contemporary painting 6 june - 23 august · language embedded in the painting’s visual systems...

Contemporary Painting 6 June - 23 August

Digital Catalogue

Introduction

‘It used to be so simple: a painting was the mediated result of the artists application of wet paint on a flat surface. No more. Ours is the age of the hybrid, the crossover, many splendid things, a time when the combined force of new media, postmodern thought, and human history has made it impossible for artists to worship a single god of painting. Indeed the practice of this ancient art may owe its continued health to its amazingly elastic nature’ Linda Yablonsky, Artworks, January 2005

As home to the Lewers Bequest – an outstanding collection of Sydney Modernist Art of the mid-century period, Penrith Regional Gallery seeks to regularly exhibit the work of Australian artists who continue to be engaged with the Modernist project.

Right Here Right Now is one such exhibition, comprising a survey of twenty young Sydney artists, who are participant to Modernism’s forward movement, its contradictions and ambiguities. Each artist uses painting as a touchstone for their practice, albeit this is painting as we do not ordinarily see or experience. Here we find artists at play with the painterly tradition, with temporal shifts, with subject, colour, shape, form and texture - and, alive to the materiality of this world and those imagined. Surfaces have luscious acrylic folds, they are sewn and patched, they mimic brick and stone, rope covers steel suggesting the painted line, assemblages are fixed and adrift on canvas, wall and floor, perspex invites light to dance.


Many of the artists presented here are early career. You will find their work in group and solo shows within artist run initiatives, and some of the recently established commercial galleries. Their work / practice reveals the influence of those who have gone before them – their teachers, artist heroes, and the pop and mass mediated culture that so many are immersed in. In this respect they show their broader citizenship in a globalised cultural landscape.

Right Here, Right Now is the first curatorial outing of Micheal Do. As curator he has used this opportunity to invite artists whose work he admires, those that exclaim the period in which they live and work. Herein, the artist is presented as expeditionary risk taker. Exhibited across three of the Gallery spaces, artworks are assembled in proximate relation and dialogue with each other. As exhibiting Gallery we invite audiences to witness an expanded conversation taking place over the exhibition period with schools on our interactive board outside the Main Gallery.

In Ancher House, is On Site: Notanda, ceramic pieces from Year 10 visual arts students of Caroline Chisholm College. These pieces respond to the Modernist aesthetic heritage and collection of Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest site. This modest exhibition reveals how the past and its artefacts remain fresh for those with new eyes to see.

Dr Lee-Anne HallDirectorPenrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest

The tradition of painting in western art has long been considered one of the most influential and prized art forms. In the 21st century, painting has been challenged by technology, ideology, the photograph, the readymade and conceptual art. These developments have been key challenges to late Modernism.

RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW is Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest’s contribution to these developments and disruptions. The exhibition, shown across the gallery’s three exhibition spaces, features twenty Sydney-based artists who are experimenting at the fringes of contemporary painting.

These artists are recalibrating the materiality of painting in response to the networked rhythms of our age. Fragile fabrics, welded metals, commercial software and industrial plastics take the place of the primed canvas. And with it, painting moves further away from image making, and towards objects that act, that mutate and perform in space. Through their irreverent wit, innovation and invention these artists demonstrate the rude health of contemporary painting. RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW timestamps current artists’ practice - exploring what painting might be, without losing sight of what it once was.


Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest would like to thank participating artists:

Georgia BrownTerrence Combos Charles DenningtonHossein GhaemiGregory Hodge Karena KeysMason KimberAnna Kristensen Stephen LittleJonny NiescheKenzee PattersonElizabeth PulieTodd RobinsonHuseyin SamiTim SilverMark TitmarshMarian Tubbs Justene WilliamsCoen YoungLouise Zhang

Essay

Georgia BrownLives and works in Sydney.

Georgia Brown’s recent practice examines perceptions of the object in the contemporary white cube. In light of the weight of meaning in a post post-modern world; one in which there is too much stuff, she playfully insists that the work performs more than one function.

Enamored by rich pigments in manufactured paints, her material of choice is Perspex. She sees this as paint in a solid state, rolled out and ready to be made into an object.

Cube Drawing comprises several hundred acrylic cubes or containers of space. Although hard edged and inflexible as individual units the drawing as a whole is designed to conform to the gallery space. When encountered on mass and from various angles the viewer perceives a changing depth of field. The iridescent glow of the Perspex in changing light ensures an ambiguous boundary.

