GREENAWAY ART GALLERY : ADELAIDE AUSTRALIA

gallery II installation view, foreground: Callum Morton / background: Stieg Persson

CALLUM MORTON (b. 1965 Montreal, Canada. Lives in Melbourne)
Callum Morton's screens invoke billboards or drive-in cinema screens that now persists as a nostalgic form of public space. This form allows Morton to conflate the status of the work which functions simultaneously as painting, sculpture and installation, while acknowledging the effect of the cinematic or moving image.

Amongst his many international exhibitions have been the 2007 Venice Biennale where he represented Australia with the large outdoor installation Valhalla; the Indian Triennale, 2004 where he won a Gold Medal; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Poland and Contemporary Art Centre, Lithuania in 2006; 2nd Istanbul Pedestrians Exhibition, Turkey, 2005; The 2nd Auckland Triennial, 2004; Hamburger Bahnhof, Germany 2003; Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Italy, 2003; and Santa Monica Museum of Art, USA 1999.

Callum Morton, Tropicana (from the series Interbau Wow Wow), 2003

gallery I installation view, Dale Frank / Mikala Dwyer

DALE FRANK (b. 1959 Singleton, Australia)
Dale Frank’s practice is an exercise in non-representational painting that combines a strong artistic vision with a highly conceptual technique. Utilising pigments sunk in varnish, Frank’s art is sensual and corporeally beautiful, often using combinations of brilliant colours or exploring the chromatic depths of a single colour. The artist’s work embraces the medium of painting, exploring its sculptural possibilities through a performative technique of pouring and layering of varnishes. Frank acknowledges a connection in his work to the Australian landscape (which is referenced in many of his artwork titles) yet he ultimately produces art that lacks sentimentality and adheres to the rigours of conceptual abstraction. The sensory effect of Frank’s works reaches beyond the merely visual, and engages the viewer experientially.

Dale Frank’s art appears in every major public collection in Australia as well as many private and public collections throughout the world. In 2008, a significant monograph So Far: The Art of Dale Frank, 1980 - 2005 was published by Schwartz City.

MIKALA DWYER (b. 1959 Sydney, Australia)

Mikala Dwyer creates installations of quotidian materials, often using transparent plastics that are manipulated into sculptural volumes. After studying sculpture and sound art at Sydney College of the Arts she travelled to London in 1984 where she studied at Middlesex Polytechnic until 1985. In 2000 she completed a Master of Fine Arts at the College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales. Dwyer has been exhibiting publicly since 1982 and is represented in public collections such as the National Gallery of Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Auckland City Gallery.

EMILY FLOYD (b. 1972 Melbourne, Australia. Lives in Melbourne)
Emily Floyd's work has most recently used texts of political dissidence and counter cultural alternative living. Ideas of permaculture, Rudolf Steiner and seminal feminist's language inhabit Floyd's sculptural installations. Emily addresses the conceptual complexity of how we are to live; that the possibility of humans reconciling their place in the world requires the ability to absorb a polyphony of voices.

Emily Floyd is represented in major collections such as The National Gallery of Victoria, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, The Bendigo Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland. Floyd has also worked on significant public commissions for Docklands, Melbourne and the EastLink motorway, Victoria.

gallery I mezzanine level, Emily Floyd, Thinking in English, 2008

STIEG PERSSON (b. 1959 Melbourne, Australia. Lives in Melbourne)
Stieg Persson’s work conceptually floats in a liminal state, acknowledging the long history of painting whilst being aware of the medium's inner conflicts and contradictions. These are visually powerful and assertive works, embracing the formal values of high modernism whilst actively destabilizing its principles through the use of figurative and decorative elements.

Stieg Persson has been exhibiting since 1983. He has had over twenty-five solo exhibitions, most recently Old Europe at Anna Schwartz Gallery Sydney. Persson has been included in numerous major surveys of Australian art including The Australian Bicentennial Perspecta and the recent TarraWarra Biennial, Parallel Lives: Australian Painting Today, 2006. His work is held in all major Australian public collections. In 2003 he won the inaugural Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery.

Stieg Persson, Little Gerhard, 2008

Stieg Persson, Sarbanes-Oxley, 2008