Exhibitions full of diverse works
CULT heroes and comic books, new stature for the ordinary, the portrait as cultural document, and a boldly colourful homage to country challenge and delight through a range of current exhibitions.
The Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery is playing host to the Phantom, the Ghost Who Walks, with the exhibition “The Phantom Art Show.”
Curated by artists Peter Kingston and Dietmar Lederwasch, the exhibition comprises works by some 40 artists for whom the Phantom was central to their childhood memories.
Rude, eccentric, funny, and totally entertaining, the paintings, dioramas, and sculptures reflect the distinctive styles of the artists while acknowledging the continuing popularity of this comic book hero in his body suit and mask.
The participants include local artist David Usher and such notables as Charles Blackman, Garry Shead, Reg Mombassa, Euan Macleod, Elisabeth Cumming, Martin Sharp, and Michael Leunig.
A memorable painting in Norman Rockwell style by Paul Newton depicts the twenty-second Phantom as a child, and there is a grainy black and white “gangster” film featuring Brett and Wendy Whiteley.
The Feather and Lawry Gallery, 4 Russell St, is presenting “From a Distance,” an exhibition of richly surfaced paintings by Brisbane artist Dylan Jones.
A ‘plein air’ painter who confronts his subjects on location rather than in the hindsight of photography, Jones paints scenic anomalies. Instead of pretty landscapes he introduces his viewer to the rewards of the mundane, often neglected slippages in everyday experience.
Clothes flapping on an apartment balcony, a high visibility vest tossed over a chair, rusting cars sinking into oblivion through carpets of weeds, a bus shelter, a highway underpass — all are given new stature through the geometry of pattern and the play between light and texture.
The Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane are offering two stunning exhibitions. “Cindy Sherman” is the eponymous exhibition by this New York based artist.
Sherman is a photographer who uses portraiture, with herself as model, to interrogate the social stereotype as cultural icon in the brittle world that embraces the cult of celebrity.
Although appreciation of her genre may be an acquired taste, Sherman’s particular explorations have been significant in endorsing photography as an important contemporary art form. The sheer scale of this in-your-face show is part of its fascination.
The second exhibition at QAGOMA is “Dulka Warngiid Land of All,” a retrospective of paintings by the late Indigenous artist, Sally Gabori.
Her dynamic blocks of abstract colour are more about feelings than the act of painting itself.
Gabori’s conceptual associations to the landscape are translated through colours and painterly gestures that are emotional responses signifying her connection to Kaiadilt Country, Bentinck Island.
Gabori only commenced painting when in her eighties and the exhibition includes some of the first and last works by this remarkable artist.