PAINTING AMONGST OTHER THINGS

Image: Lynda Benglis Roberta 1974 (detail) enamel, sculpmetal and tinsel on aluminium screeing and foil, 79.1x 89.1 x 41.3 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1975 © Lynda Benglis/VAGA

 

Painting amongst other things… brings together works by Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Tuttle, Raquel Ormella, Lynda Benglis, Ti Parks, Merlin James, Peter Alwast, Natasha Kidd and Karl Wiebke among others, examining how contemporary painting might be encountered within an expanded field. The exhibition juxtaposes significant historical precedents and contemporary works, showing how artists have continually reappraised the boundaries of their art by means of an engagement with “the real”.

Giving paintings the characteristics of objects, reassessing their physicality, spatializing their elements – these are well known devices for challenging and breaking down the four-squareness of painterly autonomy. Equally relevant to this exhibition is the artists’ exploration of new media and processes, their strategies of collaboration and their radical repurposing of objects and found materials.

The ultimate significance of the works in the exhibition could be determined by their suggestion that painting, or the artist, or art itself cannot be fixed in any assigned place. Inspiration and change must be discovered through a kind of brinkmanship, in what we don’t yet understand and may not be quite ready to accept.

The exhibition is presented to coincide with two other exhibitions around the same theme

ANU School of Art and Design Gallery
10 August – 1 September
curated by Peter Alwast, Raquel Ormella and Su Yilmez.

ANCA Gallery
8 August -26 August
curated by Oscar Capezio.

These exhibitions are supported by the ANU Research School of Arts and Humanities, the ANU Foundation for the Visual Arts, ANCA inc and the Friends of the Drill Hall Gallery.