Marblephilia

The immense, almost two metres long, polished, muscled torso turning at the waist, made of the white marble is Peter Schipperheyn’s most recent sculpture, River God. It refers back to figures one of the figures on the Parthenon’s tympanum (you know, that triangular bit filled with carved figures under the pitched roof).

Peter Schipperheyn, River God, 2012/13  (photograph courtesy of Mossgreen Gallery)

Peter Schipperheyn loves carving marble, particularly Carrara marble. Marble is a metamorphosed limestone, the crystals in the white stone is vary in size and occasionally mixed with tiny specks of mica. The white marble can be naturally stained with yellow with iron oxide or green with copper oxide. The block of marble is then under goes a second metamorphosis when it is carved.

Schipperheyn wants to be part of the marble carving tradition around Carrara. Marble has been quarried in Carrara since the Roman Empire. Quarrying and carving marble in Carrara is a tradition that might appear conservative but it also includes a tradition of anarchist radicals since the 19th century.

Peter Schipperheyn was first inspired by the large marble, stainless steel, silver bronze, nickel-plated steel sculpture in the NGV, Jean-Robert Ipoustéguy’s Death of the father (La Mort du père) 1967-1968. I always wondered what influence this macabre installation like an exploded medieval tomb of a bishop would have on Melbourne’s art. Schipperheyn understood the power and the instinctual desire to touch that that polished surfaces of Ipoustéguy’s sculpture generated. This desire to touch is expressed in several of Schipperheyn’s sculpture including Erotica, 2009.

Ipoustéguy had other resonances in Schipperheyn’s life. Eric Westbrook, the director of the NGV who had acquired Death of the Father also wrote a letter of reference for Peter that helped get his first trip to Italy where discovered his love for carving marble. Years later Schipperheyn managed to meet Ipoustéguy in Choise La Roi, on the outskirts of Paris.

Peter Schipperheyn carving the River God (photograph courtesy of Mossgreen Gallery)

I met Peter Schipperheyn at an exhibition of his ten of his recent works in marble and bronze at Mossgreen Gallery. Peter was wearing a bright orange linen suit and plain t-shirt. His marble carving tools, still with marble dust on them, are on exhibition in the built in vitrines at Mossgreen Gallery. He is happy and relaxed, he is on a hiatus after a lot of hard work, at the same time he is keen to get back to work.

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Metro Art Award 2011

On Tuesday, 26 July Jeff Kennett will announce the winner of the Metro Art Award. 25 artists aged 35 and younger are in the running for the award for painting. I went ahead of the announcement to see the exhibition of the selected paintings.

Ben Smith, The Influence, oil on board

There are plenty of paintings with over blown hyperbole, dramatic images showing-off the painter’s technical skills. There are paintings that are too ordinary or too sentimental. It felt so conservative, all these young artists painting studiously but often without any purpose other than attracting attention. Ben Smith’s “The Influence (Leonard Cohen Consoles Nick Cave)” has odd proportions and in the future, when Cohen and Cave are no longer well known, the painting will just look odd.

Vincent Fantauzzo, The Creek, oil on canvas

Vincent Fantauzzo “The Creek” looking like a Caravaggio, with a baroque drama created from working with film director, Baz Luhrmann. Vincent Fantauzzo would be the favorite having previously won the 2011 Archibald Packing Room Prize winner and Metro Art Award’s People’s Choice Prize Winner in 2009 and 2008. The wild card entry would be Matto Lucas “Daruma” who has painted on a photograph of a painted face.

I think that winner might be Michael Brennan “Right Place, Wrong Time” with the intense surface of wrinkled dried paint. Or one of the artists who emerged from Melbourne’s stencil art scene: Luke Cornish (aka E.L.K.) “Untitled, Self Portrait” a multiple layered stencil his legs climbing a ladder, a familiar exercise for artists. In the past I’ve dismissed E.L.K.’s work as technically proficient let down by the content but “Untitled, Self Portrait” combines technique with powerful but restrained image. Or Ben Howe, who was a highly commended emerging artist at the Melbourne Stencil Festival 2009.  Howe’s “Time and the Elastic” is an intense, dynamic and unusual image of multiple people in multiple layers. Metro Gallery represents several local and international street artists; a framed Banksy currently hangs in the window by the gallery entrance.

