What art exhibitions mean to us
ART exhibitions can impress, confuse, entertain, and educate.
They can introduce us to aspects of a different culture, show us how ideas can be translated through materials, and even how humour can relieve the everyday hum-drum.
The Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, with its extensive and diverse public collections, is ideally placed to mount fascinating, challenging, and totally engrossing exhibitions. Gallery M, at the top of the stairs, is hosting an elegant display of ceramics that salutes traditional Japanese techniques.
The title of the exhibition “Wabi-sabi” introduces the dual concepts that are intrinsic to the visual aesthetics of Japanese ceramics.
The excellent room sheet explains that “wabi” refers to austere beauty and the contemplation of flawed forms, while “sabi” suggests the passage of time and the patina of usage.
These aspects underpin a reverence for the hand-made in which texture and tone, a fingerprint of the artist, a seemingly spontaneous glaze, or traces of a smoky firing imbue the work with a unique quality that honours imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness as an art form.
The artists represent a roll call of significant ceramicists such as master of glazes, Shigeo Shiga, whose use of Australian clays and minerals was very influential. Carl and Phillip McConnell, Col Levy, Harry Memmott, Errol Barnes, and Kevin Grealy are but a few who have interpreted the notion of ‘wabi-sabi’ in personal ways.
Perhaps one of the most impressive presentations is “Thinking of Morandi,” a subtle understatement by the late Gwyn Hanssen-Pigott.
“The Sausage of Damocles” is another exhibition that draws on works from the gallery collections.
The drawings were largely made for reproduction in the famous “Bushman’s Bible,” the weekly Sydney publication, “The Bulletin.” Artists such as Lionel and Norman Lindsay, their sister Ruby Lind, Livingston Hopkins, George Washington Lambert, Fred Leist, and Betty Paterson churned out cartoons, illustrated jokes and poems, political satires, and tongue-in-cheek jibes at the culture of the day.
This “bread and butter” work issued forth as if from a veritable sausage factory earning the artists a precarious income dependent on the whim of an editor wielding power like the proverbial sword of Damocles.
The exhibition offers a humorous glance at history through the mastery of pen, ink, and etching.
The exhibition “King Billy: Race-based Figures from the Collections” showing in the small Lindsay Gallery at the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, struggles to consolidate an unusual selection of works.
While purporting to explore ‘singerie’, a genre popular in 18th century France that depicted monkeys in human guise, it is, in a culture of political correctness, an uncomfortable reminder that racial slurs still occur, even on the cricket pitch.
Artists such as Gordon Bennett, Lionel Lindsay, Arthur Boyd, Christian Thompson, Rew Hanks, and Eric Jolliffe ask us to consider a history coloured by prejudice, guilt, and apology.