Watermelon Construct is made of layers of imagined floorplans sandwiched together in a relief style piece. While representing the literal, a new object is created in shallow three dimensional space.


Artist Statements and Biographies

Terrence Combos Lives and works in Sydney.

The artwork SPP is an extension of Terrence Combos’ longstanding interest in the formative and destructive potential of conflating abstraction and language. His work tests the boundaries of legibility and comprehension through a non-instrumental engagement with language, presented through grid-based visual systems that rupture an operative text/non-text relationship.

In this painting, the projection of linguistic content is hindered by a pattern-based light/dark colour assignment, an absence of spacing between letters, and an ever-shifting letter orientation. The process of decoding the language embedded in the painting’s visual systems necessitates a highly laborious, inefficient method of reading.

Georgia Brown, Cube Drawing, 2012, acrylic and wood, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Georgia Brown and William Wright Artist Projects, Sydney.

Charles Dennington Lives and works in Sydney.

Charles Dennington’s work explores the way fragmentary form can symbolise a whole being or a whole object. Using the part as a proxy for the whole, his interests centre around ways that existing matter can be altered to shift or invert the viewer’s perception. He works with transmutative processes that expose the mutability of form.

In Water Lilies we see a video documentation of a sculpture that uses everyday objects to propose the phenomenon of levitation. A tiny fresco painting referencing Monet’s Impressionist work by the same name has been painted onto a small ball that floats amid a mysterious air current. The nonchalant setting of the artist’s studio hints at this tiny bobbing world as having spontaneously sprung into existence.


Hossein GhaemiLives and works in Sydney

Hossein Ghaemi embraces the unknown in both his methodology and subject matter. In his working process, thinking comes through making, and objects materialise from an intuitive flow, a knowing without interference of reason. Materially, his works are equally liminal, testing the boundaries between representation and object-hood as well as the porosity between mediums as he works fluidly between sculpture, installation, painting and performance.

Among the painted surfaces we find elements akin to Sci-Fi. Strange scenarios unfold. A figure covered in a wrinkled, white cloak stretches its arm out in the middle of a basketball-shaped basketball court; and in another piece, a dark rectangle with menacing eyes stares from a cloudlike backdrop. The shape of a human foot and a ring are recurring motifs, the ring having a particular significance to the work in terms of its relationship to the circle and its conception as something with intrinsic divine or mystical qualities.

Excerpt from the exhibition text for Hossein Ghaemi - WIDE BLUE YONDER AND THE ALMIGHTY HOOF (a painting show!), The Commercial Gallery, Sydney, 2014Ivan Muñiz Reed, independent curator and co-director of The Curators’ Department


Still from Charles Dennington, Waterlillies, 2013, video, 1 minute and 30 seconds. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallerie Pompom, Sydney.

Gregory HodgeLives and works in Sydney

Gregory Hodge constructs kaleidoscopic abstractions from a mélange of source material including painted abstract motifs on drafting film, coloured paper and masking tape, before rendering these collages in paint. Using complex and systematic technical processes such as trompe-l’oeil, cast shadows and manipulating paints translucent and opaque qualities, the paintings playfully mimic the physical fragility and provisional nature of the source material.

This visual trickery within the abstract picture space presents the viewer with multiple visual experiences. Surface and materiality become imaginative entry points. Hodge’s work exudes a sense of the material presence of painting via a concern with light, colour and surface, while to mind the perceptual associations of vision via the illusionistic picture space. The paintings blur the boundaries between two and three dimensionality and playfully explore the space between image and reality, representation and abstraction.

Edited text: Sullivan + Strumpf



Karena KeysLives and works in Sydney.

My practice moves within painting and its expanded field. Through the manipulation of acrylic paint and painting’s spatial constructs I explore the possibilities of meaning through the contradiction of elements. My research and practice has revealed to me that it is the tension created through the opposition of material, compositional and conceptual elements that ultimately informs an artwork’s effect. When these pairings are simultaneously created in a work then negated by its counter element, it is possible for an intangible tension to be perceived by the viewer.

Within my work these oppositional characteristics are found within the acrylic paint material itself. When used without a canvas support the paint it is at once hard and soft, strong but weak, fragile yet enduring. I sew, stretch and tear the acrylic to create each work, layer upon layer until it finds its form. A form that will ultimately appear static yet also in flux as it moves, sags, and droops over time and within the gallery space. Because of these material and conceptual tensions I hope my work exists within a realm of being and not being. This allows each artwork to reverberate within a field of tension relying on the viewer to join the dots, so that one is offered room for their own individual reading and experience.

