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Sunday, September 30, 2012
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Friday, September 28, 2012
Ken Whisson Exhibition Opening at the MCA Tonight
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My favourite Australian artist, Ken Whisson, has a retrospective exhibition
opening at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art tonight. We've been lucky to
own a few of his paintings and drawings, so for the last ten years or so we've
always had his work up on the walls. This is our current one:
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Aeroplanes, Girders, Voters and Vapour Trails
1986-89, oil on canvas
119.5 x 89.5 cm
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Exhibited at a touring solo show Ken Whisson A Survey at Pinacotheca Gallery
Melbourne, Shepparton Art Gallery Shepparton, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery
Ballarat and Geelong Art Gallery Geelong, 1990.
Reproduced: Ken Whisson A Survey catalogue, plate 34.
John McDonald in Ken Whisson A Survey catalogue:
"If one acknowledges that the style of a Whisson painting is unmistakeable, this
is not to plunge the artist into a creative cul-de-sac. One of the reasons these
pictures are individually so engaging and cumulatively so haunting, is that the
problems they deal with are never predictable, their shapes never purely
rhetorical. Each work has its own crisis to overcome, its own pictorial language
to invent. Yet the path Whisson follows is by no means one of linear
progression, since he will occasionally backtrack over old territory when he has
a new insight, or when he feels that some revision is necessary to the current
picture he is working on. In AEROPLANES, GIRDERS, VOTERS AND VAPOUR
TRAILS (1986 and 89), he revisits several motifs that have been appearing in
his paintings for the last decade or more, as though he had the sudden urge to
put them side-by-side to see how they looked together. He is like a general
assembling his troops, or a collector rearranging the objects in a display
cabinet. Just as we might make a list of things to do, so as to make these
tasks seem more manageable, so too does Whisson make an orderly
arrangement of images in this painting, (an arrangement which took three
years to assemble), as though he is looking back at what he has alreeady done
so as to get a clearer idea of what to do next."
An interesting essay on the exhibition (when it was in Melbourne) by W C Chong
at a Crikey blog:
From MCA website:
KEN WHISSON: AS IF
28 September-25 November 2012
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Learn more about one of Australia’s most important painters when the Museum
of Contemporary Art Australia presents a major retrospective of Ken Whisson’s
work As If, produced in collaboration with the Heide Museum of Modern Art in
Melbourne.
See portraits, landscapes and sketches tracing the evolution of Whisson’s
practice over the past six decades. Renowned for his unique vision and
independent style, Whisson has been making thoughtful and uncompromising
paintings and drawings which hold a unique place in Australian art. His
reputation has been built around his tenacious dedication to the act of painting
and persistent fascination with — and singular responses to — the delicate
machinations of both his inner world and the world at large.
Discover the artist’s influences and the development of his highly personal
aesthetic. Trained as a young artist in wartime Melbourne in the 1940s, Whisson
emerged out of the influential school of figurative expressionism. He initially
studied under Russian émigré artist Danila Vassilieff at Warrandyte, then went
on to combine the styles of his formative years with an increasingly linear and
graphic abstraction. Topographic and single point perspectives coalesce and
Whisson’s imagery often suggests a heightened and intense, sometimes
hallucinogenic reality, reflected in the exhibition title derived by Whisson via
Immanual Kant: ‘To live as if’, and the Paris surrealists: ‘Let us live as if the
world really exists’.
Examine Whisson’s major themes and series, from his powerful portrayals of
human relations to those which consider relationships with natural, built and
cultural environments and see the historical backdrop of the time reflected in
numerous drawings and paintings.
Since the late 1970s Whisson has been based in the Italian city of Perugia,
during which time interests in displacement and memory have joined his
enduring themes of landscape, identity and politics. At the age of 84 he is
painting as well as ever, and for the long haul, releasing into the world images
that reward the patient, analytical yet unguarded viewer.
Ken Whisson: As If, on Level 3, is curated by Glenn Barkley (MCA) and Lesley
Harding (Heide Museum of Modern Art).
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