Past Exhibitions

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More than 800 works in two exhibition spaces and 3 stockrooms 

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I’ve been painting since I left school and when I started art school, I thought what a wonderful place it was.  I knew right away that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life - paint and create.

I experience both beautiful and sad things through everyday life and these experiences generate a strong need to paint. 

Whenever I face a blank piece of large, good quality paper I know right away that I need to touch it and feel the quality, arrange the palettes, squeeze the paint tube and watch the vibrant oils, acrylics or pastel chalk in my hand, and know it will soon come alive in the form of a drawing or a painting.  When I start, I focus on an idea or experience and let my feelings take control.  At times the painting starts to take on a completely new direction to the initial one I had in mind, however, I am its creator and to this extent have control over the end result. 

I’m content in the realisation that everyone that sees one of my works has different interpretations, a new ‘feeling’ to my original intentions. I love that my work acquires different interpretations and appearances outside my studio.  It becomes more a child born to me.

During my development, I have been able to focus on nature and the incredible sensation I get from being able to transfer my feelings to paper or canvas.  Because at times these inspirations come to me when I’m unable to paint, I have developed an ability to store these ideas and expand on them later, sometimes in the form of a new direction.

Being an artist is my life, and in no way could I imagine being, or doing, anything else.

After completing a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001 I left America to pursue painting in Japan. In 2005 I immigrated to Australia to study at the National Art School, and completed my MFA in 2007. 2009 has been a year of inland travel, seeking inspiration from the rural areas of NSW and Victoria. This pursuit has culminated in my current body of work titled ‘Shadow on the Back Block’.

Robert Motherwell said ‘I believe that painters’ judgements of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgements flowing from an ethical content. Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.”

‘Shadow on the Back Block’ is my attempt to unite my painting practice with a strong belief in a sustainable future. I think it is fair to say that the attention the media and society have placed on current environmental concerns has led to a massive re-evaluation of our individual lifestyles. My own position led me to consider how I could incorporate these themes into my paintings.

In April of this year, I set out on a 5,000 km journey through the fruit-growing regions of New South Wales and Victoria. As I travelled and painted the vineyards and orchards of the places I passed through, I realized that because of the specific topography, the paintings were functioning more as portraits than landscapes. My interest in the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the agriculture of these areas led me away from spatial imperatives, towards a more specific search for a way to define a locality’s persona.

Over the mountains and across the tablelands, the Australian landscape is alive with colour and bursting with productivity. I have attempted with this body of work to embody the fecundity of the land in bold brushstrokes and fully saturated colour, to offer a new view of what is often thought of as a dry and desolate terrain.

Rudy Kistler, October 2009

Annabel Butler, 2009

Rather than writing an artist statement about this new body of work, which I have called The Built Environment, I have chosen to quote Hans Hofmann. His words, written in 1944, articulate the issues that I have been exploring.

Hans Hofmann 1944

Space and the Picture

One cannot see space
one can only sense space –
Since one cannot see space
one can also not copy space
and since one senses space
only
one must invent `the´pictorial
space
as the finale of a pictorial
creation.
Therefore one must be inventive
in using the pictorial means.
The lines, the planes, the points
these are the architectural means
with which to build space as
experienced
experienced by the senses
and not only perceived by
physical vision
because vision and space experience together
create an ‘inner vision’
in the junction
of a multiple physical
experience
with a physical reaction

Notes on Paper, Scissors, Fish

I always seem to go in two directions at once. This time one was slow and deliberate and the other quick and spontaneous. Things tend to break down and meet half way, then trade places. In the beginning the still life was for you and the collage paintings were for me. Now the collage paintings are for you and the still life is for me.

The collage paintings are a mystery. In the initial collage stage I had no idea, deliberately, about what I was doing so they surprised me completely. I was seeing black and trying to get to gold. Painting them was more like cooking than eating. I needed the still life to get away from brooding. They taught me how to paint by rapid response. And they fed me.

Bon Appetit

Melissa Becker

INTERCEPTION
New paintings by Malcolm Utley reference a common experience of live visual media - small image frames within an ever changing context of our busy world. Here they are frozen, a collision of two distinct paintings both literally (painted at separate times) and stylistically. Images collected through Utley’s camera on his journeys from the last 8 years are subject matter for the portrait paintings that intercept his earlier works (paintings completed up to 8 years prior). The result is a synergy of images, not unlike a cinema edit, to amplify and construct a new more potent and complex work.