Gregory Hodge, Weather Patterns, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 229 x 198 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney.

Mason Kimber Lives and works in Sydney

Mason Kimber is interested in the way cinema can both influence and direct our recollections of the past – and has used a series of film stills as the basis of a new collection of abstract paintings entitled Screen Memory.

Kimber’s paintings are a haunting combination of decipherable figures and structures that fade into soft brush strokes of abstraction. An apparition of an image in gentle tones that is familiar – but dissolved before it can be fully recognised. “I think all media imagery can have an effect on the way we picture our own memories,” Kimber says. “Films in particular though, because they focus on a small moment in time and hold our attention by amplifying it, making it bigger than it actually is.” He lists close-up moments such as a view into a doorway, a pair of keys or a wallpaper pattern as being capable of manipulating any accurate view of the past.

Text: Sammy Preston, ‘Mason Kimber’s Screen Memory’, Broadsheet Sydney, 22 October 2013



Anna Kristensen Lives and works in Sydney.

Anna Kristensen’s paintings are intentionally discursive and dialectical – they drift between styles and subjects, often placing these subjects in direct opposition. We see this in the way her paintings simultaneously pair antithetical references to nonrepresentational art and figuration, in her juxtaposition of illusionistic pictorial space with the concrete flatness of abstraction, and her rendering of gestural painting in a cool and detached photo-realist style.

Some of these conflicts play out formally in Crazy Wall (2014), a painting of a ‘crazy paving’ wall photographed by the artist in America. The image of this textured and gestural surface was transferred via silkscreen onto canvas, where it was further worked and transformed.

In An Image of the Future made in the Past (2014), Kristensen disguises a portrait of the cartoon character George Jetson within a photo-real painting of a stucco wall. This figure is almost invisible within a flurry of gestural strokes in cement. In its most simplistic reading, the work is a humorous play on what we see and project onto pictures. George Jetson, however, is not a random choice. He exists here as a sign of the future (and what was The Jetsons but a popular evocation of the future) paradoxically delivered to the past, hidden as he is within the earth-hewn render of a primitive looking wall.

Anna Kristensen, An image of the future made in the past, 2014, oil and acrylic on linen, 59 x 49 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery 9 Sydney.

Stephen Little Lives and works in Sydney

My practice explores alternatives to traditional models and conventions commonly employed in the classification of painting. Rather than draw on familiar materials and pictorial traditions to construct meaning I seek to highlight painting’s unorthodox potential by reworking it through other media. Having side-stepped the use of traditional materials and methodologies the work draws on everyday objects, materials and often-unconventional associations to reflect on the current condition of painting.

As a reflection on the material, conceptual and perceptual shifts that continue to arise within the discipline, my abandonment of traditional materials has brought me closer to the complexities that surround, inform and characterize the territory of critical painting today. Through this, anomalies are generated that continue to provoke pertinent questions about painting’s classification, and its continued indiscernibility.


Jonny NiescheLives and works in Sydney

My practice is concerned with the cultivation and manipulation of aesthetic ‘experiences’. The primary content of my work is the physiological affect activated in the viewer whilst navigating the work. Using a vocabulary of transparent, reflective and translucent materials such as Voile and mirror the ‘paintings’ create immersive experience of spatial ambiguity as the viewer navigates them.

Employing an illusory play of objects and visualisations of deep space combined with references to minimalism, magic and psychedelia. In a performative way, an experiential exchange is created between the works, the space and the viewer. The works are activated by the viewers’ presence and movement, creating a visual conversation. The visual conversation is the aesthetic ‘experience’ of the work. Bisecting the relationships between object and illusion, reduction and excess, the digital and the handmade, I am interested in teasing and stretching the spatial limitations of traditional painting, speculating upon various ways in which painting might transcend and articulate space.


Stephen Little, Monodome (pink), 2010, coated taffeta polyeurythane, fibreglass, guide ropes, plastic, 190 x 210 x 125 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and William Wright Artist Projects, Sydney.

Elizabeth Pulie Lives and works in Sydney

Elizabeth Pulie works within a larger philosophical project centred around the idea of the end of art. # 38 and #40 (2013) form part of a larger numbered series that combine a focus on arts and crafts aesthetics with a conceptual approach driving painting towards decoration as an end point. These works, configured as banners combine retro material approaches (macramé, stitching, weaving, embroidery and beading) to create frisson within the as-yet-unfinished debates around art’s future.

