Three years ago, Erwin Fabian passed from this life in Melbourne – he was 104 years old. I knew him since 1980 – for forty years – for some artists you could say that you knew them for lifetime – for Fabian, I knew only a flake of his long, complex and multifaceted existence.
 

 
Erwin Fabian was born in Berlin in 1915, the son of the distinguished and well-established German-Jewish academic expressionist painter, Max Fabian. Coincidently, exactly three weeks later and in Berlin was born Inge King– another German-Jewish sculptor who was also to have a profound impact on Australian art.
 
Fabian’s childhood was made up of art – art surrounded him on the walls of his family home, his father worked in his studio from dawn to dusk, while his mother, Else Boehm, was also an artist, who was one of his father’s painting students whom he married in 1913. The house was filled with artists and with talk about art, art commissions, art exhibitions and art politics – to be an artist seemed a natural progression and visiting art galleries was a natural pastime. Fabian recalled, “I regarded looking at paintings, the concern with painting, as the normal life, it wasn’t questioned.”
 
In March 1926, when Erwin was ten, his father died suddenly aged fifty-three. Things became more difficult for the young Fabian as he trained as a house painter and sign writer taking life drawing classes in the evenings. As the Nazis came to power, admission to the Academy was barred to him as a Jew and general racial persecution intensified.
 

 
On the eve of Kristallnacht, Fabian fled his homeland and took refuge in Britain, where his younger sister, Lilo, and some cousins from Munich, had preceded him. This was in 1938 when he was twenty-three-years-old. In London he mixed in the circles of the German Jewish diaspora and got some work in commercial graphic design and designed book covers. He also drew and studied art at the V&A and attended life drawing classes at the London Polytechnic.
 
A few months later, he was joined in London by his mother, who had fled Berlin and managed to bring out with her a considerable amount of his father’s work. The Fabian family shared a cramped little flat, so all Max Fabian’s bigger paintings and other larger artworks were stored separately in a warehouse and only work in the portfolios stayed in the flat. The warehouse was subsequently bombed by the Nazis during the blitz, and everything stored there was destroyed.
 
When war was declared on 3rd September 1939, some 70,000 British resident Germans and Austrians were termed ‘enemy aliens’. Tribunals classified them into three categories, from Nazi sympathisers in category A, to refugees from the Nazis, like Fabian, in category C. However, as the threat of a German invasion of Britain loomed, the newly installed Winston Churchill government panicked and virtually all the males, regardless of category, were deemed as of potential threat and more than 7,500 internees were shipped to internment camps in Canada and Australia.
 
Fabian was one of these – so that by the age of twenty-five he had lost not only his father and his homeland, but also his family and his freedom and was sent off to prison camps in Australia on the infamous Dunera. In the Australian Galleries’ exhibition, we have an immensely rare sketch that Fabian made on board of the Dunera of sleeping inmates.
 

 
The Dunera Boys were mainly German and Austrian Jewish refugees, many of whom were professionals – musicians, academics, architects, historians and artists – and most of whom were brutalised by the remnants of the British military who were sent to escort them. In contrast, the prison camps in Australia, in the remote locations of Hay, Orange and Tatura, were far more relaxed, where the internees rapidly organised for themselves lectures, art and music classes, concerts and the like.
 
It was here that Erwin Fabian made his first monotypes with improvised materials in a curious technique. He covered a hard surface, like a pane of glass, with ink, then placed a sheet of paper on top of this and drew on this, on the back of the paper, creating a sort of traced image in reverse – a unique impression with a rich play of different textures and lines, where masses suggest faces, figures and forms.
 

 
As with much of his work, it is immediately memorable and visually exciting. In the Australian Galleries’ exhibition, there are two very rare monotypes from 1941 made while in prison camps and two unique ink and wash sketches from the same period where there is a strong surrealist element. I am somewhat surprised that these are not already in major institutional collections.
 

 
One of the monotypes that he made in 1942 was included in a Red Cross Army Exhibition where it was spotted by Dr Ursula Hoff, a German Jewish scholar who had recently been appointed to the staff of the National Gallery of Victoria as the keeper of the department of prints and drawings and it was acquired for the gallery’s collection by the director Daryl Lindsay. This was Fabian’s first work in a public collection, subsequently the British Museum in London acquired 21 of his works, the National Gallery of Australia 15 works and there were numerous acquisitions made by many other public art collections in Australia and internationally. The NGV presently holds 12 of his works and other works are held at the Art Gallery of NSW and in other state galleries.
 

 
Fabian, in 1942, finally had the chance to swap internment for military service with the Australian army and he enlisted as part of the Eighth Australian Employment Company. The following year, he was transferred to the Australian Army Education Service where he worked on the magazine Current Affairs Bulletin, primarily designing its covers. He continued doing this for the next decade, long after he was demobbed in 1946, the same year he became a naturalised Australian citizen. One of his most memorable cover designs is for the Migration and the Refugee issue from March 1945 that appears remarkably contemporary to us today.
 

 
I have paused on Fabian’s biography for the first three decades of his life, in part because these circumstances are not widely known, and, in part, because they are so crucial for our understanding of the subsequent seven decades of his life when he emerged as an artist of international significance. I will not discuss Fabian’s biography any further other than to mention in passing his marriage, the birth of his two children Sarah and Daniel – the tragic and crippling death of Sarah as a child – and the establishment of a strangely semi-itinerant existence suspended between Europe and Australia for the rest of his life.
 

 
Although after he spent a dozen years in London between 1950 and 1962, working mainly in commercial art and teaching at the London School of Printing and Graphic Arts, he returned and settled in Melbourne and started to actively exhibit his art in a series of solo exhibitions held in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. He first started to exhibit with the Australian Galleries in 1991 with his first solo exhibition held at this gallery in 1995.
 
Fabian would return annually to Europe to visit his family and he maintained a studio in London and had many friends in the European art world – mainly in England, France and Germany. Included in the Melbourne exhibition is a selection of graphics that Fabian made over seventy years with examples of his famous non-figurative monotypes, the expressive dye drawings that he made in a medium to which he was introduced by Sidney Nolan, and his late ink and correction fluid drawings, many of which have never been exhibited before.
 

 
Fabian over the years had become a significant Australian artist and an artist of international standing. As a sculptor, he worked almost exclusively with scrap metal that was allowed to sit on the concrete floor of his studio, frequently for years, waiting to mature, like ripening fruit. Then the alchemy commenced as forms were arranged and rearranged until they seemed to belong. This was an ineffable quality of belongingness that is the key to his artmaking, sometimes a process that stretched over a number of years or, occasionally, it found an almost instant resolution.
 
