Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Judy Cassab

Judy Cassab


Exhibition: Focus on Judy Cassab
On view from Friday 1 July 2011


Eva Breuer Art Dealer
83 Moncur Street Woollahra 


Judy Cassab was recently awarded  the Gold Cross of Merit by the Republic of Hungary for her lifetime of work by the Hungarian Ambassador. 
In honour of Judy's award, Eva Breuer Art Dealer is holding a small survey show, Focus on Judy Cassab, which will showcase landscapes, interiors and portraits executed over her lifetime. 
Judy quickly became an eminent portrait painter - being the only woman to win the Archibald Prize twice, first in 1961 and again in 1968 and also winning the The Australian Women's weekly Portrait Prize twice in the 1950s. Alongside portraiture, Judy also became enamoured with the Australian landscape and subsequently developed a unique abstracted view of the outback, producing vibrant depictions of her new home.
Judy Cassab is one of Australia’s most celebrated living artists. She was born in Vienna in 1920 and with her young family immigrated to Australia in 1950.
Judy’s paintings are held in all major collections in Australia and around the world including the National Portrait Gallery in London. 
Judy is still painting today at the age of 91.
Further information and images: Please contact Michelle Seth 


PH: 02 93620297
email: art@evabreuerartdealer.com.au




Judy Cassab (b. 1920)
Waterfall 2008
oil on board
60 x 44.5cm
signed 'Cassab 08' lower right
Provenance: The artist
no.10680

Eva Breuer Art Dealer
www.evabreuerartdealer.com.au


Thursday, June 23, 2011

Christopher McVinish: Silent Observations

Christopher McVinish: Silent Observations
Opening July 30 at Eva Breuer Art Dealer

Silent Observations continues McVinish's investigation of the landscape and the figure in the landscape. In these new paintings the scenes depicted are at once familiar but at the same time contain an element of psychological drama. The landscapes and their solitary inhabitants address viewers role as filmic voyeur. We are invited to become a participant in the story being portrayed, to attach our own history to the painting. Through the painting we enter into our own story looking for the unexpected, some piece of information that will unveil the mysterious world before us.


mcvinish_12224_oberon.jpg
Christopher McVinish
Towards Oberon 2011
 oil on linen
 92 x 101 cm
no. 12224

Monday, June 20, 2011

Vince Vozzo - Naissance: Drawings for sculpture

Exhibition 2011
Naissance - Drawings for sculpture

10-22 September 2011 Opening Saturday 10 September 3-5 pm
“Drawing is the beginning of everything - the beginning of ideas.”



Past, Present, Future 2004
sandstone
25 x 400 x 25 cm

Apocalyptic paradigm shift 2008
acrylic on canvas
92 x 771 cm 

It is arguable that the sculpted female form is the most powerful symbol to have been created by Man. The image of Woman historically and today, embodies notions of fecundity, fertility, birth, power and temptation. The ancient Venus Figurines Venus of Lespugue (Musée de l'Homme, Paris); Slovakia’s Venus of Hradok and the important Venus of Willendorf have for millennia given hope, inspired, fascinated and intrigued. In contemporary times in Australia artists such as Bertram Mackennal (1863-1931) Guy Boyd (1923-1988), Lyndon Dadswell (1908-1986) and Tom Bass (1916-2010) have found inspiration in the feminine. But where did that form begin? What are these totems borne out of? They are borne out of drawing.
Born in Cabramatta, the son of Italian migrants, Vince Vozzo is among the most important contemporary Australian figurative sculptors. Vozzo insists that, “Drawing is the beginning of everything - the beginning of ideas” and it is from the tumbling figures in drawings such as his Apocalyptic paradigm shift 2008, that his marble and stone Venus’s are born. Selected by Italian curator Vittorio Sgarbi for the Venice Biennale 2011 Apocalyptic paradigm shift is a Bosch inspired complex panorama of bats, angels, Greek gods, mules, serpents, and levitating houses – a womb, cradling the geneses of future objects. Henry Moore said that drawing was an outlet for his ideas and within Vozzo’s drawings the viewer is constantly aware of thousands of these ideas waiting to be extracted from the block.

In stone we witness the genius of Vozzo’s method. It is in the innate “life” retained in the transfer from two to three dimensions that Vozzo is commanding and in the truthful manipulation of the stone. Small works like the Carrara marble Woman waiting I have the power and feminine authority of Venus of Willendorf. His Sydney sandstone, Woman waiting I has the proportions and fluid rhythm of Brancusi’s Bird in Space in the New National Gallery in Berlin. Vozzo creates the illusion that the object is soft, supple, light and malleable, but remains true to the stone, allowing the natural density and weight of the object to suggest the form. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” wrote John Keats and like his Grecian Urn, the beauty of Vozzo’s amphora-like figures are all we need to know.


