Exhibitions | Linda Marrinon and Dominik Lang | MUMA

Revolutionist 2014 tinted and painted plaster Monash University Collection

Revolutionist 2014
tinted and painted plaster
Monash University Collection

Two new exhibitions opening next week at MUMA.

Exhibition Dates: 11 July - 19 September 2020

Opening function Wednesday 15 July 2015, 6-8pm. With remarks by Robyn McKenzie, writer and art historian

Linda Marrinon: Figure Sculpture 2005-2015

A key figure in Australian art since the mid-1980s, Linda Marrinon has developed an idiosyncratic language of painting and drawing steeped in postmodernist irony and feminist wit. Over the last decade, Marrinon has concentrated her attention on a significant body of entrancing and enigmatic figurative sculptures, forty-eight of which are brought together from public and private collections around Australia at the Monash University Museum of Art for Linda Marrinon: Figure Sculpture 2005-2015. Like many of her peers who established their reputations in the 1980s, Marrinon draws her references from both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, presenting a series of archetypes, intermingling soldiers, maids, matrons, ingénues, twins, travellers, intellectuals, performers, peasants and the privileged with a handful of identities ranging from Voltaire to Field Marshal Montgomery to Dame Joan Sutherland to MC Hammer. Marrinon casually pulls these subjects from a floating archive of objects, people, places and histories.

The texture of Marrinon’s artworks, laden with traces of the artist’s hand and sculpture tools, is reminiscent of the sculptures of Edgar Degas or Auguste Rodin, while their subjects evoke the mannerisms of the Regency, Victorian or Edwardian periods. Marrinon redeploys nineteenth-century studio practices, and the historical association of plaster casts with the serious study of classical antiquities, in her own whimsical subversion of the genre. Like characters from archaic forms of popular theatre, her figures are equipped with stage properties or articles of clothing by which they can be identified, sometimes simply by high-waisted pants or long sleeves, or more obscurely with a postiche or a shillelagh. The figures are dressed up but perhaps not for the music hall stage; Marrinon reinterprets the ideas, contemporaneous with Impressionism, of the new visibility of urban life and the flâneur into a contemporary sea of selfies and self-performance with which her audience is familiar.

Exhibition Publication with texts by Julie Ewington, Robyn McKenzie and Angus Trumble

Dominik Lang: Girl With Pigeon

Czech artist Dominik Lang takes a preexisting bronze sculpture, the seated figure of a small girl, found abandoned in the studio of his late father artist Jiri Lang (1927-1996) as the departure point for the installation, Girl with Pigeon. Imagining his father’s sculpture coming to life, Lang creates a series of sculpted movements—iterations of poses and gestures that the static figure would enact or perform, should it wake from its still position to move throughout the gallery. Lang places himself in the position of both sculptor and choreographer. Bringing a usually motionless medium to life, he represents movement, creating variants of the same body, navigating and directing the figure through the exhibition space.

Lang’s desire is not to create a statuary of sculptural pieces that resemble a lapidarium-like display, but rather to stage an experience similar to that of watching a performance or a dance sequence, where each movement has a temporary stage that smoothly fuses into another. Here the sculptures are not perceived individually as a series of static figures, but rather as a circulation of the same figure through the space, leaving traces throughout the gallery, as if one would see all the phases of a movement simultaneously. The audience will follow Girl with Pigeon’s journey through the installation: standing up from a chair; walking through a room; leaving traces upon the floor; leaning forward; looking out a window; posing; and, returning to her original location.

Lang describes his figure as, ‘a girl made of plaster with a plaster pigeon that sits on her hand, who travels to the other side of the world, perhaps to see an exhibition or to meet someone she once knew. She arrives with all her luggage to the museum but the gallery space is empty, or perhaps in the stage of installing or deinstalling a show. There are buckets of paint everywhere, ladders, cleaning tools, and part of the wall is being restored. The girl is alone in the space. There is no one to ask for advice or guidance. She feels lost. She walks around the space in circles. From time to time she sits on the floor and rests. For a little while she falls asleep. She leans towards the wall or hides when she hears some steps. No one is coming. She keeps waiting.’

MUMA | Monash University Museum of Art

Address: Ground Floor, Building F, Monash University, Caulfield campus, 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East

Website: http://monash.edu/muma/

Opening Hours: Tuesday – Friday: 10am – 5pm; Saturday: 12 – 5pm