I feel that the essence of Fabian’s creative process was his ability to create a new natural order, where all the elements appear as if they belong, as if they have been found this way in nature, without actually resembling any specific form found in nature.
 

 
Fabian had that rare ability to create a new and convincing reality through which the viewer can be seduced and captivated. His sculptures, in the final analysis, belong to the grand tradition of humanist sculpture – in other words, they interact with us on a human and emotive level – we come to believe in their existence not only as aesthetic objects, but as metaphors for the human spirit. Take, for example, the beautifully expressive sculptures Arc, 1989, Oracle, 1997 or his stunning late masterpiece, Lethe’s comb, 2017 – we have at the Australian Galleries a cross-section of 30 years of Fabian sculptures.
 
Over the many years that I have spent visiting Fabian’s studio, I have always been struck by how memorable his non-figurative sculptures are, and whenever he would change a piece (something that happened constantly in his practice), I was struck by how noticeable that change would be. His sculptures became like a cast of characters, each endowed with its own personality, features and set of unique characteristics, each has its own voice and temperament. It is a hallmark of a wonderful artist the ability to create an alternative reality – one that seems real and believable – Fabian had this ability in spades.
 

abian was a very complex, passionate and intellectual being who never lost a sense of humour, freshness and naïve enthusiasm both in life and in his art making. He had always a quality of freshness and discovery, an unbridled joy in the intuitive process in the creative act. He knew that art was something that really mattered – it was something that was permanent and had to last the ages – he was in it for the long haul.
 
Last time I visited him, it was in his studio off Arden Street, he had been down the street to buy some sweet pastries for our cup of tea and was anxious that I see his latest creations. I remember there was a very heavy table sculpture on the bench that I sought to move. Fabian, intervened and said, “Sasha, it’s too heavy for you, let me move it.” My pride may have been injured, but this centenarian with an iron grip lifted the sculpture and move it effortlessly off the bench.
 
That afternoon, Fabian and I agreed that he had more than enough work for another solo exhibition. As I left that day, he escorted me to the door and said, “I do hope that I have time to make work for a few more exhibitions – I think that I am making some of my best work ever – I just need a little bit more time”. In this I do agree – some of Erwin Fabian’s best work was some of his late work – with the years his vision deepened and became more profound.
 
I conclude on a curious note, those who knew Fabian’s studio in Arden Street may also know that directly across the road lived one of his early champions, James Mollison, the legendary director of the Australian National Gallery. Mollison and Fabian both died on 19 January 2020.
 
Exhibitions:
Erwin Fabian, Australian Galleries, 35 Derby Street, Collingwood, 30 March – 22 April 2023
 
Erwin Fabian, Robin Gibson Gallery, 278 Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst, Sydney, 15 April – 6 May 2023

 
I spent last week in Sydney, primarily enjoying the opening of Sydney Modern. I thought that it would be worthwhile to share some of the art highlights that I encountered in the harbour city.
 
The headline act is certainly the new extension to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the outcome of the Sydney Modern Project and now known somewhat prosaically as the North Building. Already people are referring to it as ‘the birdcage’ in contrast with the stately neoclassical South Building.
 

 
Michael Brand, a year after he was appointed as the director of the Sydney art gallery, launched the unfunded plan for a new building in 2013, the Tokyo firm SANAA won the architectural competition in 2015 and construction commenced in 2019 with a budget of $344 million.
 
Architecturally, it is an ‘understated’ building conceived as a three-storey luminous birdcage with suspended hanging gardens and an extensive crypt below. The main architectural concept is that of three limestone clad cascading pavilions leading down towards the water with a huge supporting rammed earth wall.
 

 
In the birdcage there are about 900 exhibitors in the opening exhibitions with women artists making up 53% of the total number of exhibitors. Hype aside, and in Sydney you get it by the spade load from politicians with an eye to the state elections next March describing the new extensions as the greatest art gallery in the world exhibiting the greatest collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art in the world, this is an excellent functional extension that almost doubles the exhibiting space of the old building.
 
Indigenous art is a major highlight in the new building (and I love the newly commissioned woven huge metal handbags made from discarded well-weathered metal sheets from the outback by Lorraine Connelly-Northey) with a good mix of contemporary Australian non-Indigenous art, Asian art and other international art. Despite the huge storm of controversy that the building project initially caused, it has to be seen as a resounding success as a space for exhibiting art. It is also accompanied by excellent green credentials in this fully sustainable building with its 6-star Green Star design rating.
 

 
While visiting the birdcage, do pop into the old building that has been substantially rehung and see the impressive Daniel Boyd Treasure Island survey exhibition (closes January 29, 2023). It is the first major survey of his art and enhances his standing as a significant Australian artist who explores in his art the interconnected histories of First Nations peoples.
 

 
The Museum of Contemporary Art is hosting a substantial survey exhibition of the South Korean artist, Do Ho Suh. I first encountered his work at an APT exhibition, which has been a gateway for many of us to encounter contemporary Asian art. Do Ho Suh is particularly memorable for his large-scale sculptural installations playing with memory and the idea of the body suspended in space.
 

 
This exhibition spans three decades from the 1990s through to the present. Do Ho Suh in many of his pieces explores ideas connected with home and identity from an obsessive self-referential perspective. Although there are prints, drawings and miniatures, the most impressive pieces are full-scale replicas interpreted in unexpected materials.
 

 
At the Powerhouse at Ultimo – there is a great extensive exhibition dedicated to the Australian designed Carla Zampatti (until June 11, 2023) and an immersive show ‘Unpopular’ (until June 3, 2023) examining the music scene in Australia with some brilliant footage of the Nirvana tour of Australia and documentation of Sonic Youth, Beastie Boys, Mudhoney, Nirvana, Bikini Kill, Fugazi, Pavement, The Lemonheads and many more.
 

 
What I found as a spot disappointing is the glitzy Gucci Garden Archetypes show (until January 15, 2023) that comes across as one huge commercial for the company and its products that are available in the accompanying gift shop.
 

 
Possibly reflecting my personal poor taste in music, I found Opera Australia’s production of Carmen on Cockatoo Island simply amazing. It is one of the best productions of this evergreen classic that I have seen in recent years and is set within the spell of Cockatoo Island. It is not so much the motor bike stunts, crashed cars or the fireworks that carry the show, but the calibre of the singers and the choreography that provide a new lease of life to Georges Bizet’s popular music.
 

 
If the intensity of the art scene starts to tire the gaze, you can always escape on a seaplane and examine the sights of the city from a fresh perspective.