Nicky McWilliam " Universities are letting Australian art down"


Published: Sydney Morning Herald  March 24, 2011

I recently advertised on an arts industry website for a part-time assistant for a commercial gallery in Sydney. There were more than 80 applicants, and all were either graduates of, or students attending, tertiary art schools. At interviews, there were works on the gallery walls by significant Australian artists including John Coburn, Gary Shead, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Brett Whiteley and Grace Cossington Smith. Only a handful of interviewees could identify any of the artists or works. Interviewees showed little knowledge of or interest in Australian art and art history; most said their courses offered Australian art only as an adjunct or secondary field of knowledge.
I discussed my concerns with an art history student, Vi Girgis, and we began to investigate: is there a new generation of graduates in the arts who have little understanding of and appreciation for Australian cultural and artistic heritage? If so, why?
An online survey of the graduate and postgraduate art history and theory courses at Australian universities revealed that not one of them had a mandatory undergraduate course in Australian art history. Only the University of Adelaide offers a one-year postgraduate course: studies in Australian art. There are elective options at Melbourne University, the University of South Australia and the Australian National University.
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It is possible to complete a graduate and even postgraduate degree in fine art, visual art, arts administration or art theory at an Australian university without acquiring even the most basic knowledge about Australian art or art history. This dishonours the profound wealth of Australian art and the indigenous history and social comment that inspired it.
It falls to art institutions and galleries to spend time and resources training and refocusing graduates, who may well be ill-equipped to represent the Australian art world in the international market.
Christie's in London recently held a sale of modern and contemporary Australian art. The 40 lots realised £541,737 ($877,540). Last August Georgina Pemberton, formerly head of Australian paintings at Sotheby's in Australia, was appointed a director of Agnew's, one of London's leading international art dealerships. Her first exhibition was devoted to paintings by Sidney Nolan, of which nearly all sold.
Why, then, is the international interest in Australian art not mirrored here? Academics at various universities referred me to a 2006 issue of Artlink, which was devoted to the dwindling academic interest in the study of Australian art. In it, Professor Ian McLean, of the University of Western Australia, explained: ''Most Australian art historians teach and research European and US art … in the 1970s … Australian art was the last thing we students were interested in.''
Daniel Thomas, emeritus director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, recalls that ''art teachers 40 or 50 years ago in Sydney seemed to know or care little about Australian art of the past when they conducted students around their local art museum''.
Professor Sasha Grishin, from the ANU, laments that ''courses devoted to Australian art sometimes fail to attract large numbers of undergraduate students''.
This lack of interest is not a new phenomenon, but a dysfunctional cultural cringe trumpeting the superiority of European-American art over Australian. The variety, depth and high standards of art practices are a strong foundation for not only the successful practice of art making and theorising, but also a deep appreciation for the art, culture and heritage of this country. It is incomprehensible that this is not a fundamental focus of universities teaching art history.
Elizabeth Grierson, head of the school of art at RMIT University, has suggested a new way of looking at art institutions that would turn the focus away from the northern hemisphere. An art school, she says, should operate ''as a knowledge-generating site with a role and responsibility to the community of which it is a part. As such it contributes to, shapes and reflects the cultural and historical values of a given community.''
Australian culture deeply appreciates the history and participants of sport, entertainment, fashion and gastronomy. It is time for tertiary institutions to promote critical appraisal of Australian art and its participants by making Australian art mandatory knowledge for students of art theory.
Nicky McWilliam is a lawyer and fine arts graduate who is a director of her late mother's gallery, Eva Breuer Art Dealer.


Vale - Brenda Humble (1933-2011)

Brenda Humble c.1958

Brenda Humble 
Figure 19 1994
Oil on canvasboard
17.5 x 12.5cm
no.7136
 Brenda Humble (1933-2001) The face of the people

Brenda Humble graduated from the from the National Art School with a Diploma of Painting in 1960. As an artist she was continually fascinated by faces.  In 1982 she was awarded the Portia Geach Memorial Prize for her portrait of Virginia Hall and the walls of her home and studio were filled with the brightly coloured likenesses of friends and neighbours. 

As an activist she was the face of the people. As Community Development Officer for the inner Sydney Regional Council for Social Development, Brenda was the face of activism for the thousands of faceless residents in the inner Sydney suburbs of Redfern, Woolloomooloo, Surry Hills and King Cross  whose homes were threatened and in some instances completely taken from them by the ivory tower social engineers of the 1970s.

In conjunction with the Brenda Humble Estate, "Brenda Humble: The face of the people" celebrates Brenda's life with an exhibition of 50 exquisite small drawings of faces on card sourced from her Redfern studio where she lived and painted for thirty years. Often working in a variety of mediums we see in each drawing Humble studying the faces of the broken hearted, the perplexed , the attentive, the bashful, the smug, the sleepy, the sickly, the cute and myriad other individual faces from the community for which she fought so hard and loved so much. Deceptively simple, these drawings show Humble's mastery of the subject and her unique brand of humanism with which each face is brought to life.       

Brenda Humble is Represented in Artbank Collection, Sydney; New Parliament House, Canberra; Reserve Bank of Australia Collection; University of NSW; IBM Collection, Sydney; Mackay City Library, Queensland as well as private and corporate collections in Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK and the USA. 

http://www.evabreuerartdealer.com.au/humble.html

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