These works derive from her 2013 work The Female Form (II). Pulie says of her paintings, ‘I didn’t intend to draw vaginas in the first instance, I was trying to draw three reproductions of a vaguely floral design in a row, but the design became more explicit as I went.’ Referencing historical feminism, the banner medium is a nod to the wide-ranging protest marches for women’s rights, while the hessian, an unpretentious and utilitarian fabric, promotes an earthy 70s craft-like feel. With the application of acrylic paint Pulie intents the ideas in her work to span the decades.

Edited text: Sarah Cottier Gallery, The Art Life.


Kenzee PattersonLives and works in Sydney

Kenzee Patterson works across a wide array of media, materials and technologies. His works responds to the realities of urban and suburban Australian and the Australian identity with a playful approach.

Kenzee Patterson is a graduate of Sydney College of the Arts (BVA, Hons Class I) 2005. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia. His works are held by various public institutions and in private collections.


Kenzee Paterson, Return to Artist, 2014, hot dip galvanised steel, 90 x 60 x 6 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.

Todd RobinsonLives and works in Sydney

Todd Robinson’s recent work enquires into sculptural presence, materiality and conditions of audience reception. The exhibition features a series of rope sculptures, experiments in an uncanny realism that unfurl fluidly against the floor, yet rise up vertically challenging the physical laws to which they are subjected. In so doing Robinson covertly renders imaginary forces visible of which we are unaware, yet appear natural to conventional observation.

In Impossible Suspense #2 Robinson playfully challenges the laws of physics with balloon inspired sculptures which are recurrent in his work.

Equipoise Series is located in Lewers House.

Impossible Suspense #2 is in the Main Gallery.


Huseyin SamiLives and works in Sydney

Huseyin Sami’s practice to date has been predicated on pursuing a consistent line of experimentation to illustrate how painting can capture ideas of time, action and process. Sami’s work is centred upon the field of painting and developing numerous activities that have iteratively engaged with the process of making paintings. These progressive pursuits have explored the material of household paint into studies of colour, form and materiality in an attempt to define a unique material language of painting.

Sami’s creative process of transformative incidents within his working methodologies has provided a platform for circumventing new questions and strategies toward art making. This has been a process which further engages his established repertoire of pictorial codes and devices such as pouring, dripping, rolling, stretching and cutting household paint to present the possibility of opening up a new creative space. These enquiries reflect an ongoing series of informed revisions, which have taken Sami’s examination and understanding of the medium further.

Edited Text: Simon T Lore


Todd Robinson, Impossible Suspense #2, 2015, laminated fiberglass, SLS print, automotive lacquer, cast painted concrete, welded steel base, laminated plywood, paint, 235cm x 40xm x 35 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallerie Pompom.

Tim SilverLives and works in Sydney

Injury or infestation can create a burl – an aberrant growth or tumour that emerges in trees. Despite its malignancy, the burl is highly prized by woodworkers, where its form offers an oblique figuration. The burl is an inherently baroque form. The word ‘baroque’, derived from barroco, which in Portuguese describes an imperfect pearl, can readily describe the similarly sought-after imperfection of the burl. For Tim Silver the world is inherently baroque. It is best understood via its equivocations, and within its ambiguity lies unexpected beauty. Silver’s sculptures usually begin dying the moment they are born. They denounce the striving towards permanence that sculpture has historically embodied. His self-portrait busts, cast in wood fillers, desiccate – sloughing and slumping into new forms. Demise for Silver can be a creative state.

His choice of the burl as a sculptural subject extends his material and metaphysical fascination with growth and decay. Pigmented black, their synthetic or plastic nature mocks the essentialism and truth to materials celebrated in the surrounding exhibits. By casting that which is traditionally carved and by transforming timber into plastic, Silver creates an art that is not only baroque but decidedly burlesque in its parody and imitation’

Edited Text: Lisa Slade


Mark Titmarsh Lives and works in Sydney

Mark Titmarsh is a visual artist working in painting, video and writing. His current ‘expanded painting’ work is painting about painting or painting that dissimulates into objects, videos and texts.

Titmarsh is an academic in the School of Design, University of Technology, Sydney. His artworks are held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, various public institution and private collections. He has also published widely including the journal Art Monthly Australia and contributed to the book Baudrillard Live.