 
Should art be weaponised? While it has been fashionable to march under the banner of ‘art for art’s sake’ and to draw a line of demarcation between art and politics, more and more artists are being drawn into major social issues of our time, including climate change, plight of First Nations people, pandemics, global famines and various military conflicts.
 
Some artists, in taking up social causes, have adopted an overt political stance, William Kelly, Ann Newmarch, Noel Counihan and Mandy Martin are amongst the many names that spring to mind, others in their art aim for a more implicit message. It seems to me that in recent years global developments have become so dire that artists, who are the prophets of our society, feel increasingly compelled to take a social and political stance in their art.
 

 
Industrial agriculture in Australia with factory farms (concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs) appear increasingly unsustainable, destructive to our environment, potentially harmful to our health and a major contributor to climate change. The intensive production of crops and animals may involve the use of huge quantities of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, sometimes inadequately tested genetic modification of crops, widespread use of antibiotics on animals and have an adverse impact on biodiversity, quality of soils and cause the pollution of waterways and impact on climate change. It has been argued that certain pesticides, for example glyphosate-based products, go far beyond eradicating weeds but also wipe out species of insects and may have a long-term impact on human health.
 
One response to Industrial agriculture is regenerative farming that could be described as a system of farming principles and practices that seeks to rehabilitate and enhance the entire ecosystem of the farm. The basic idea is to heal farmlands that are now quite sick. There is an emphasis placed on a holistic approach with a focus on soil health and water management, plant diversity, general biodiversity and reforestation as well as the storage of carbon. In Australia, it has taken off in a big way and has been popularised in publications including Charles Massy’s Call of the Reed Warbler.
 

 
Earth Canvas arose from a chat between the regenerative farmer Gill Sanbrook and the distinguished environmental artist John Wolseley in 2019. The idea was quite simple – to match up specific regenerative farmers with specific visual artists and in each case imbed the artist on the farmer’s property where they would make work about their experience.
 
The ‘list’ as it emerged is quite impressive: Rosalind Atkins, working with the Wearn Family at Yammacoona, Little Billabong; Jenny Bell, working with the Coughlan family at Mount Narra Narra, Holbrook; Jo Davenport, working with the Austin Family at Mundarlo, Mundarlo; Janet Laurence, working with Rebecca Gorman and family at Yabtree West, Mundarlo; Idris Murphy, working with the Coghlan family at Eurimbla, Gerogery and John Wolseley, working with Gillian Sanbrook at Bibbaringa, Bowna. These regenerative farms were located between the Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers in southern New South Wales with the artists drawn from Victoria and New South Wales.

 
The next step was to involve a regional gallery and the Albury Library/Museum stepped into the fray with their curator Kate Eastick assembling a credible exhibition and securing Visions funding for a tour of regional galleries in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales over the past two years. In each venue, a local artist working with a local regenerative farmer was added to the mix to give the travelling show a peculiarly local flavour.
 
I caught up with the show in Canberra where it opened at the National Museum of Australia with considerable fanfare and was accompanied by two days of symposia and artist’s talks. It is spectacular in a quiet way and not at all preachy that is the downside of many exhibitions tied to causes. What many of the artists appear to have taken out of the experience was that these regenerative farms were involved in healing – healing the land and, in a few instances, the artists themselves experienced part of this healing process.
 

 
Janet Laurence, who has been such a significant environmental warrior north of the Murray, produced a series of dark immersive mirrors that recorded the devastation of the land as well as the healing process. While difficult to see in the tightly packed reflective installation in Canberra, they radiate a contemplative peace.
 
Ros Atkins, the wonderful Melbourne-based printmaker, has been a tree hugger for decades, but on the farm her wood engravings, woodcuts and monotypes convey a strong sense of healing, in the sense of healing the land in this farm and, also healing herself after a period of loss and turmoil in her life.
 
Jo Davenport has produced strong expressive paintings and drawings that combine a sense of anger, frustration and protest at what is happening to the land and the rivers, but also convey an expression of joy at the process of love and regeneration by the farmers with whom she was involved. Jenny Bell, who comes from a farming background and lives on a farm, translated her transformative experiences on the farm near Holbrook into an abstracted painted code that marks a significant departure from her usual art practice.
 

 
Idris Murphy, who incidentally has a large travelling exhibition on at the Drill Hall Gallery in Canberra, translated his evocations of place into his own idiosyncratic language with colour-saturated paintings tinged with melancholy.
 
John Wolseley, who is Australia’s most distinguished environmental artist and the most senior artist in this group, charts the topography of his farm noting the throbbing regenerative energy. There is something quite magical and transformative about his paintings that invite the viewer to enter them and contemplate the gravity of the situation and yet see the path to salvation.
 

 
The local artist for Canberra is Alexander Boynes, also the youngest artist in this group, and he was matched with the Watson clan farming at the Millpost farm – a sustainable 1,200 ha property on Ngunnawal/Ngambri country between Queanbeyan and Bungendore. This is his first project since the passing of his mother Mandy Martin with whom in recent years her has frequently collaborated. In Canberra, Boynes followed his established artistic strategy of painting a canvas and projecting over it a video ‘animation’ and having this accompanied by a music score by his brother-in-law Tristen Parr. It is quite a moving work that pays homage to the Indigenous people who own the site on which the farm is located.
 
The photographer, Tony Nott, who passed from this life last year and who documented much of the venture is also represented in this exhibition.
 

 
Earth Canvas celebrates a struggle that is taking place in our own backyard to explore regenerative farming. Although it presently lacks the scale to take over mainstream agriculture in Australia, I suspect that it and other developments similar to it have to be the future if we are to restore our natural environment, turn back climate change and secure our food sources.
 
Earth Canvas, National Museum Australia, Canberra
August 26 – October 30

“The cursed face business … the nature of face painting is such, that if I were not already cracked, the continual hurry of one fool upon the back of another, just when the maggot bites, would be enough to drive me crazy”. Thus wrote the great portrait painter Thomas Gainsborough in a letter to his close friend James Unwin in 1770. The sentiments he expressed sum up perfectly our popular concept of portraiture as the making of flattering likenesses.

The exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, drawn from the collections of the NGV and the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, has the intriguing title ‘Who are you?’ This sounds more like a title for a tv mystery show than for a portrait exhibition and conceptually it moves the focus of portraiture away from the making of likeness to exploring identity.  

