Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

A fresh expression

This July, the Sydney harbourside institution will showcase energetic landscapes, bodies in motion and wide-screen experimentation.

“I don’t want to call these works ‘highlights’,” internationally acclaimed artist Shaun Gladwell humbly says of Shaun Gladwell: Pacific Undertow, the first survey of his work, which starts showing at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) this month. Yet they are all key to his story. Spanning two decades as it traces the artist’s beginnings as a painter obsessed with ancient paint recipes and his evolution into a video artist who asks himself, “What is the Australian landscape?”, the exhibition includes his earliest and most well-known works, as well as unseen and newly commissioned virtual reality and augmented reality pieces.

Gladwell’s show includes some of the most mesmerising video art in the gallery’s collection. Some of his most famous works capture the cool ballet of a skateboarder caught in a Bondi Beach storm, the unease of war in Afghanistan and a pop-culture-tinged scene of drive-by desolation in the outback, among many other frames. Gladwell’s work is part environmental, part physical and part spatially experimental but quintessentially Australian in its execution.

“I came up with a term for my work: ‘performance landscapes’,” he says, citing influence from the Romantic landscape art movement. “I am interested in performance art and I really like landscape so I try to connect the two.” Straddling the approachability of painting, the captivating nature of video and the beauty of photography, Pacific Undertow connects technology, elemental movement, human nature and Australian scenery in art.