Tim Silver, Untitled (trauma #9), 2014, cast pigmented polyurethane, 72 x 60 x 22 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney.

Marian Tubbs Lives and works in Sydney

Marian Tubbs’ artwork is manifest across internet, video and assemblage-based installations. It conflates material binaries between body and object, physical and virtual, and high and low culture. It describes abstract metals, everyday effluence, finger-paintings on silk, gymnastic hoops, stickers, free apps and explicit jokes made for friends as both a list of materials and the allegoric make-up of her practice.

Her works, which often juxtapose images of nature with everyday materials, seem to represent a poetics between the material world and cybernetics, and in doing so provide a rethinking of the detritus that is part of a consumption-obsessed society. Marian discerns the corporeal and anthropomorphic qualities in her pieces, suggesting that objects can sometimes echo aspects of her own body or perhaps even act as an extension of it. Her intuitive use of materials and fluid working processes tests the porosity between the body, the object and the binary world.

In conversation with the artist on the occasion of Primavera 2014: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Ivan Muñiz Reed, independent curator and co-director of The Curators’ Department


Justene Williams Lives and works in Sydney

Justene Williams’ work encompasses video, photography and performance. Williams’ collage extends beyond the physicality of cutting and pasting — she reaches back in time and channels the ghosts of artists past to explore issues of contemporary Australian suburban culture and consumerism. Williams combines these themes with Modernist art historical motifs, often referencing Dada and Surrealism.

Justene Williams has exhibited widely throughout Australia and internationally. Her work is held by numerous public institutions and private collectors, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.


Justene Williams, Installation shot from No Mind, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

Coen Young Lives and works in Sydney.

Coen Young is a painter who is interested in photographic processes and methodology in pursuit of his practice. Young applies various media and chemicals in multiple layers such as gesso, marble dust and enamel onto a sheet of cotton rag paper; the last being silver nitrate, which is applied, fixed and washed just like a sheet of photographic paper. Each process leaves its trace on the paper, evident at the edges, and evokes a sense of the object’s history as it slowly reveals itself to the viewer. The result is a highly polished surface that claims a certain objectness that is also its antithesis, revealed in the tension between the surface and the ‘image’, which is only manifested in the reflection. The works gesture towards an experience or temporal moment that like a memory remains ungraspable and somewhat illusive.


Louise ZhangLives and works in Sydney

Louise Zhang work starts with the most basic unit of construction: the amorphous, inchoate ‘blob’. Working with materials ranging from acrylic, oil, enamel, resin, expanding polyurethane, gap filler and silicone, she creates both sculptural objects and paintings on canvas and birch wood supports. Through these materials, Zhang takes the ‘blob’ – defined by its infinite mutability, and pure constructive potential to produce abstractions of the everyday, informed and shaped by painterly gestures.

Born out of a love of goo and slime in children’s toys, as well as outbursts of grotesqueness in cartoons, Zhang’s work revels in everyday ephemera. These seemingly innocuous ephemera are impishly reread and manipulated, engineered simultaneously attractive and repulsive outcomes and interpretations. The work employs the use of an artificial candy palette of the cute and the pretty, however its purely jovial potential is often counterpointed by a perceivably monstrous physical formation. Zhang’s practice explores and is a product of this hybrid relationship between the enticing and the odious.


Coen Young, Study for a Mirror I and II, 2015, acrylic, marble dust, enamel and silver nitrate on paper, 212.5 x 121.5 cm each. Image courtesy of the artist and William Wright Artist Projects, Sydney.


Georgia Brown Watermelon construct 2011 acrylic and woodCourtesy of the artist and William Wright Artists Projects, Sydney. Georgia Brown Cube Drawing 2012 acrylic and woodCourtesy of the artist and William Wright Artists Projects, Sydney.

Terrance Combos SPP 2015 paint marker on boardCourtesy the artist.

Charlie Dennington Waterlillies 2013 Video 1 Minute 10 seconds Private Collection, Sydney

Hossein Ghaemi Yellow face (blonde hail of chains and approval)2014acrylic on Perspex, wood, chain, hardwareCourtesy the artist and The Commercial Gallery, Sydney.

List of Works

Hossein GhaemiTwo paste2014acrylic on acrylic, chain, hardware, Courtesy the artist and The Commercial Gallery, Sydney.

Hossein GhaemiQuilt fantasy2014acrylic on wood, chain, hardwareCourtesy the artist and The Commercial Gallery, Sydney.