It is a very large show that challenges the idea of what constitutes portraiture, both in its historic context as well as advancing some of the more contemporary interpretations. The late Andrew Sayers, the visionary inaugural director of Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery, challenged portraiture conventions by arguing that for an Indigenous person a landscape, a portrait of their country, constituted a portrait as a marker of identity. It was a radical concept when he advanced it, now it has been adopted as part of the accepted conceptual framework of portraiture in Australia as advocated in this show.

Shirley Purdie’s multi-panelled evocation of identity in Ngalim-Ngalimbooroo Ngagenybe, 2018 and Kunmanara Burton, Ngayaku Ngura, 2009 are examples, another is Kaylene Whiskey’s Seven Sisters Song, 2021 with its funky humour. A non-Indigenous artist, John Nixon, conveys as his self-portrait one of his iconic interpretations of Malevich’s emblematic crosses that is a long way from being a transcription of his own features.

The veteran broadcaster, Phillip Adams, writes in the catalogue in a light-hearted manner on the tradition of self-portraiture as a collection of ‘selfies’. The now iconic image, an early John Brack painting showing the artist shaving, is the standout work in this part of the show. Frank and disarming in its honesty, Brack illustrates the morning ritual for men of his generation and the cruel  confrontation with the mirror.

For an artist, these ‘selfies’ were frequently the result of a cheap and ready model as well as, on occasion, a journey into flattery and flights of fancy and self-aggrandisement. Rupert Bunny, Sam Jinks, William Yang, Vernon Ak Kee and James Gleeson all fail to smile for the camera, the canvas or silicone and resin, as the case may be, and are shown resolutely as heroic artists.

This exhibition can be described as a thought adventure where well-known images from the two collections are juxtaposed with the new and unexpected. We see the historic spread from daguerreotypes to digital photographs, from academic naturalism to postmodernist explorations.

There are few portraits in this exhibition that would have been defended by Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century as examples of virtue that would inspire the young to lead virtuous lives. On the contrary, many of the portraits on show could lead people to question stereotypes concerning gender, race, sexuality and ethnicity.

A few decades ago, it was fashionable amongst art students to dismiss portraiture as an antiquated art form designed either for the circus of the Archibald Prize or the power politics of corporate boardrooms or the watering holes for politicians. The wonderful Joshua Reynolds had warned us in his Discourses in the late 18th century, that “A history painter paints man in general; a portrait painter, a particular man, and consequently a defective model.” So many exhibitions of portraiture are collections of defective models.

‘
Who are you: Australian portraiture’ is a show about the journey that Australian portraiture has travelled over the past two hundred years and hints at its prospects for the future so that portraiture can remain relevant as an art form.
 
‘Who are you: Australian portraiture’
National Gallery of Victoria: The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Fed Square
Level 3, 25 Mar 22 – 21 Aug 22, Open 10am–5pm daily
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, October 1 2022 – January 29, 2023

Sculpture by the Sea (SxS) first saw the light of day 25 years ago as a ‘one night stand’ at Bondi in 1997. Now it has clocked up 50 exhibitions distributed between Bondi in Sydney and Cottesloe in Perth with a few held in Denmark.

The idea is relatively simple. A large exhibition of big sculptures sprinkled along a spectacular stretch of coast. The exhibitions are free, democratic and secular and each location has its ‘peculiar’ and distinctive feel about it. The coastline from Bondi to Tamarama is steep, elevated and has performing whales and dolphins thrown in as a backdrop. Cottesloe has a flat sandy shore surrounded by grassy areas and a pier with the wonderful Indian Ocean as a backdrop with its stunning sunsets.

The realisation of this simple idea is exceptionally complex and has been the life’s work of the SxS founding CEO and artistic director, David Handley AM. The alchemy involved in fundraising for each event, the environmental and engineering logistics involved in siting each sculpture and the whole curatorial process of selecting the sculptors from a huge national and international pool keeps a permanent and large volunteer staff occupied throughout the whole year.

Handley is a charismatic personality with youthful handsome features who manages to infect others with enthusiasm for his projects and has drawn a professional staff into his orbit, has enthused thousands of volunteers and has persuaded many private sponsors to open their wallets. His success with government arts funding organisations at both state and commonwealth levels has been less successful at times although he did secure for SxS a $2 million grant in RISE funding.

How does one assess the worth of SxS? There are obvious economic benefits to the participating artists as well as the local economies. The artistic benefits are more difficult to fathom. There is a view in some quarters that SxS is insufficiently ‘elitist’ – that is, the selection process is not always conducted with the same stringency as within a public art institution and that there are too many concessions to popular taste. Some describe it as the ‘Archibald’ of sculpture.

Where this parallel holds good is that indeed hundreds of thousands of people turn up to see the shows and many who come are not regular art exhibition goers. In some SxS exhibitions, there are anywhere up to $2 million in sculpture sales. It can be argued that SxS has created and continues to create and foster new audiences for sculpture, a new breed of collectors of sculpture, and it sends an economic lifeline to keep some sculptors solvent in what is often lean times.

The argument in defence of the artistic integrity of SxS is that it shows the broad church of contemporary sculptural practice with the wacky, ephemeral and environmental installations, monumental structures in heavy metals and stone as well as some more conceptually experimental work. Being an out-of-doors exhibition with massive crowds and limited security, other factors including safety to the public, durability and longevity also need to be taken into consideration before work is accepted for the show.

The recent show at Cottesloe, the 18th at that venue, illustrates the multifaceted nature of SxS. There are about 70 major outdoor pieces that hug the coast and are situated along the beach, in the water, the surrounding grassy areas and the pier. A bit under half of the sculptors come from Western Australia, about 15 come from elsewhere in Australia (predominantly from NSW) and the rest are international with a substantial contingent from Japan as well as participants from Taiwan, the Czech Republic, France, Spain, Italy, India, South Korea, Switzerland, Norway and Singapore.

How do I assess this year’s Cottesloe? I have only been to three of the 18 SxS exhibitions held at this venue and this is not the finest of the three. Nevertheless this is a formidable show with plenty of interesting highlights.

A crowd favourite, as well as one of my favourites, is the work of the Victorian sculptor Jimmy Rix, Lone Dingo. It is figurative, but not literal, at over two metres it is monumental, and made of corten steel it possesses a natural rusty colour. It smacks of rustic humour and the disposition of planes makes it work from all angles. In his artist’s statement the artist provides us with a narrative: “The Lone Dingo stands apart from its pack, keeping its distance. Watching and waiting to be accepted back into the pack when the leader allows it - mirroring our experiences of social distancing and lockdown.”

