Conquering The Great Divide

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday September 22, 2007

John McDonald

From west to east and north to south, these artists offer a taste of the unknown.

Transient: retrospective and new works by Hans Arkeveld

Mosman Art Gallery, until 14 October

Neue Euro: contemporary Eastern European paintings

Ray Hughes Gallery, until 26 September

HANS ARKEVELD HAS the distinction of holding Australia's longest-running artist residency. The host institution, unlikely as it sounds, is the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. For 36 years, Arkeveld has been a fixture in this department, exploring the connections between art and science, and forging plenty of new ones in the process.

Arkeveld (b.1942) is one of Western Australia's best-known artists but, like so many from the West, has barely any profile in the eastern states. When Tony Geddes, the director of the Mosman Art Gallery, heard about this retrospective exhibition he tried to interest other regional galleries but found few takers. Geddes's enthusiasm springs from the fact that he spent several years working in Western Australia but for those with no western connections, Arkeveld was an unknown quantity.

Transient, which examines Arkeveld's work from 1963 to 2004, debuted in Perth more than two years ago. The Mosman show is a stripped-down version of that original exhibition, providing a neat summary of the artist's manifold themes and preoccupations. These are largely the same topics that Leonardo da Vinci examined in his notebooks: anatomy, mechanics, optics, the structures of the natural and man-made worlds. Arkeveld is a man with strong ethical and political convictions, and a sense of spirituality that is not based on any formal religious beliefs. All this adds up to an exhibition that can virtually be read like a book, with each work being predicated on a clear set of ideas.

In the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, Arkeveld has been able to work directly from cadavers, to make models that describe the growth of the foetus, to analyse bone fragments and other aspects of life's building blocks. He has benefited from his interactions with doctors and scientists and helped bring a unique character to the school.

In many ways his project is a throwback to the Renaissance, when art and science were closely allied. Their gradual estrangement probably began during the Romantic era and it has taken this long for the two disciplines to get back on speaking terms.

One usually thinks of art as subject to all sorts of subconscious, irrational motivations, while science is orderly and methodical. Yet scientific progress also relies on creative thinking, perhaps on the flash of insight that makes one look in another direction. Art, for its part, has its own disciplines, its own tried and true techniques that artists rely upon in translating mental images into concrete reality. Insight is a fleeting thing but technique is a constant.

With Arkeveld's work, technique can be a little too intrusive. As a graphic artist he is as precise and skilful as any architect or engineer, as a sculptor he is a master craftsman. Yet the extreme clarity of his approach leaves the viewer with little to do beyond recognising the concept or the comment in a piece. Four Shrines to Indoctrination (2004), for instance, is an elaborate model tower in which four miniature political scenarios are played out, ranging from Australia's unhappy treatment of refugees to our worship of American influence and power.

In Vision Deceptor No. 8 (1991), a sculpted head mounted on a plaque like a trophy, sprouts a tangle of spindly frames and lenses. In both works, Arkeveld's theme is our susceptibility to ideology and propaganda. He is implying that the blind faith we once invested in God is now being lavished on the lesser deities of politics. He invites us to trust our own vision, to look to our consciences, rather than the manicured lies that are fed through the media.

Arkeveld apparently will not be lamenting the downfall of the current government, though his motivations are cosmic rather than party-political. He returns time and again to the foetus as a symbol of human strivings and capabilities. Having studied the biological odyssey that takes place from conception to birth, Arkeveld views the foetus as a heroic figure. In Pre-Celestian (2001), a foetus sprouting the wings of a cherub rides a unicycle that looks more like a war chariot. It is a monument to blind determination, where the promise of flight is shackled to a heavy, earthly wheel.

Other works are more humorous, such as Dog Carry Case (1996) - a red wire frame in the shape of a kelpie, with a handle attached, which parodies our desire to conquer and control nature. A wooden microscope in another work suggests the limitations of science, or perhaps of human vision. Arkeveld may subscribe to the Renaissance doctrine that man is the measure of all things but he is also aware that, where weighty issues are involved, the vast majority of us would prefer not to stand and be counted.

The artists in Ray Hughes's exhibition, Neue Euro hail from more distant climes than Hans Arkeveld but they are in many ways more familiar. Looking at this collection by six young painters from Germany, Hungary and the Czech Republic, I was reminded of the vitality and eclecticism that existed in international art at the beginning of the 1980s. In those days, a group of emerging stars gradually found their way out from under some very dubious labels, such as the Transavantgarde, coined by the Italian critic Achille Bonito Oliva; or the Bad Painting that so dismayed viewers of Leon Paroissien's Sydney Biennale of 1984. In retrospect, Bad Painting looks better than much of the art that followed.

Neue Euro is one of those exhibitions that one might only find at the Ray Hughes Gallery. No other dealer would be likely to pick up a group of works by relatively unknown artists in Europe for a commercial exhibition in Sydney. Conventional wisdom has it that local audiences buy local art, with any deviations into international work being the result of an impulsive moment in an overseas gallery.

Hughes, however, is no friend to convention. He has held exhibitions by contemporary artists from China and from Africa and found, years later, that the works nobody wanted to buy had doubled and tripled in value as the artists became internationally recognised. This time he has stuck his neck out with Akos Birkas from Budapest, Josef Bolf from Prague and Germans Alexander Esters, Menno Fahl, Christopher Lehmpfuhl and Michael Waitz.

Lehmpful, who will be visiting Australia soon, is an expressionist who uses the same kind of thick paint and subdued palette as Nicholas Harding. Waitz occupies more metaphysical territory, not too far removed from the work of Leipzig painters such as Neo Rauch and Matthias Weischer, who have become big names in European art. Fahl is a textbook Ray Hughes artist - a painter who slaps on colours with great speed and energy, using pieces of old board as supports. His large painted sculpture, Gartenzwerge ( "Dwarf garden"), impersonates a crude piece of folk-art in which patches of colour drift like clouds across the figures.

The sleeper of the show is Esters, whose abstract forms owe a debt to Miro. He uses prints and stencils to apply the paint, giving his images a matt texture and sharp edges. The resulting pictures are visual puzzles that hesitate at the doorstep of recognition.

The two non-Germans, Birkas and Bolf, are also the most ambiguous in sensibility. The former's two paintings titled Kopfe (Heads), show the faces of young people with coloured hair and faces. They look like fashion extremists but are all smiling and laughing in a way that belies their rather menacing appearances.

Bolf's pictures are dark fairy tales, etched in lurid pink from a black surface. One thinks of fantastic artists such as Bruno Schulz and Alfred Kubin, or perhaps some of the animated films that have issued from the former Eastern bloc. Probably the darkest, most disturbing art being made today is in the form of cartoons or comics and one can easily imagine Bolf's work as a series of frames plucked from a visual novel.

In this story, monsters and monstrosities cohabit with blank-faced androgynes, in a world both morbid and beautiful, sad and sinister. It is the other end of the spectrum from Arkeveld's humanism, a place where the light of reason is lost in the looming shadows of science fiction.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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