite 4, level 1 / 119 Hopkins St Footscray 

Open Wed-Sat 12-5pm 

‘Summers’ recent trip to Heathcote’s Pink Cliffs in Central Victoria was the inspiration for this exhibition. The paintings highlight his dedication to rendering the landscape with exquisite evocation. His subtle and arresting works on canvas demonstrate a complex, intriguing expression of Minimalism. Pink Cliffs is so named because of the pinkish hued rock formations left behind from sluice mining during the gold rush era. The rock, which is actually powdery clay, changes colour depending on the time. 

Peter Summers

Pink Cliffs is Summers’ follow up to his successful solo show Difficult Pleasure at Tacit Galleries Collingwood, late last year. In 2017 he was included in the very successful exhibition, Chromatopia, on the history of colour by chemist and writer David Coles. In 2012, he co-curated and participated in the exhibition Un:sighted at Fortyfive downstairs gallery, before relocating to Shanghai (2012-2016). In 2011, he was selected for the Yering station sculpture prize and awarded the Ella Donald Memorial scholarship. He has exhibited on a regular basis at Five Walls since 2015.’ Five Walls website

Installation

Local Walks

Local walk

Demolition, summer light

Local walk

Mechanical Drawing

Local walk

 Fossil Process

Local walk

Street cleaning

Local walk

 Form

Local walk

Art

Steven Parrino

“New York: The Eighties (part one)”

The Consortium Museum, Dijon, France

To April 14

ALLAN MCCOLLUM, CADY NOLAND, CHUCK NANNEY, DAN GRAHAM, DAVID ROBBINS, LAURIE PARSONS, LOUISE LAWLER, MICHAEL CORRIS, ON KAWARA, STEVEN PARRINO, STEVE DIBENEDETTO

Steven Parrino, Screaming Yellow Crush in Classy Chassis, 1992.

I find the work of Steven Parrino, 1958-2005, profound. Influenced by 1980s Deconstrucivism and the declaration that the painting avant-garde was dead in the 80s (one of the first in a succession of such declarations) Parrino with a Punk DIY attitude explored the entropic side of creation. His works are as relevant today with numerous artists world-wide exploring the boundaries of painting sculpture in the context of what Parrino termed 'misshaped paintings' as opposed to the 1960s movement of shaped canvases. In Italy, from my observations, that movement related to Arte Povera and was more 'constructive' notwithstanding the mark making of Luigi Fontana. He was famous for his destructive cutting and piercing of the canvas in a repetitive way.

Blinky Palermo

Blinky Palermo, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2009, was my first experience of the artist. I responded immediately to the scale and series aspect of the paintings which played with order and variation. The painting manner which was minimal but not hard edge has some reference in Arte Povera. I asked the German artist, Bernd Kirken who was with me if he was a good artist and he said ‘yes of course he’s very good’. So when home I researched Palermo’s work and a few years later saw some of his large material works at the MMK Museum, Frankfurt.

Blinky Palermo at Hamburger Bahnhoff, 2009.

Blinky Palermo at Hamburger Bahnhoff, 2009.