The welded steel sculptures, a feature of all SxS exhibitions, include a brilliant swaying falling pillar by Haruyuki Uchida from Japan, titled Thinking Red, fabricated of stainless steel and held to some extent by magnets at four metres it is most imposing. Philip Spelman, who lives on the outskirts of Canberra in his mild steel Shuffle finished in shiny automotive paint has a brilliantly effective collapsing column of strict geometric shapes seemingly defying gravity. It is one of the most accomplished works that I have seen from this artist.

His neighbour, Michael Le Grand has created for the show what for him is an unusual block-like steel sculpture with elements as if peeling away from the main body. It is possibly more effective located within a shallow niche rather than seen completely in the round.

The wonderful veteran WA sculptor, Ron Gomboc who has been making sculpture for half a century has made a three-and-a-half metre high work where suspended on corten steel organic pillars are three stainless steel birds that can rotate with the breeze. Simple in concept, but effective and a work of soaring beauty.

Greg Johns, from SA, has a swaying corten steel structure that unlike some of his work is not overstated. At three-and-a-half metres it has a delicacy and sense of grace. Linda Bowen, from NSW, revisits an earlier piece of a construction of an open architectural space in mild steel and automotive paint. It has a somewhat uncanny feel here on the grass.

Another local WA sculptor, Kevin Draper has a remarkably clever and effective work in the form of a large tree that has been intersected with a red and white grid structure. It is about regrowth after a bushfire and I spent several occasions contemplating its solemn majesty. It works both on a purely emotional level, as well as a cerebral puzzle.

Another WA sculptor/printmaker is the fibre artist Fiona Gavino who weaves with cane a wondrous spreading maze measuring four by four by six metres that envelops the surrounding vegetation. It is a sensuous piece that throws a veil over nature to present an emotional and cerebral labyrinth of possibilities.

The Japanese contingent of artists, who have been a feature of many SxS exhibitions, especially in carvings from hard stone, are again prominent at Cottesloe. Takeshi Tanabe carves in black granite a superb contemplative work. His artist’s statement hints at the profundity of his piece. He writes: “This work focuses on the water on the earth as the origin of life. Water collected from oceans across the world has been sealed in the stone in an attempt to tell the world about the importance of protecting the earth’s water environments.” Contemplating these droplets of water releases some of the power of the piece.

Keizo Ushio carves out of green granite his knotted wreaths and Takahiro Hirata carves a black granite arrow head over two metres high in resolved splendour. Wataru Hamasaka carves a slab of granite as if a reclining couch on which Socrates administered hemlock to leave this life – it is a work of transcendental beauty.

Richard Tipping, from NSW continues with his famous aphorism road signs – in Cottesloe it is “Oh No” and “Oh Yes” that are very appropriate for our times. The veteran WA sculptor, Mark Grey-Smith, has produced a knotted riddle in his Germination in aluminium and terrazzo.

A different art critic would produce a different selection of highlights, but it is enough to say that there is much in this exhibition to delight the eye and to engage the mind.

SxS sails on with the Bondi exhibition opening on October 20 this year and the challenging Snowy Valleys Sculpture Trail, funded by a $4 million grant from the NSW Bushfire Local Economic Recovery Fund, is opening later this year.

 
What’s in a word? The word ‘tarnanthi’ in the language of the Kaurna people, the traditional owners of the Adelaide Plains, means to spring forth or appear – like the sun and the first emergence of light. It is the name given to the festival of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at the Art Gallery of South Australia and spreading to other participating venues. It commenced in 2015 and its sixth iteration opened in October 2021.
 
However, the word ‘tarnanthi’ is not simply a snappy title, but according to its artistic director, Nici Cumpston, it also represents a new curatorial attitude. Cumpston writes in the lavish exhibition catalogue, “this curatorial approach is far from conventional. Western museology dictates that the curator is author and grand selector … Tarnanthi jettisons this way of working in favour of a practice that encourages excellence and innovation to spring forth and appear.” The curator becomes like a participating collaborating artist and a more collaborative, organic and fluid approach evolves for the selection of participants and exhibits.
 

 
The proof of the curatorial pudding always lies in the exhibition and this one is interesting. There is some unexpected work from some well-known artists, including Nyunmiti Burton, Teho Ropeyarn, the irrepressible Kaylene Whiskey, Maree Clarke, Alec Baker, Angelina Karadada Boona and John Prince Siddon. There are also some fairly ‘predictable’ pieces from Kathy and Tracey Ramsay, Julie Gough, Kent Morris and Doris Bush Nungarrayi. Then there are some unexpected highlights, brilliant pieces from less well-known artists, including Timo Hogan, Minyma Kutjara Arts Project, Gail Mabo, Karen Mills and Waringarri Aboriginal Arts. 
 
The visual excitement of the exhibition in part lies in its freshness and unpredictability and in part in the exceptional calibre of some of the exhibits. For example, the room full of Tiwi papers is simply breathtaking. Unglazed and in a dense salon hang, there are some great works by some iconic and interesting emerging artists including Timothy Clark, Kaye Brown and Alison Puruntatameri.
 

 
One of the most quirky and memorable installations at the show is the Minyma Kutjara Arts Project – Mutaka (motor car). The eight artists from the remote Irrunytju community in South Australia near the tri-state border have picked up oil sumps from abandoned cars, added pram wheels and painted them as cars with their passengers and personalised narratives. A rusty car bonnet serves as a panel for a useful hand drawn map of the area and an animated video with these painted cars relates a broader narrative. All sorts of post-colonial narratives can be attached to these exhibits and there is the strong stamp of authenticity – of being there and bearing witness to the sense of place. It is also a lot of fun.
 

 
Another installation that was surprising and unusual was that by the Waringarri Aboriginal Arts artists. Carved boab nuts have long been the backbone of the tourist trade in outback Australia. Here nine artists have been commissioned to carve a large number of birds on boab nuts and these have been suspended from the wall on ingenious copper rods at various distances from the wall. There is a wonderful play between the objects and their shadows so that the flock appears to glimmer as it flies off the wall.
 

 
Timo Hogan’s Lake Baker is a huge painting some three metres high and six metres across. It is an amazing piece with a fantastically detailed snake and textured white surfaces against a black background. The more time I spent with it, the more I was seduced by its magical spiritual presence. Although his star in recent times has been in ascendency, this painting makes a strong claim for his standing as a major artist.

 
Alec Baker is deservedly one of the big names in the show and is the senior artist at Iwantja Arts. His Kalaya Tjina (Emu Tracks) is a suite of sixteen paintings – each a meditation on country. He has a complete certainty of touch knowing exactly where to place the mark. The series is initially a mesmerising experience and subsequently a gateway to meditation.
 