Hossein GhaemiGreen gloves2014acrylic on wood, chain, hardwareCourtesy the artist and The Commercial Gallery, Sydney.

Hossein GhaemiToe ring2014acrylic on wood, chain, hardware, Courtesy the artist and The Commercial Gallery, Sydney.

Hossein GhaemiHave to be in it to head out of it to let me in2014acrylic on acrylic, wood, chain, hardwareCourtesy the artist and The Commercial Gallery, Sydney.

Hossein GhaemiFallow2014acrylic on wood, chain, hardware,Courtesy the artist and The Commercial Gallery, Sydney.

Gregory Hodge Weather Patterns 2014 acrylic on canvasCourtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney.

Karena Keys We’ll Float # 7 2015 acrylic soaked tissue paper, cotton thread Courtesy the artist.

Mason KimberStill 105 2013 oil on canvas Private Collection, Sydney. Mason Kimber Still 100 2013 oil on canvas Private Collection, Sydney.


List of Works

Anna Kristensen Crazy Wall 2014 silkscreen ink and acrylic on canvasCourtesy the artist and Gallery 9, Sydney. Anna Kristensen An image of the future made in the past2014 oil and acrylic on linenCourtesy the artist and Gallery 9, Sydney. Stephen Little Monodome (pink) 2010 Waterproof coated taffeta polyurethane, fiberglass, guide ropes, plastic Courtesy the artist and William Wright Artist Projects, Sydney.

Jonny Niesche Particle Shift 2015 voile on woodCourtesy of the artist and Minerva Gallery, Sydney and Station Gallery, Melbourne. Jonny Niesche Punctum 2015 voile on woodCourtesy of the artist and Minerva Gallery, Sydney and Station Gallery, Melbourne.

Jonny Niesche Dissolve into being loop2015voile on woodCourtesy of the artist and Minerva Gallery, Sydney and Station Gallery, Melbourne.

Kenzee Paterson Return to artist 2014 hot dip galvanised steelCourtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.

Kenzee Paterson Red and Green Kangaroo Paw2013 hot-dip galvanised steelCourtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.

Kenzee Paterson Pink Heath 2013 hot-dip galvanised steelCourtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.

Kenzee PatersonBlue Gum 2013 hot-dip galvanised steel Courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.

Kenzee Paterson Sturt’s Desert Rose 2013 hot-dip galvanised steel Courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.

Kenzee Paterson Royal Bluebell 2013 hot-dip galvanised steel Courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.

Kenzee Paterson Sturt’s Desert Pea 2013 hot-dip galvanised steelCourtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.

Kenzee Paterson Waratah 2013 hot-dip galvanised steelCourtesy the artist and DarrKnight Gallery, Sydney.

Kenzee Paterson Cooktown Orchid 2013 hot-dip galvanised steelCourtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.


List of Works

Elizabeth Pullie #38 2013 acrylic on hessian, metal rod & fimoCourtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

Elizabeth Pullie #40 2013 acrylic on hessian, metal rod & fimoCourtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

Todd Robinson Impossible Suspense #2 2015 laminated fibreglass, SLS print, automotive lacquer, cast painted concrete, welded steel, laminated plywood, paint.Courtesy the artist and Gallerie Pompom, Sydney.

Impossible Suspense #2 was assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Todd Robinson Equipoise in Black #12015 Steel, ropeCourtesy the artist and Gallerie Pompom, Sydney.

Todd Robinson Equipoise in Black #22015 Steel, ropePrivate Collection, Sydney. Todd Robinson Equipoise in Black #32015 Steel, ropeCourtesy the artist and Gallerie Pompom, Sydney.

Todd Robinson Equipoise in Black #42015 Steel, ropeCourtesy the artist and Gallerie Pompom, Sydney.

Todd Robinson Equipoise in yellow #22015 Steel, ropeCourtesy the artist and Gallerie Pompom, Sydney.

Todd Robinson Equipoise in Yellow #3 2015 Steel, ropeCourtesy the artist and Gallerie Pompom, Sydney.

Huseyin Sami Colour Wire Hang (BP) acrylic on wire2014 Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

Huseyin Sami Untitled (WAP) 2014 acrylic on canvas Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

Tim Silver Untitled (trauma #8) 2014 cast pigmented polyurethaneCourtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney.

Tim Silver Untitled (trauma #9) 2014 cast pigmented polyurethaneCourtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney.