The four snorting beasts underneath the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are not the exact same four painted here by Kinnane. But, as they say, the fruit never falls far from the goddamn tree. There is less black cruelty, certainly, less outright threat, here, safely, than in those ominous nostrils. Still, it has been many a night that the gun rattle of hooves on the stones outside has made its way into my sleep, and every time I look deeply into the lines between the old angels and the new, between the carnage of the past and that of today, there are goddamn horses everywhere and I can’t stop them coming.
It was a giant horse that took the city of Troy, one morning, years ago. At least 20 hands high, this one had been hollowed out, preserved, and its belly filled up with wood shavings and small fighting men, their blood foaming and ready to be spilled in the service of a truly mad man driven illogical by love. There were horses on the battlefields of Cannae, back in the day when Hannibal stuck it to a million Romans, wading about fetlock deep in those things lost in wars. There were horses at Gallipoli and the Battle of Siler River, and it was on their backs that young men were carried into the history books or to muddy holes. From that day to this, it has been on their backs that we have ridden to our wondrous, ridiculous, and unimaginable destinies, banners streaming behind us in the wind, cavalcades of the murderous and the love struck raising all hell in the name of The Bandit Moon and The Bastard Sun, the ruined countryside flying by like we was magic.
But I feel a little assuaged by these lanky grass eaters, the ones I see here that Kinnane has mustered out of his satchel. They are the ones that conversed with poor Gulliver, the ones that the poet rode, the steeds sent forth with a messenger and a small, silk purse to woo the long-haired maiden. I have heard about these goddamn nags. Despite their more noble breeding, it is an equally miserable history, this quest of sonnets and filtered sunlight and clearings in the forest and pilgrims with good intentions. For the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And it’s a long, long road. So how do you think we got there? Ain’t nobody walking, that’s for goddamn sure. It was them beasts that carried us, singing and howling, thrashing about like illness or scanning the horizon for silhouettes, the ruined countryside flying by like we was magic.

http://alive-sydney.whereilive.com.au/lifestyle/story/aaron-kinnanes-art…

www.aaronkinnane.com

Recollections 1999-2009 is George Byrne’s first photographic exhibition since embarking on a career as a singer-songwriter five years ago. The exhibition is an eclectic mix of images from around the world, revealing the full breadth of George’s unique talent as a photographer. Recollections 1999 - 2009 consists of 18 signed limited edition 20’ x 30’ colour and black and white prints.

“Living and working in Spain I from time to time feel a little homesick for the Australian landscape. So many of these pictures have been painted from memory to salve this pain. Then there are several European pictures inspired by the wonderful valley views that capture me every time I walk out of my studio door.”

This exhibition WOODCUT is a vision of relief printmaking by four established artist printmakers. From methods of creating the images in wood to their transfer onto paper, contemporary applications of traditional, Asian, and innovative Western techniques are employed. In these works the artists reveal their respect for the wood itself, and give expression to their creative processes, both intimate and expansive, grounded in the best traditions of the woodcut in communicating spiritual journeys.

Ritual is a protocol, a guide, for that most fundamental of human needs: meaning.
But when protocol loses meaning, snubbed out by the distractions of life, it is merely repetition. Baptism becomes bath, marriage a party with rings. And so on the Western world ¬¬ambles, away from what was once the light, out into the secular unknown.

One wonders, in this state, if bath can become baptism - if, on meditation, the mundane can take up meaning and repetition become ritual. This is the margin I seek to explore: the contemporary quest for purpose, rite in the Australian landscape.

Ritualism delves into the shared desire to understand our existence and our mortality, the purpose ritual holds in explaining moments of life, to mark them and imbue them with meaning.

This exhibition includes two recurrent themes in my painting, fascination with the sea and the continuing importance of still life. I was drawing and painting furiously when I was 2 years old, and creating images has been a constant throughout my life. My subjects vary, and although they come from direct experience they often conceal much of their personal significance for many years.

The seascapes originated in New Caledonia in 2001 when, after too many cocktails, the sea drew me into it in all my clothes in the moonlight. As dangerous as it was, it mesmerized me and I haven’t stopped looking at the ocean and reliving the experience in my paintings since. Working on these paintings now, I still feel like a Siren going home to rest.

Four years ago, I relocated to a small town near San Francisco, all rose gardens and antiques, and I started to paint what was for me a new and fascinating environment, a long way from the Australian bush town that provided me with my early landscape paintings. Old, worn objects next to the ephemeral beauty of flowers and fruit, lit by candle light or daylight, were an unending source of material for creating emotion and meaning from my visual experience. I worked fast and focused, to attempt to capture that fleeting first recognition of the significant and beautiful before the mind can make it mundane. These still lifes keep me conscious of the importance of living in the moment, of appreciating now.