 
The painting by Nyunmiti Burton of the Seven Sisters was one of the big surprises at the exhibition. I usually associate her work with very tight carefully articulated pieces, but now there is a breadth and freedom with gestural swirls so that the ancestral travellers appear to take off and defy terrestrial gravity. Angelina Karadada Boona’s Wandjina images are growing gradually more ethereal as they are created with the materials from the land from which they arise. She captures perfectly the sensation of something emerging out of the spiritual realm to become visible but ready to retreat back into a timeless dimension.
 
There is always a danger when reviewing a show of this nature to plunge into a catalogue of exhibits enhanced with a bit of a verbal commentary. Sadly, that by its very nature is somewhat boring and this exhibition is anything but boring. There is a great fecundity of invention throughout the show, a vitality and sense of urgency.
 

 
The long awaited Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme exhibition was meant to open to the public on Friday 13 August 2021 at the Canberra Museum and Gallery. A day earlier, there was to be a small opening at 6.30 pm – alas the Canberra lockdown came into force that evening at 5pm – the show did not open, it has not been seen. This is almost true, sensing the disaster that was about to unfold, covering my gardening clothes with an overcoat, I hopped into the car and sped off to see the show before it and I were locked down.
 
Ethel Spowers (1890-1947) and Eveline Syme (1888-1961) were silver spooners who came from the Melbourne establishment. They were daughters of the rival newspaper magnates – The Argus and The Age – who were lifelong friends and both were prominent printmakers who championed a version of modernism.
 

 
Their most productive years fell in the period between the two world wars when their art was featured in exhibitions in Australia and Britain. In the context of conservative Melbourne, their colourful linocuts looked modern and attracted a few champions and a couple of detractors. However, most of the art world simply ignored them until they were ‘rediscovered’ posthumously in the 1970s and 1980s as part of the revival of interest in the so-called ‘Claude Flight School’ of modernist linocut printmakers. Outside of the art market, the revival was spearheaded by the curator Stephen Coppel, firstly in Canberra and later in London. Today their prints are highly prized and command considerable prices on the art market.
 

 
This could be described as a ‘perfect exhibition’. It is small enough to be manageable, yet sufficiently comprehensive to give an excellent understanding of the two artists seen within their cultural context. It includes linocuts, drawings, paintings, fairytale illustrations and even an embroidered screen. It is meticulously researched by Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax, the Curator of Australian Prints and Drawings at the NGA, who uncovers mountains of new material from the artists’ archives. She is also the author of the accompanying monographic catalogue, where the interwoven lives of the two artists are explored in her text, employing the metaphor of skating on ice. Noordhuis-Fairfax writes in a lively engaging style, where despite the abundance of quotations from primary sources, such as the detailed correspondence between Spowers and Frances Derham, it remains a very readable text.
 

 
The English artist Claude Flight, through the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London, championed the colour linocut in Britain, with a whole army of talented pupils including the Australians Dorrit Black, Spowers and Syme.
 
There were a few peculiarities of Flight’s method. One was his worship of the Italian Futurism and British Vorticism – the exhilaration of speed and the demonic energy of machines. Flight translated this into curved dynamic lines and fragmented colours designed to express speed, movement and hustle of modern life. Flight and his disciples used three to five blocks to print colour to produce an animated surface. The third feature of the Flight method was printing on very thin oriental tissue paper Gampi or India paper, printing on the reverse side of the paper allowing the image to bleed through to the other side, permitting a degree of subtlety.
 

 
The colour linocuts of Spowers and Syme have a glowing luminosity and rhythmic dynamism. Spowers’s The works, Yallourn (1933), a print of considerable complexity and employing seven blocks, and Syme’s Sydney tram line (1936) from three blocks, are outstanding examples of the Flight method. All is caught up within a dynamic explosion of energy with a rich and vibrant colour palette.
 

 
The beauty of this exhibition, at least in part, lies in the forensic matching up of sources and contexts, for example, a porcelain squirrel with an acorn appears in a Spowers’s print Still life (1932) with its dynamic play with shadows and in the exhibition the actual figurine is exhibited next to the print. In another instance, Spowers’s joyful School is out (1936) print is matched up with the artist’s drawing that served as the basis for the print.
 

 
When you recall that much of the work was made during the Great Depression, it is a gay and somewhat frivolous world that we encounter in their art. The artists did possess a social conscience and were heavily involved in charitable work, women’s education and the war effort, in their art they celebrated a joyful innocence and hedonism.
 

 
Spowers and Syme may not have made work of the same calibre or profundity as Jessie Traill or Dorrit Black, however, they did produce a body of exquisite prints that have finally been recognised and are celebrated in this wonderful exhibition.
 

Spowers & Syme
Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra 13 August – 12 February 2022
Western Plains Cultural Centre, Dubbo 26 February – 1 May 2022
Heide, Melbourne 18 June – 2 October 2022

An earlier version of this review was published in The Canberra Times

Damien Hirst, the irrepressible entrepreneur in contemporary British art, was the driving force behind the Young British Artists (YBAs) and organised their infamous Freeze exhibition in 1988 that included the work of fellow students at Goldsmiths College of Art, most notably Sarah Lucas, Angus Fairhurst and Michael Landy. The YBAs look included preserved dead animals (Damien Hirst), found objects crushed with a steamroller (Cornelia Parker), one's own bed (Tracey Emin) and sculpture made from fresh and canned food, smokes and women's tights (Sarah Lucas).

Fast forward to 2021, Damien Hirst no longer appears as the coolest monkey in the art jungle, Cornelia Parker, recently on show at the MCA, is also off the boil, Tracey Emin remains a mega pop star, while Sarah Lucas has been growing from strength to strength and basking in accolades.

Witty. irreverent, provocative and, to some, confronting and deeply offensive, the art of Sarah Lucas is presented with a baroque exuberance at the NGA in gallery 1 in conjunction with the 'Know my name' exhibition.
For 30 years Lucas has been the 'femme terrible' in the British art scene. Between 1984 and 1987 she studied at Goldsmith College where she met many fellow artists, including Damien Hirst, Angus Fairhurst, Gillian Wearing and Gary Hume, who formed the YBAs group, Inspired by the writing of the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin and her arguments on patriarchy and her analysis of pornography, Lucas in her art began to question, with wit and assertiveness, assumed structures in society and the art world.

Spurred on by the organisational genius of Damien Hirst, YBAs brought a sense of excitement to the British art scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Lucas also for about six months ran a temporary shop with Tracey Emin, where they sold decorated keyrings, wire penises, hand-painted T-shirts and decorated funky ashtrays. Apparently the friendship was short-lived as was the shop. Lucas, drawing on tabloid newspapers, magazines, street culture and observed structures within the arts community, created a body of work that drew attention to sexist and misogynist assumptions that were held as social norms that she would expose and ridicule with humour.