Tim Silver Untitled (Scar Tissue #1) edition of 22013 cast pigmented polyurethaneCourtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney. Mark Titmarsh Chromophiliac 2.5 2009slumped acrylicCourtesy the artist.


List of Works

Mark Titmarsh Blue Moon Candy Table 2009slumped PerspexCourtesy the artist.

Mark Titmarsh Yellow Cobra Chair 2009slumped PerspexCourtesy the artist.

Marian Tubbs stale to me 2014 digital print on silkCourtesy the artist.

Marian Tubbs techne 2015 digital print on silkCourtesy the artist.

Marian Tubbs typical quasi coy 2014 digital print on silkCourtesy the artist.

Marian TubbsIn need of a world 2014 digital print on silkCourtesy the artist.

Marian Tubbs under striates one 2014 digital print on microgeorgetteCourtesy the artist.

Justene Williams Tree/Volcano 2015 adhesive tape on tarpaulinCourtesy of artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

Coen Young Study for a Mirror I 2015 acrylic, marble dust, enamel and silver nitrate on paper Courtesy the Redlands Art Collection, Sydney. Coen Young is represented by William Wright Artist Projects, Sydney.

Coen Young Study for a Mirror II 2015 acrylic, marble dust, enamel and silver nitrate on paper Courtesy the Redlands Art Collection, Sydney. Coen Young is represented by William Wright Artist Projects, Sydney.

Louise Zhang Vermiform Streaks 2014 vinyl acrylic and oil on birch woodCourtesy the artist and Artereal Gallery, Sydney.

Louise ZhangCesspool of Unconditional Love2015 vinyl acrylic and oil on birch wood Courtesy the artist and Artereal Gallery, Sydney. Louise Zhang Pools of ugh2015 flashe, acrylic, expanding foam, polyurethane, resin, plastic

This direct to wall mural was commissioned by the Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest for this exhibition, RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.

Louise Zhang is represented by Artereal Gallery, Sydney.

Ancher House

Ceramic works by Caroline Chisholm CollegeON SITE : NOTANDA

Notanda is a Visual Arts program for Year 10 Visual Arts students at Caroline Chisholm College. Students visit the gallery and take a tour of the site and the collection with Collection Manager, Dr Shirley Daborn. From these visits, the students develop a design for a ceramic form that is their interpretation of an aspect of the Penrith Regional Gallery site, including the Collection, the original house and the garden.

The name for the unit, Notanda, has been taken from the name of ground-breaking design shop run by Margo Lewers from 1936-1939 in Rowe St, Sydney. The name of the shop, Notanda, meant ‘worthy of note’ and featured a selection of modern homewares, textiles, ceramics, jewellery and artworks.

Margo Lewers, with her husband, Gerald Lewers, were founding members of the Contemporary Art Society of NSW. Their house on the banks of the Nepean River was an important site where many significant artists and writers would stay and work.

One of the key intentions of this unit is to introduce students to the history and significance of the gallery site and to help them appreciate and value this important local site.

Notanda Gallery Margo Lewers(b. Mosman 1908 – d. Emu Plains 1978)

In 1936, artist Margo Lewers opened an interior design shop called Notanda Gallery in the bohemian heart of Sydney, Rowe Street. She established the shop after returning from Europe energised with the new expressions of modernism she had witnessed across the fields of visual arts, literature, interior decoration and architecture. Notanda Gallery, Margo explained, ‘was the only shop anything like it at the time… most of my clients were architects who had come back from overseas. The average person didn’t like what I sold at all.’ Although Notanda closed in 1939, due to a shortage of materials during WWII, Margo continued to espouse the same international principles, which are particularly notable in the lifestyle and space that she created as her home here at Emu Plains.

Margo’s PotteryMargo Lewers designed a range of earthenware for sale in Notanda Gallery. These works were designed with clean, simple lines, and hand-painted by Margo using the tonal shades of a single colour as the means of expression. Margo would oversee the commercial production of her designs at the well-established Fowlers Pottery in Sydney. Each piece was typically stamped with ‘Margo’s Pottery’ and a number that corresponded with her ceramics product catalogue. Penrith Regional Gallery is fortunate to have a range of Margo’s Pottery in its Collection, including small plates and bowls, candlesticks and pots of varying shapes and scale. The majority of these pieces have been received as generous donations by Mrs H. Barnett in 1982 and most recently by John and Alison Waters in 2015.

