Hamish Sawyer
Since 2012, the Rockhampton Art Gallery has presented a biennial, invitational art prize—the Gold Award. This initiative has allowed the gallery to present and acquire works by a number of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, whom the gallery and its audience might otherwise not have had the opportunity to engage with. Public galleries play a vital role in collecting and preserving culturally significant material for the benefit of future generations. Examining the artworks acquired for the collection through the Gold Award can elicit revealing insights about the state of contemporary art.
This essay will consider three such works—paintings by Tony Albert, Julie Fragar and Richard Lewer. All three artists are established figures within the Australian visual arts ecology, with their works featured in many curated exhibitions and collected by major public institutions. The artists’ credentials are therefore verified, but what about the artworks themselves?
Collectively, they reflect the plurality of approaches, content and perspectives characterising contemporary works that have entered the collection through the Award. Contemporary art is neither homogenous nor monolithic; rather, it is fragmented, reflecting an increasingly complex and globalised world. Drawing upon their individual histories, these artists locate their practices within an Australian context, while simultaneously acknowledging broader global currents. As contemporary art historian Terry Smith posits:
Building out from the details of locality and place, [contemporary] artists elaborate their own society’s sense of uniqueness. But they also see the importance of countering tendencies towards narrow chauvinism and nationalistic un-freedom, so they often highlight international and cosmopolitan perspectives. These often take the form of a kind of imaginative traveling through time, a display of many pasts that persist in the present.1
A descendant of the Girramay, Yidinji and Kuku Yalanji peoples of Far North Queensland, Tony Albert is best known for his multimedia installations that re-purpose vintage ‘Aboriginalia’—kitsch velvet paintings and decorative objects that feature crude depictions of Aboriginal Australians. Albert reclaims these objects by incorporating them into works that assert and celebrate his identity as an Aboriginal man in contemporary Australia.
In All That Glitters 2018, Albert paints characters from a range of sources, including Disney cartoons, to examine the ongoing misrepresentation of First Nations people in popular culture. Portrayed as loincloth-wearing savages with exaggerated features and subservient to the white heroes of the narrative, such examples of mass entertainment reinforce stereotypes and discrimination against First Nations people. The work is painted in a flat style, reflecting the mediated nature of the imagery Albert appropriates. By using cultural references that are familiar to children and young people around the world, Albert highlights the ongoing global struggle for Indigenous people to achieve equality. Curator Bruce McLean has noted that this strategy “affords Albert access to a wide audience who can more easily access the political and conceptual framework of his creations”.2
Julie Fragar is a painter in the traditional sense, working exclusively in oils to create her ambiguous and compelling images. The Brisbane-based artist and academic is renowned for her technical facility with paint, layering her compositions to create a sense of transparency, like film stills placed one atop another.
The artist’s biography has informed a large part of her oeuvre. Her painting Penned Like Chickens Eaten Like Chickens (Fiji) 2014 is from a series of works exploring the story of Fragar’s ancestor Antonio, who was shipwrecked in the Pacific but eventually made his way to Australia. This particular work recounts an incident when he became trapped on a boat with cannibals.
Relatively modest in scale, the painting is dominated by a brood of chickens, echoing the work’s title, with the ghostly figure of a nose-ringed cannibal lurking underneath. The lone figure in the top left of the image, while resembling Fragar, is in fact her teenage son standing in for Antonio. Smith’s reference to an ‘imaginative traveling through time’ is particularly relevant to Fragar’s work, acknowledging the artist’s ‘filling in’ of the gaps in Antonio’s story. As artist and writer Jonathan McBurnie recognises:
By fleshing out and then interpreting and expanding upon Antonio’s story, the core of portraiture is exposed for the half-truth, the construct that it has always been.3
It is worth noting here the continued pre-eminence of painting, even in the age of ‘anything goes’ contemporary art. One reason for this is what theorist Isabelle Graw has defined as the “liveliness of painting”;4 that is, the way in which the medium has been able to absorb developments in art history, society and technology, while retaining its inherently unique qualities.
New Zealand–born artist Richard Lewer often uses unconventional supports such as sandpaper and pegboard for his quirky paintings and drawing that ruminate on everyday life. Confessions 2016–17 is from an ongoing series exploring the Catholic confessional, a ritual of the artist’s upbringing. The work comprises an installation of text paintings on pegboard, referencing both the pegboard partition wall of a church Lewer visited in researching the project and the artist’s childhood memory of his father’s garage workshop.
From the mundane “It’s been eight years since my last confession” through more specific reflections such as “My BAS statements are always overdue”, Confessions can be read collectively as an unconventional self-portrait of the artist. As curator Lisa Slade observes:
Not content with being a spectator or bystander, Lewis is complicit in the drama that unfolds in his work—he always includes himself in its attendant narratives.5
Recalling Smith’s and Graw’s respective propositions regarding the state of contemporary art—and specifically painting—one can see how the works of Albert, Fragar and Lewer embody the infinite ways in which artists reflect our present back to us. Their works are implicated in broader social and cultural contexts but that does not limit their reading as paintings; if anything, it enhances our understanding of them. These paintings contain the artists’ lived experience, while simultaneously expanding the limits of the picture plane to better articulate the infinitely complex nature of contemporary existence.
February 2022
1 Terry Smith, Contemporary Art World Currents (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2011), 319.
2 Bruce Johnson McLean, “Invisible Truths,” in Tony Albert: Visible (Brisbane: QAGOMA, 2018), 21.
3 Jonathan McBurnie, “Julie Fragar: New Paintings,” Eyeline 82, 2015, accessed 5 September 2020, https://www.eyelinepublishing.com/eyeline-82/review/julie-fragar-new-paintings. 4 Isabelle Graw “The Value of Liveliness: Painting as an Index of Agency in the New Economy,” in Painting Beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition, ed. Isabelle Graw and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016).
5 Lisa Slade, “Drawing Can Save Your Life,” Arts New Zealand, Summer 2016, accessed 5 September 2020, https://www.sullivanstrumpf.com/assets/Uploads/ArtnewsNZ-Richard-Lewer-Drawing-can-change-your-life.pdf.