THE PERSONAL & THE POLITICAL :
a selection of important Australian art

Greenaway Art Gallery has always concerned itself with the primary market; we value our artists and support their activities. We also value our patrons and when they are ‘downsizing’ or moving overseas they sometimes need to part with some of the artworks they have collected. From the works that have been coming in, from our patrons, I have selected a few that fall into the personal or the political.

Juan Davila (b. 1946) exhibited at our gallery for 10 years and during this time presented some exceptional exhibitions. In Buckley’s Return Davila revisits the composition of Drysdale’s The Drover’s Wife. The colonial figure of Buckley, who lived with the Australian Aborigines, mutates into the South American indigenous woman Enriqueta Gallardo. Ex-Prime Miniser Howard appears in the hazy wasteland behind the primary figure. Davila has never shied away from the political.

Rosalie Gascoigne (1917 – 1999) also gave us some outstanding exhibitions and the small gem Swarm 1 came from an exhibition in 1998. Gascoigne’s use of dissected vibrant text from weathered wooden Schweppes drink crates has become iconic in Australian art. Swarm 1 does not imitate nature but represents its essence, with rhythmic patterns composed of letters and shapes.

The Sally Smart (b. 1960) work is a classic and represents a key phase in the artist’s development. Femmage Frieze is part of a much larger body of work that reconfigures itself depending on the architecture of where it is shown. The familiar silhouettes and branches appear in many of Smart’s major works, such as Family Tree from 2003, or Treehouse (The Unholy Body); the female body becomes a map and a metaphor for an internal space and its disturbing and disquieting notes.

Equally important is the Imants Tillers (b. 1950) Landprint V painting, a complex and rich work that echoes many of the artist’s ongoing themes. Tillers draws on artists he admires, in this case de Chirico’s drawings of mannequins and Piero Manzoni’s thumbprint (as a signature) on eggs, or here reminiscent of contours in the landscape. Landscape is also echoed in the words ‘Horizon’ and ‘Basalt’ and place names around his home town of Cooma on the Monaro.

Brett Whiteley’s (1939 - 1992) The Arrival was created to coincide with the 1988 bicentennial celebrations. A lyrical line, collage and distorted perspective, and reminiscent of Commodore Perry entering Japanese waters, elevates documentation to fine art.