Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

Eom ,706-7-1.-/Ze c7kincen 4.41744?fro "MORNING HERALD" Sydney, N.S.W. Show -time splendour 1WENTY exhibitions to visit in the past week and, what's never hap- pened before, two by world-famous foreign artists, Larry Bell from; Los Angeles and Fried -I ensreich Hundertwasser from Vienna, both in town with their shows. Yet the super -ethnic Australiana at the Royal Easter Show probably wins. I don't mean the paint- ings in the Arts and Crafts Pavilion, though its deco- rated cakes, china paint- ings, pictorial rugs and so on are weirdly fascinating survivals from another age. It's the adjacent pavilion that contains the splen- dour. Five giant mosaics, each a hundred yards wide, made of agricultural produce. Drifts of pump- kins, pink and grey subtly mingled. Golden paths of oranges. Luminous clusters of persimmons. Neutral distances of wheat and wool. Lively edgings of til- ted preserve bottles. The reverent care, the pride, the confidence in its im- portance, the ease with which it rises to the great occasion, namely the culls; mination of a year, make each mosaic a joyful triumph of communal.' folk -expression. 8' And on the ether aide of the Arts and ' rafts Pavi- lion you wn ponder another cycle of, nature. 1 An enormous Merino snoozes, enthroned in hay, ; near a catwalk for fashion 1 parades of woollens. I' don't think I've ever seen a fashion parade before, but the physical arrogance of the pacing human clothes -horses, their mane - tossing, thr..t. nostril-dilat- ing, was startlingly similar to the bloodsiock nearby in the Show{ng. + * i standing Larry EA'S art is super - refined. to invis- sheets of 'it made of Ass. In the past they were slabs boxes, then bility: c -screens, coated with chap opalescent colour. 'fists`, show at Bonython is. of plain glass and the sheets are no longer rectangular but instead sharply angled. Local technology wasn't tip to Los Angeles stand- ards of fetishistic per- fection: the joints aren't as neat as usual, the tit isn't perfect, there are some cracks. The piece recently in- stalled at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, its glass shipped from America, gives a better idea of his art, though nei- ther there nor at Bony - then does the sculpture harie its own ideal, private, uncluttered, cubic, archi- tectural space. The Art Gallery piece is of glass coated to give graded vari- ation in reflectiveness. His art makes space tangible. It is the extreme4 development from those early twentieth-century sculptures, pierced or hol- lowe0, in which the space enclosed by thesolids the,.p.rimary concern. He got' further and in- Aprporates the spectator into the artistically acti- vated space, partly by en- closure, partly by the sight of one's reflection, partly by knowledge that one could stand on the either side. By making tangible the pocket of ibece in which the spectator- stands, Bell , also makes the spectator aware of apace as an in- finite continuum. * * * Hundertwasser, whose screenprirsis ar at the SoHo G.alkaLtne.iZove, is not pialug towards any contemporary extremes, but he is at an extreme of technical virtuosity. He looks hack to the elabo- ' rated jewelled luxury of Viennese art nouveau lint, to Venetian colon': and to Oriental aestheticism. The margins of each print. are littered with seals, stamps, messages and numbers. The printed surfaces glit- ter with metallic silver and gold as well as with a thousand intense colours, and the townscape and landscape images are often seen through raindrops. It is an exotic cul-de-sac. Prices: around $1,000 for original screenprints, . $45 for reproductions. * * * Martin Sharp is fasci- nated by art. His "Art Exhibition" at Bonython comprises large painted versions, framed under glass, of his familiar small collages in which repro- ductions of famous paint- ings am brought together: Van Gogh is introduced to Francis Bacon, Munch to Monet, Magritte to Mk; tisse. A snrtll *took of reproductions of the col- lages has just been pub- lished, and is called "Art Book." It's not art itself that fascinates him, more the fact that a few images have achieved inter- national stardom. Once upon a time reproductions of Van Gogh's sunflowers were in every home: earlier it was Whistler's mother. Andy Warhol's to sbperstar Marilyn 'roe, collaged Lgositcsonflowqrs, makes the point best: certain paintings generate vast fan -dubs. Fans fantasise about their favourite stars. How would Picasso's Demoi- sellesagorn look on an sbeach? The answer: *untanned. Sharp's superstar paint- ings have something tn common. They all repro- duce moderately well in colour. Most , are twentieth-century,' lied therefore fairly vivid and schematic; otherwise they are hard-edge, like Bot- ticelli or Ingres. Equally great paintings, like Ti- tian's or Turner's, whose ' colour and surface are too subtle to reproduce easily, are not on his list, though in the nineteenth century, before colour reproduction was invented, they were popular enough as black and white engravings. Sharp's prices: about $1,000. * * * Three straightforwardly good exhibitions: Peter Powdltch, Komon gallery. More of his series of copper -tore sun-torsos, tightly interlocked planes held in shOlowest space. Tough, st.&e, intelligent. `Cubism is alive and well .with no one else in stralia,. ony Tuckson, Watters Gallery. Long vertical ges- tures, quivering on un- framed, curled -up sheets like the Aboriginal sheets of painted bark he admires. Delicate whites and pinks and ochres leap in the I dark. Abstract-expression- i ism is alive and well, as only, elsewhere in Austra- lie, with Michael Taylor. Macquarie Gallerie rntuted,.., tt show foci tef' includes tdlc ex- cellent, underrated Mel- bourne irexpreekiodhi 1(tnt Whisson ($400), a fine Ian Fairweather $4,000), a Rupert Bunny south of France landscape ($1,800), drawings by Godfrey Mill- er ($230) and Drysdale I (around $1,000).