Lucas's sprawling collage/sculpture, Penis nailed to a board (1991), the title drawn from a tabloid report of boys behaving badly, also provided the title for her first solo exhibition that launched her career and gave her notoriety and a standing as a serious artist in the art world. She is an artist for whom humour and bricolage are important elements in her art and she developed a practice that goes across sculpture, photography and installation. Frequently in her sculptural creations she combines domestic materials, including old furniture, stockings, underwear, cigarettes, cinder blocks and food, such as raw chickens, vegetables and kebabs. The food items often do double service in portraying erotic body parts, especially genitalia.

Recognition came early with Lucas's inclusion in the notorious Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997, a retrospective exhibition of her art followed at the prestigious Whitechapel Gallery in East London in 2013, and in 2015 she represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. Today she is widely regarded as one of the more important feminist artists of her generation working in Britain.

The exhibition at the NGA brings together a series of early self-portrait photographs plus some of her more recent sculptures. It is an impressive, theatrically presented exhibition, quite different from the slightly 'grunge' look of some of her earlier shows that I have encountered in Europe. The self-portrait photographs are of the artist eating a banana made in 1990 that she apparently rediscovered in about 2017 and released for sale as individual prints under the title Eating a banana (revisited) in an edition of 25 measuring 91.4 x 121.9 cm. In the Canberra exhibition, the photographs have been blown up to about seven metres and are displayed as continuous wallpaper in a gallery with exceptionally high ceilings creating a dramatic setting that invariably dwarfs the scale of the sculptures that were conceived as life-size into miniatures. This is similar to the strategy adopted for her Red Brick Art Museum show in Beijing in 2019-20, again with the same giant photographs and the same sculptures. Where the exhibitions in Beijing and Canberra differ, the banana room in Beijing was a small part of of the survey exhibition of Lucas's work, in Canberra, it is the exhibition.

The huge back and white photographic images of the 28-year-old Lucas dressed in leathers and with unisex cropped hair seductively consuming a banana (with all of its sexual connotations) converts the gallery space into a contested arena where the erotic sculptures strut their stuff under the artist's gaze. The photographs appear to cater to the male desire through the sexual euphemisms, however, the scale dwarfs the potential for this to be read as a submissive image. Big sister is watching.

The 'Bunnies' sculptures, with all of their connotations of Playboy bunnies, Lucas first made in 1997 as eight mannequins out of variously coloured nylon tights that had been stuffed with wool and sat atop and around a snooker table in the installation Bunny Gets Snookered. The stuffed nylon pantyhose became splayed limbs of women's bodies - intimate, glamorous and erotic, while at the same time disposable and abject. Drawing on conventions of Dada and Surrealism - Hans Bellmer's uncanny fetishistic dolls, the soft sculptures of Dorothea Tanning and Louise Bourgeois's fabric sculptures - Lucas's tubular elongated female limbs adopt erotic poses.

The bunnies moved onto chairs of various descriptions and adopted stiletto heels, coloured socks, fashionista shoes and other fashion accessories and as the series developed they moved out of the snooker hall up to the fashion catwalk and business executive lounges. Lucas adopts existing gender stereotypes that are illustrated by the bunnies, subjects of masculine conquests, but non-responsive slumped, sagging forms and literally empty heads seem to turn these traditional objects of desire back on themselves and they appear as hollow and ridiculous. Lucas, as in much of her art, sets up a mirror for sexism, rather than presenting a critique or an agenda for change. As she pointed out in an interview, "I'm not trying to solve the problem. I'm exploring the moral dilemma by incorporating it."

In this exhibition, apart from the soft sculpture bunnies, there is a new breed of figures cast in bronze (based on the stuffed nylon forms) where on a heightened level the line between the humorous and the abject is blurred. Some of these new bunnies, still shown in laid back seductive poses, are no longer simply female and in pieces including Elf Warrior (2018) and Dick'Ead (2018) they have thrusting, vertically positioned huge male members. In the book, Sarah Lucas: after 2005, before 2012, she listed her attraction for making penises, "appropriation, because I don't have one; voodoo; economics; totemism; they're a convenient size for the lap; fetishism; compact power; Dad; why make the whole bloke?; gents, gnomey; because you don't see them on display much; for religious reasons having to do with the spark."

In another bronze sculpture, where gender is strangely morphed into ambiguous forms, Tittipussidad (2018), that has been recently acquired by the NGA, the struggle between attraction and rejection is palpable, where forms simultaneously seduce and repulse, but you are left with an image that will continue to haunt your imagination for a long time to come.

Lucas, in recent interviews, appears a little depressed on where feminism and the world is presently heading. She observed, "things seem on a very conservative trend now, fascistic even. I was watching Nancy Pelosi speaking after the storming of the Capitol by right-wing fanatics. She was making a very serious speech about the threat to democracy, looking very pale and shaken, and I noticed that she was on very precarious stiletto heels beneath her trouser suit. This seems to be a necessary get up for women to be taken seriously in public life. They're allowed to talk tough and wear power suits but are inevitably tottering around on implausible heels. What does this tell us? Is it an ugly and hateful thing for women to look anything other than 'feminine'"?

Perhaps Lucas's sculptures have lost none of their relevance and are more crucial today than ever before and are needed to expose and reverse this fascistic trend in our society.

*An earlier version of this essay was published in The Canberra Times
Project 1: Sarah Lucas, National Gallery of Australia Canberra.
7 August - 18 April 2022

 
Any history of modern printmaking starts with the work of an outsider, a Spaniard, Francisco Goya (1746-1828). By outsider, I mean that in the late 18th century, printmaking was not a major art form in Spain – there was no tradition of printmaking – unlike Dürer in Germany, Rembrandt in Holland, Callot and Fragonard in France or Marcantonio Raimondi, the Carracci and Piranesi in Italy, printmaking in Spain was almost exclusively a minor art form that reproduced paintings. Goya was not only a great technical innovator, as all major printmakers are, but he also advanced a new concept for printmaking, one that in many art historical constructs is seen as the beginnings of the modern print.
 
Goya’s thinking as a printmaker is revealed through his incredible drawings that are held in the Prado and until now a pilgrimage to Madrid was necessary to be inducted into the alchemy of his creative process. This brilliant exhibition unites 44 drawings from the Prado with over 120 etchings and aquatints drawn primarily from the collection of the NGV and supplemented with a number of works from AGSA.
 