“The Metro Art Award previously consisted of a Judges’ Choice Prize of $40,000 and a People’s Choice Prize of $10,000.  In 2011, the People’s Choice Prize has been eliminated and the $10,000 has been added to the Judges’ Choice Prize, which is now $50,000.” (Metro’s media release) Dropping the People’s Choice Award is a good move; there are too many of these polls and the results are too easily manipulated. Popular opinion is well represented by the selection panel itself that comprises “the Hon Jeff Kennett AC former Victorian Premier and Arts Minister (Chair); with Fenella Kernebone, Presenter of the ABC TV’s Art Nation Program; the Rev Dr Arthur Bridge AM, founder of Ars Musica Australis, a charitable foundation supporting the creative arts; and human rights advocate Julian Burnside AO QC”. 

See my review of Metro Art Award 2009.

P.S. The Metro Art Award 2011 was won by Vincent Fantauzzo with “The Creek” – I told you he was the favorite to win.

Metro Art Award 2009

I went to see the 2009 Metro Art Award exhibition at Metro Gallery in Armadale. It is an exhibition that has some of the best painters under 35 and given the age of the entrants this exhibition is an indication of the future of painting. And the quality of the paintings in this exhibition is magnificent. I had seen some of the entries in the last year and I knew some of the artists (Stephen Giblett and Grant Nimmo were both involved with the gallery, No Vacancy, where I had my last exhibition).

Most of the paintings in the exhibition are self-portraits, tromp l’oeil and dark images and some of the best paintings combining all three elements. Gold Coast artist Victoria Riechelt’s “Self Portrait – A Stack Of Books Crowded In A Bookshelf” was the People’s Choice winner. It is a grid of a bookcase containing Riechelt’s books. If we are what we have read then this is a portrait of Riechelt including many art/text references and “French Phrases for Dummies”,

There were so many self-portraits: Dane Lovett (highly commended), Julian Smith, and Michael Brennan’s “Me at the (Circle, Triangles & Squares)”. Michael Brennan’s triptych depicts his residence in Tokyo. Katherine Edney “Self Portrait (Time & Time Again)” has four images of her hands holding fabric gesturing towards the almost as many tromp l’oeil paintings.

Peter Tankey’s “Gregor’s Metamorphis” is the contents of a recycling bin: bottles, cans and boxes. The pile of beautiful, glistening objects is a treasure trove in a Kafkaesque world. Tully Moore’s diptych “Double Debris” plays with tromp l’oeil painting depicting paper and masking-tape. Stevan Jacks’s painting “Family Tree” is like a proverb: origami birds playing with matches against a slick dark background.

And so many dark scenes, obscure uncertain landscapes and images. The gathering darkness is evident in Vincent Fantauzzo’s scene “Out of the Dark” has two women in the white dresses at the edge of a suggested grave. The paintings of Grant Nimmo’s and Andre Piguet are full of black paint. Is the darkness in these paintings a sense of mystery or a desire for obscurity?

There is an odd kind allegory or moral voice in many of the paintings, not a pedantic Victorian depiction of virtue and vices, but a subjective and introspective reflection. Stephen Giblett’s painting “Walk On By” contains an allegory on gossip in a seaside setting typical of Giblett’s paintings. In the background the Norman Rockwell style images of the man and woman on the beach shack doors along with the rowboat named ‘gossip’. What is there left to say about the sexy girl in a swimsuit in the foreground? Likewise in Julian Meager’s “Aon (Gimmie a Chance)”, a portrait of a tattoo torso with the tattoo slogan on his chest, appeals for a chance not to be judged on appearances. Are these paintings speaking about the judging of the exhibition and the rush to judgment in the contemporary life.

There were only two abstract paintings by Fiona Halse and Ry David Bradley. The winner was, of course, nothing like the majority of the exhibition a small, pale, monotone watercolor of men praying at Mecca Our Plastic Everything is Broken by Jackson Slattery.