A rare occasion! Three widely known contemporary artists – students in the early seventies – from Australia: Dream-time, Renaissance, Colonization and Natural Environment explode in these scenes of life down under. Get a tan from standing in the Budapest rain!
Sally Robinson, Denis Clarke, Jonathan Dell – “DREAM-TIME: determination, celebration and idyll”
On the eve of Australia Day in Chinese Characters, this year we celebrate with a show by three contemporary Australian artists: Jonathan Dell, Sally Robinson and Denis Clarke. The works on display will elucidate the title “DREAM-TIME: DETERMINATION, CELEBRATION AND IDYLL.
Sally Robinson and Denis Clarke are both practicing artists and show widely in Australia and Europe. Jonathan Dell, in many ways the centre piece of this exhibition – not only by force of majority but for me in his ability to portray what seems to be an Australian phenomena: dream-time – committed suicide in the late seventies, and though I have tried to find information on him, I have only the witness of the owner of these works to attest to his nature.
In considering these as landscape painters in the European tradition, I don’t wish to overlook the obvious symbolic imagery and contemporary influences of 20th century motifs such as surrealism and pop-art, and the definitely post-modern nature of the work.
Scenes of wildlife, children and newly built houses are idylls born out of european colonization. Renaissance imagery in Dell’s works mixed with modern iconographical pop images seem to explore the relationship between nostalgia and quest for the new, the idea of progress in a timeless place. Realism and humanism in art are renaissance ideals. The idea of the artist as “melancholic hunter”, as in Courbet’s “The Death of the Stag” is apparent in Robinson and Dell’s work. On the brink of potential which characterizes man’s relationship with the world and his dual nature of educator and executer, the future lies open yet strangely empty.
Prestige, determination, irradiated colours of a sunburned landscape, the celebration of a renewed interest in aboriginal thought and art, and the start of previously only marginally considered recognition of indigenous Australians – despite the 1971 Gove land rights case ruling that there existed no land claim prior to European settlement - all point to a society enriched. That these times can be lost or forgotten, that colonization and reclamation are momentary and fragile processes which the artist quests to capture for our enlightenment, and that social and environmental consequences must be addressed, are ever present in these works.
Courtesy of private collection.
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Megnyitó: 2009. január 22. kedd 19.00
Opening: 7 pm Tuesday 22 January 2008
PHOTOS: ?
