While Robert Hughes's "The Art of Australia" was the definitive tome on the subject when it was first published in 1966, it is clear that artists in that region of the world now have more pressing priorities than throwing off the influence of European and American models. Proof of their autonomous aesthetic identity is on view in ³Out From Down Under and Beyond, The Australian & New Zealand Art Exhibition,¹ at Agora Gallery, 530 West, from May 4 through 24. (Reception: Thursday, May 10, 6 to 8 PM.)
The landscapes of Astrid Dahl, for example, seem at once quintessentially Australian and consummately mainstream for their combination of the earthy and the visionary. Dahl is an especially striking colorist, employing a combination of inks and acrylics to luminous effect. Stuart French employs a somewhat more abstract mode in his strongly schematized compositions with their intense hues and bold forms. Primitivistic figures emerge like radiant apparitions from French¹s gem-like color areas. Growing up on a farm in a remote rural area on the Australian outback had a profound influence on Sally West, whose acrylics on canvas also pay homage to Aboriginal art. Although West¹s compositions are ostensibly abstract, their colorful, shard-like, interlocking forms suggest some of the more rugged aspects of nature.
New Zealand-based Ngaire Dunn sends up feminine stereotypes with skillful Pop realist panache. From images of sensual bathing beauties to anorexic Vogue models, Dunn comments wittily on the female image in all its contemporary permutations. Another New Zealand-based painter, Ira McCully, employs a deceptively innocent style with sophisticated results. McCully¹s homey paintings of family scenes, racing events and other everyday subjects are joyous celebrations, bursting with local color and good cheer. Then there is Sofia Minson, whose landscapes and figure paintings are limned in smoothly modeled monochromatic hues with a dramatic emphasis on shadow-play. Minson makes the atmosphere and mythology of New Zealand palpable to the rest of us through her reverence for nature and national mythology.
Murray Swan honed the streamlined sculptural style that has garnered favorable comparisons to Brancusi as an aircraft engineer in both his native Australia and the United States. Employing highly polished stainless steel, copper, titanium and brass, Swan creates soaring shapes that are notable for their combination of grace, velocity, and formal economy. Inspired by music, the abstract paintings of Sonya Veronica juxtapose fluid areas of color, often in the red and yellow range, to create fluid linear forms possessed of great chromatic vibrancy. Veronica¹s bold, smooth strokes invest visual art with an impressive musicality. John Weeronga Bartoo brings his own unique ecriture to Australian Aboriginal dreamtime painting, resulting in a brilliant synthesis of the traditional and the personal. While employing the ³dot² patterns endemic to this genre, he invests each of his paintings with the force of his personality in a manner that transcends folkloric conventions, achieving a formal autonomy akin to sophisticated mainstream abstraction. Working mostly in acrylic, sometimes with elements of the composition extending beyond the confines of the canvas in a manner akin to Red Grooms, Vittoria Marie Vieceli evokes the Australian landscape with a unique painterly vigor. Vieceli sees color as a conduit of joy and her work is enlivened by a goodnatured visual wit. An Australian painter trained on scholarship in Budapest, Hungary, Lauren Wilhelm integrates European influences in Neo-Baroque compositions that employ elements of appropriation in a highly subjective context. Combining an accomplished classical technique influenced by Velasquez with a postmodern conceptual sensibility, Wilhelm gives us the best of two worlds in her accomplished canvases.
Indeed, one of the true pleasures of this exhibition is discovering how, having evolved their own unique artistic voices, these artists from Australia and New Zealand now add confidently to traditions against which they once had to struggle. Their contribution to the larger culture is all the richer for it.