mage: Marrnyula Mununggurr, Ganybu, 2015, natural ochres on bark, dimensions variable, courtesy the artist and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala.
New exhibitions open tonight at Gertrude Contemporary in Fitzroy. Tomorrow (31st January) there will be a series of artist talks. All exhibition run from 30 January – 14 March 2015, details below.
Gertrude Contemporary | 200 Gertrude street Fitzroy | www.gertrude.org.au
Opening hours Tuesday-Friday 11.00-5.30pm, Saturday 11.00-4.30pm
Friday 30th January: Exhibition Openings from 6pm
Saturday 31st January: Artist talks, painting demonstration, studio sale
1.00pm | David Egan will discuss his exhibition Actually Energy Help Light with curator Helen Hughes and the public.
1.30pm | Marrnyula Mununggurr will talk about her exhibition Ganybu with curator Helen Hughes and the public, as well as give a painting demonstration using natural Yolngu ochres and bark.
11.30–4.30pm | Sarah crowEST (the current exhibiting artist in Studio 12) will be holding a sale upstairs in her adjacent Studio 10.
Marrnyula Mununggurr, Ganybu
Marrnyula Mununggurr presents a new body of work, Ganybu — a vast matrix of 252 small bark paintings and one larrakitj, each of which depict the artist’s Djapu clan design, the fish trap and waters at Wändawuy in North East Arnhem Land. Mununggurr’s grids painted in natural ochres reference the topography of Wändawuy itself, striated by billabongs, high banks and ridges, as well as the structure of the fish trap itself. The shape of the fish trap, ganybu, is iterated in the installation of the small barks hung en masse on the gallery wall.
Mununggurr is also undertaking a short Studio 18 residency between the 26th of January and the 2nd of February. exhibition and residency marks the beginning of a new partnership between Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre and Gertrude Contemporary, which will facilitate the exchange of artists, curators and exhibitions between the art organisations in Yirrkala and Melbourne.
David Egan, Actually Energy Help Light
For Actually Energy Help Light, David Egan presents several different bodies of paintings and text. A new work is painted using pigment from the beautiful yet noxious flowering plant Morning Glory, a climbing weed that competes with cultivated plants by growing laterally, stopping light from penetrating its blanketing surface. This painting changes colour in time, it is a pictorial registration of the decomposing plant matter. Other paintings extend Egan’s Painting Playing Cards series (2013–), which invoke a form of decorative artifice introduced to the back of the formerly blank playing card in the nineteenth century to address a social epidemic of card cheating. Asparation Frieze produces a painting of architectural proportions, which cannot be viewed in its entirety from any one vantage, always gesturing to the peripheral. Egan’s written text works produce a meta-fictional space in which the concerns of the paintings criss-cross in a succession of mental images.
Performance: ‘The Czech Magnate, a circular’, a radio play written by Mark von Schlegell ‘in the service of David Egan’, has been produced especially for the occasion of this exhibition. It will be performed and recorded live in the central gallery at Gertrude Contemporary on the evening of Tuesday 10 March 2015.
Sarah crowEST, RUNNING ORDER
For RUNNING ORDER, Sarah crowEST will show a series of stretched and unstretched paintings alongside digital prints of these works attached to human bodies. An interactive part of this Studio 12 exhibition invites viewers to ring a bell to summon the artist from her adjacent studio, and to become part of a ‘casting call’ or discussion. This may or may not involve dressing-up, image capture and inclusion in the running order for a hypothetical fashion parade.
Several of crowEST’s paintings will be worn by guests at the opening of the exhibition on Friday 30 January, and are available to be worn by visitors throughout the duration of the exhibition.
Liang Luscombe, Slide
The 2015 curator of Slide is Fayen d’Evie, who has invited Liang Luscombe to present the first work.
Liang Luscombe is a Melbourne-based artist and curator. Recent solo exhibitions include: Three Sailors, Sutton Project Space, Melbourne, 2014; Non in Casa, 157 Blyth St, Melbourne, 2013; Bauhaus Fisher Price, TCB Art Inc., Melbourne, 2012. Selected group exhibitions include: No fond return of love, I.C.A.N., Sydney, 2014; Dear Masato, all at once, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, 2014; brimming dissolution, buoyant expenditure, RM, Auckland, 2014; Synonyms for Sincerity, Alaska Projects, Sydney, 2013; Please be quiet, The British School at Rome, Rome, 2013; Navel Gazing, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne, 2013; Fresh Paint, Sutton Projects, Melbourne, 2012; Ménage a Trois, XYZ Gallery Tokyo, 2012; and Impossible Objects, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne, 2011. Luscombe was the recipient of an Australia Council JUMP Mentorship in 2013 and was mentored by Angela Brennan. She has also held residencies at the Australia Council Studio, British School at Rome in 2013 and PICA Studio Residency in 2011.