Jarek Wojcik’s previous solo exhibition, born from a journey to his native Poland in 2007, renewed his interest in the imaginative recreation of experience through memory. In his new exhibition Deserted Places he further develop his ideas of the artist’s creative reimagining of place and experience.

“Art is a journey, and for me every work is the beginning of that journey.
I’m visiting places which are not necessarily actual locations or even physical sites. They can be places within one’s self. This is a mental landscape, part of my response to what is around me through the study of history.
Every object, every destination initiates a process of conversation with reality and produces a fascinating collection of stories, messages and experiences.
I’m asking questions, and to find the answers one has to travel… but not too far.”

John Lendis has been a professional artist for over thirty years, exhibiting regularly both in Australia and internationally. He has received an Australian Post-Graduate Research Award, and grants from Arts Tasmania and The National Association of Visual Arts. After completing his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania in 2006 he has been working in England, and has recently been Artist in Residence at the Scott Polar Research Institute in the University of Cambridge. He is currently working towards exhibitions in Canada and the UK.

This exhibition is about the idea of a city: a city made up of memories, experiences, images and dreams of many cities; a city that is known and owned by one person; one person walking streets at dawn, before the city wakes, when its buildings and streets and roads and rivers can be possessed and filled up with songs and memories and love and sadness. A city where everything dissolves into everything else; where walls become trees, where icebergs float down a river, and where cathedrals tower below secret rooms that let you look out across a world that you have created, a world that is yours alone.

We see our place in the world through the filters of our culture, experience, values and expectations. The viewer sees suggestions of form in my works through the veils of collage, colour and texture.

In 2002 I travelled through Italy and was enchanted by its culture, people and golden light. It enticed me back in 2004 to live in Florence, near the Basilica di Santa Croce. Each day I walked to art classes past the Galleria degli Uffizi and through the Piazza della Signoria. I also travelled, finding the regional galleries and working with and learning from local artists inspired by both their history and contemporary culture. The country’s history is everywhere, walls rich with layer upon peeling layer of past centuries, many with no attempt at renovation or repair.

Living in Italy inspired me to produce two bodies of work which were shown simultaneously in galleries in Italy and Australia in 2005.

This exhibition, La Dolce Vita, is the result of my subsequent, and inevitable, return to Italy. I have added to my memories with photographs of textured walls, graffiti, mysterious alleyways and enticing doorways, with the maps that guided me through the narrow laneways where I lived, and with old burnt papers saved from a villa under restoration. I have used these, together with other public and more personal imagery, to evoke a place, an episode, or a moment in time.

“Paul Anthony Sleeman’s colour and black and white photographs are unashamedly a celebration of the beauty of female form. Sleeman concentrates on expressing the weight and texture of female flesh essentially as a landscape, veiled by shadows. Sleeman’s pictures embrace carnality but still manage to invite us toward an unsentimental, yet romantic experience of one of fine-art photography’s most enduring genres - the female nude.” Robert McFarlane
Sydney Morning Herald Photography Critic

The exhibition has been extended to 21 March 2009.

Steven Sallybanks has been a scenic artist on many of Hollywood’s biggest films, from Titanic, to several James Bond, Harry Potter, Star Wars and Indiana Jones films.

Sallybanks paints by memory, starting en plein air with oils and adding layers to the canvas when he returns to his studio. His technique of applying multiple layers of thick oil paint enhances the play of light and dark on the painting, resulting in a three dimensional surface of semi abstract quality.

Charles Hewitt Gallery is delighted to be taking our exciting artist Benedict dos Remedios to New Generation, Art Sydney, 2008 (stand N2). If you would like a complimentary ticket please contact the gallery.

ARTIST STATEMENT

‘A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know’
Diane Arbus

The medium of photography is a wonderful tool for capturing a moment. These images are echoes of private moments conveyed using the moods and elements of landscape. I’m continually drawn to places with vast open spaces and sparse vegetation, places that give me access to thousands of miles of sky. The sky with its ever-changing light and transient moods balanced by the permanence of landscape. Fleeting versus fixed. The present versus the past.

I like to build my images by either emphasising or subduing certain aspects thus enabling the image a clearer voice – even if that voice is merely a whisper. What the camera actually sees is simply the starting point, what the mind sees is the more interesting journey.

Ultimately, what engages the viewer in my images will depend upon their experience, hopefully there is a hint of the contemplative, the still, the calm. As that is an important part of the process. Chaos versus calm.

