Kick Gallery: Jewels Stevens

Between Two Worlds is Jewels Stevens latest showing at Collingwood’s Kick Gallery. As always Stevens has splashed out on colour, with works that are vibrant, sensational, and once again, she’s created works that lend a view of audacious colour that one might imagine lives some place between the horizon and a vivid imagination filled sky. At times explosive, this latest hanging sits against Kicks walls mid-eruption.

“It is no trick to make a simple thing complex” great jazz bassist Charles Mingus once said. “The real accomplishment is making something complex simple”

Stevens – in her 4th solo exhibition with Kick – has taken her now signature use of colour to an absolutely emotive level. Her clever use of perspective leaves the viewer wondering if we have perhaps fallen into a world too small or large to visualise. This latest wonder from Stevens runs until April 28, 2012. Read the full article »»»»

Edwin Parker Twombly: Big Picture Man Passes Away

Edwin Parker – Cy – Twombly, Jr. April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011. Twombly was a key figure in the post-war abstract art world, he died in Rome after suffering cancer for a number of years.Best known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. Twombly exhibited his paintings worldwide. Twombly’s paintings blur the line between drawing and painting. Many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard on which someone has practiced cursive “e”s. Twombly’s paintings of the late 1950s, early 1960s might be reminiscent of long term accumulation of bathroom graffiti. Twombly had at this point discarded painting figurative, representational subject-matter, citing the line or smudge – each mark with its own history – as its proper subject.  Later, many of Twombly’s paintings and works on paper moved into “romantic symbolism”, and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words. Twombly often quoted the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as many classical myths and allegories in his works. Examples of this are Twombly’s Apollo and The Artist and a series of eight drawings consisting solely of inscriptions of the word “VIRGIL”. Twombly lived in Lexington, Virginia, and Rome, Italy. He died in Rome after being hospitalized for several days, and had cancer for many years. Read the full article »»»»

Kick Gallery: Tim Vagg, The Boxer

TIM VAGG

The Boxer Paintings

Exhibition Opening 6-8pm June 09

Exhibition runs June 07 – June 25 2011

In his new series, The Boxer Paintings, Tim Vagg continues his recent artistic investigations into Australian history posing questions about the notion and formation of our national identity. Having painted portraits of specific Australian heros and antiheros in recent exhibitions ‘the boxer’ becomes the central motif in his new series. Filled with metaphor and allegory Vagg’s new works again invite his audiences to re-look and reassess Australian history and identity.

Kick Gallery: Ben Elisha

And the Winner is…

Sydney: A portrait of the celebrated painter and one-time Dobell muse Margaret Olley by the artist Ben Quilty has won the $50,000 Archibald Prize. Quilty’s work was chosen from more than 800 entries and 41 finalists to win the coveted portrait prize, now in its 90th year.

The 88-year-old doyenne of Australian art, who was also the subject of an Archibald winner by William Dobell in 1948, said: “Ben’s been wanting to paint me for years. But I kept on saying no.