Margo LewersSmall pot # 43c. 1937hand coloured and glazed ceramicCollection Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest. Donated by John and Alison Waters, 2015.

Margo Lewers Medium pot # 69c. 1937hand coloured and glazed ceramicCollection Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest. Donated by John and Alison Waters, 2015.

Margo Lewers vase #46c. 1937hand coloured and glazed ceramicCollection Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest. Donated by John and Alison Waters, 2015.

Margo LewersSmall Bowl and Plate Setsc. 1936hand coloured ceramicCollection Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest. Donated by Mrs H. Barnett, 1982.

Margo LewersJardinièrec. 1938hand coloured and glazed ceramicCollection Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest. Donated by Mrs H. Barnett, 1982.

Ancher House

Ceramic works by Caroline Chisholm CollegeON SITE : NOTANDA

Ceramic works by Caroline Chisholm College

Claudia BeghettoBamboo Grove, 2014earthenware, oxides, underglaze and clear gloss glaze

My ceramic form is based on the bamboo garden near Lewers House. I was drawn towards the structural form of the plant as well as the rich variety of vibrant greens. In my ceramic form, I adapted the shapes and patterns of the bamboo in the form and surface decoration.

Amber EnglishModernist Circles, 2014earthenware, oxides and underglaze

It was my aim to represent the way that Gerald and Margo Lewers incorporated geometric shapes into their works and how these modernist characteristics are featured in other works in the collection. I focused on the tower of arches and blocks in a sculpture at the front of the gallery. My ceramic design focuses on this sculpture and the bold colours that Margo Lewers used in many of her works.

Laura WonsonLewers Vessel, 2014earthenware, oxides and underglaze

This ceramic form was inspired by the variety of surfaces and textures that are used throughout the site, in the gallery and surrounding gardens. The actual structure of the form is inspired by the strong qualities of a number of sculptures including Gerald Lewers’ drainpipe, whilst the colour choices are derived from the vibrant colours found in artworks and other sculptures in the collection.

Jasmine ClarkModernist Form, 2014earthenware, oxides and underglaze

My inspiration for my ceramic form mainly came from Margel Hinder’s 1967 sculpture near the café in the garden at Penrith Regional Gallery, Six Day War. The geometrical and curved patterns, as well as the textures, were based on the patterns of the sandstone bricks that cover the floor of the area outside of the café and the main gallery.

Alana ThomasConstructed Form, 2013earthenware, oxides and underglaze

My ceramic form is an adaptation of the modernist constructed metal sculptures that are found in the gardens around the gallery. The slab construction at the opening reflects the angles and planes of the steel constructions and the colours reflect both the warm reds of the oxidised steel as well as the colours in many of Margo Lewers’ paintings.

Ancher House

ON SITE : NOTANDA

Acknowledgements

RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW Curator: Micheal Do

On Site: NotandaCeramic Works by Carolyn Chisholm College Curator: Dr Shirley Daborn

Exhibition TeamDirector: Dr Lee-Anne HallExhibition Project Manager: Micheal Do Collections Manager: Dr Shirley Daborn Public Programs and Media: Dimity MullaneDesign and catalogue: Justine Holt

Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest is operated by Penrith Performing and Visual Arts. It recieves the funding support of Penrith City Council and Arts NSW.

Our partners:Penrith Lakes Development CorporationWirra Wirra WinesWestern Regional Wines

This exhibition has been made possible though the generosity of the artists involved, their galleries and private collectors.

Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest would like to thank participating artists:

Georgia BrownTerrence Combos Charles DenningtonHossein GhaemiGregory Hodge Karena KeysMason KimberAnna Kristensen Stephen LittleJonny NiescheKenzee PattersonElizabeth PulieTodd RobinsonHuseyin SamiTim SilverMark TitmarshMarian Tubbs Justene WilliamsCoen YoungLouise Zhang

Representative Galleries:The Commercial, Darren Knight Gallery, Gallerie Pompom, Gallery 9, Minerva, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sullivan+Strumpf, William Wright Artist Projects.

Our thanks also go to Karen King and the Visual Arts Department at Caroline Chisholm College.

© Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest. All rights reserved.

Front Cover: Todd Robinson, Impossible Suspense #2, 2015, laminated fiberglass, SLS print, automotive lacquer, cast painted concrete, welded steel base, laminated plywood, paint, 235cm x 40xm x 35 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallerie Pompom.

Find us at www.penrithregionalgallery.org

contemporary painting 6 june - 23 august · language embedded in the painting’s visual systems...

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