Stuart Humphreys

MONO NO AWARE
Mono no Aware continues Marcella Kaspar’s fascination with the ephemeral beauty of flowers. Opening on 18 September, her latest exhibition comprises flower paintings showcasing her characteristic obsession with the perfection and repetition of nature. However, for the first time the artist weaves fresh-faced geisha girls and Japanese landscapes among her usual tapestry of petals.

After numerous visits to Japan, the artist was struck by the Asian culture’s love affair with flowers as a reflection of the impermanent beauty of life. The exhibition title, Mono No Aware, is a phrase used (in Japanese culture) to express the connection between nature and its transient, inevitable passing. The philosophy perfectly mirrored the artist’s own interest in flowers as a metaphor for life itself: beautiful and luminous, yet fleeting.

A new exhibition by Gabrielle Courtenay uses the ephemeral beauty of the desert saltbush to confront environmental issues of our time.

‘In Edge Courtenay has transformed tiny skeletons of plants into bewitching forms of poetic beauty… Macabre as they are, these assemblages have poignancy to them, for like Courtenay’s paintings they are reminders of the fragility and ephemeral nature of life.” (Author and Curator Victoria Hammond)

Best known for her bold, minimal style, the new works in this exhibition reflect a dramatic shift in Gabrielle Courtenay‘s art practice. Edge is a series of 19 paintings and drawings of dark poetic forms. The works reach out to the viewer, confronting one with the environmental destruction done since colonisation and the need to take climate change seriously.

This will be Marina’s first solo exhibition with Charles Hewitt (April 24 - May 13 2008),
featuring the artist’s everyday environment in the Eastern Suburbs.

First solo show for this exciting young artist at Charles Hewitt.

An exhibition of oils on canvas using mixed media based on themes of nostalgic maternal images of childhood lost.

Lostalgia is a haunting and poignant exhibition of 31 works created by Sophie Gralton.

Heavily themed with images of children, these arresting paintings are reminiscent of 17th century Dutch portraits of children. Sophie, however, has infused them with overtones of contemporary Australian childhood.

“My childhood in rural Victoria as the middle of five children was a noisy, vivid and the happy time filled with the overflowing hotch potch of family life in the country,” said Sophie.

“In today’s era of sleek minimalism, designer kitchens and crisply sterile modernism, I mourn for a time when children could remember what it was like to have milk bottles with foil tops, a baker that delivered to your home and the postie rode a bike. In my own childhood in the country our milk was delivered by horse and cart. That era has gone – and I want to capture now the childhood that my own children are experiencing by incorporating in my artwork, pieces of memorabilia of this current generation.”

Sophie’s works include mixed media such as old linoleum, manila tags, childrens’ story books and postage stamps, which are directly applied to the canvas.

“The faces of the children in my paintings are obscured as it was not the intention for them to be conventional portraits but rather fleeting impressions of youth and childhood memory, rather than of the individuals themselves,” said Sophie.

Sophie studied fashion and textile design at Sydney College of the Arts and worked for five years as a textile designer. She then studied at the National Arts School (Sydney) and graduated in 1996 with a degree in Fine Arts. This is the fifth solo exhibition for Sophie.

This exhibition is a continuation of themes I’ve explored before. Once again the old linoleum, manila tags, notes, children’s story books and old stamps are morphed with what seem to be traditional representations of children. This time they are directly applied to the canvas rather than being actually rendered.

The iconography for this exhibition was suggested by bourgeois 17th century Dutch portraits of children, however I’ve tried to give them a more contemporary Australian sensibility.

Their faces are obscured as I did not want them to be conventional portraits but rather fleeting impressions of youth and memory generally, rather than of the individuals themselves.

Sophie Gralton
2008

SOFT SKIN

“Malcolm Utley, like many artists, oscillates between painting and sculpture. This new body of work produced in Kuala Lumpur pushes every aspect of his mark-making, lifting it outside the exhaustive, and somewhat tired, linage of artists working in tubular stainless steel. What Utley has managed to achieve in these new sculptures is tension. These works become liberated from modernist rhetoric and enter a complex, layered dialogue of suggestion, not dissimilar to Malaysia itself.”

Gina Fairley

WORLD SCULPTURE NEWS
Volume 13 Number 3 Summer 2008

My work addresses the child in all of us. We are all born artists. Children reveal this in their picture making. We presume to teach the child how to make art, while in practice we can learn so much from the child.

In the tranquil reverie of my art making I find myself returning again and again to my childhood solitudes. And through this dreaming I marvel at how the long forgotten imaginings of these solitudes resurface in my adult-infused imagery.

My imagery references the recurrence of childhood in adulthood - vignettes filled with ‘personas’ big and little, human and animal, scary and friendly, playful and serious in their curious encounters with other strange creatures all born of childhood fantasies.