 
Goya’s working method was to start with a sanguine wash drawing, this was then translated into a red chalk drawing where the composition was further resolved and this was simply transferred as a reversed impression onto the copperplate with its soft ground and run through the press. Then Goya fully engaged with the etching and aquatint processes to produce a powerful image. With printing, the composition is once more flopped over to make it the same way round as in the original drawing, but the simplicity of grounds, the subtlety of line, and the dramatic highlights made this into an image which can only be uniquely realised as an etching. Throughout the exhibition the preliminary drawings are united with the finished etchings.
 
When Goya published in Madrid, the 80 etchings with aquatint, which comprised his Los Caprichos, in February 1799, this marked, what could be seen in retrospect, the beginnings of modern printmaking. The name Los Caprichos, which can be translated as The Caprices or satirical images, is a metaphorical smokescreen behind which are concealed images of grotesque realism made by a man steeped in Enlightenment learning examining with passion and cold introspection the surrounding world.
 

 
The intended opening plate for Goya’s Los Caprichos was The dream of reason produces monsters, an etching and aquatint, measuring 22 x 15 cm [smaller than A-4], which is approximately the impression size of most of the plates. The inscription, which is found on the preparatory drawing is: “The author dreaming. His only intention is to banish harmful common beliefs and to perpetuate with this work of caprichos the sound testimony of truth.” Goya depicts himself at his desk with the creatures of darkness swarming behind him. The owl on the desk has grasped his pencil and is urging him to work, while the demonic cat looks on from the floor.
 
As everything in Los Caprichos, this too is a metaphor alluding to a deeper meaning, the monsters which he depicts are those of the Spanish church, the Inquisition and high society. It is this combination of dream, fantasy and social criticism and the rejection of flight from reality and the engagement and commitment with harsh realism that gives the series its unique bite. Possibly as a compromise, Goya deleted this frontispiece, shifting it to plate 43 and replaced it with the famous self-portrait Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Painter, executed as an etching, aquatint, drypoint and burin. Apparently it was an insufficient compromise and Los Caprichos was withdrawn from sale after only two days and, four years later, in 1803 Goya presented all of the copper plates and the unsold 240 sets to the king, Charles IV. It appears that the artist had been reported to the Inquisition and feared for his safety.
 

 
Education, or lack of it, is a central theme of Los Caprichos. The Enlightenment, or the rule of light, is contrasted with poor education, superstition and ignorance, or the rule of darkness. About half way through the series, before the witches and goblins appear, there is a sequence where the professional and upper classes in society are characterised as asses. An asinine teacher who holds a ferule in his left forehoof instructs the young ass by rote the letter ‘A’. The satirical inscription reads: “What if the pupil knows more?” In another etching, a seated aristocratic ass proudly holds open a book of genealogy demonstrating as the caption declares that his family consisted of asses “As far back as his grandfather”. In other etchings Goya shows peasants with their eyes closed carrying on their shoulders aristocratic asses, a comment on the poor stupidly carrying on their shoulders the idle rich.
 

 
Los Caprichos scholarship frequently dwells on Goya’s circumstances for the creation of the series. How he had been out of Madrid for a long while living in Andalusia, how he had suffered an illness which left him permanently deaf, his love affair with the sex goddess of the day, the Duchess of Alba, and her subsequent unfaithfulness to him (she did not return to her husband, nor did she stay with Goya) and the general political and religious oppression in Spain. It may also be the case that Goya, who was 53 when Los Caprichos was published in 1799, was easily the most prominent artist of his day in Spain, one who spent much of his time painting portraits of the aristocracy whom he despised. The allegorical images of the asses are supplemented with images of grisly realism.
 
The origins of many of the plates in Los Caprichos are to be found in the drawings in the so-called ‘Madrid Album’ which Goya commenced in Andalusia while staying with the Duchess of Alba in 1796 and completed the following year on his return to the capital. There is a danger of being over literal in interpretation and reading Goya’s art as an exercise in autobiography, or even worse as a misogynist vendetta. His images of ‘majas’, basically courtesans or women of the night, have long been identified with the Duchess of Alba and this may in fact be founded in reality, but their function in his art goes considerably beyond the specific individual.
 

 
I think it is important that the women of modern Spain whom Goya depicts are shown as victims of their upbringing and at least as guilty of depravation as the men with whom they consort. The plate in Los Caprichos is called Two of a kind, sometimes translated as Two birds of a feather, it may have a specific identity in the Madrid Album drawing, but, in the etching, it becomes a universal statement.
 
What is not always immediately apparent to a person who casually glances through Los Caprichos is the manner in which one plate visually, spiritually and intellectually, relates to another. Love and death is plate no 10, Out hunting for teeth is plate no 12; compositionally one echoes the other, the tonality has been reversed and the woman/man relationship of the live woman and the dead man is similar, yet in substance different. The episode with teeth relates to a Spanish superstition that if a woman pulls out a tooth from a dead man she would soon find herself a husband. Goya’s comment is that it is that sort of superstition and stupidity which leads to one person fighting a duel with another.
 

 
Everything to do with the series of etchings popularly known as The Disasters of War is considerably more complicated than it first appears. As three of the plates are dated 1810, this has been taken by many as the commencement date for the series, and as other subjects may refer to events following the defeat of the French, the completion date for this series has been extended to about 1820. Goya was apparently in fear of the Inquisition and was looking for a safe time to publish his edition, but such a time never arrived. These prints were never published in his lifetime.
 
It appears that at some time between the restoration of 1814 and 1820, and before Goya fled Spain to go into exile in 1824, he printed two sets of proofs which he circulated amongst friends. These had the title Fatal consequences of Spain’s bloody war with Bonaparte and other striking caprichos. In these proof sets there were 83 plates accompanied by hand written captions. In 1863, long after Goya’s death, the copper plates were recovered and a major edition printed employing rich inky tones which were fashionable in the mid-19th century. Three of the plates were omitted and several of the captions were altered to modify their message.
 

 
It is difficult to speak of Goya’s Disasters of war without largely describing the narrative of the scenes. They are amazingly graphic images, like Why? and Great heroism against the dead, both generally dated between 1812 and 1815. They have also become some of the most famous icons of anti-war art ever made. If we look at these works as prints, they violate all of the conventions of the preceding tradition of European etching. Murky pools of aquatint appear like pools of blood, the focus is personalised, immediate and confronting. Not only the limbs, but compositional structures are truncated and violated. So many of the artistic strategies advanced by Goya are not only pictorially confronting, but also pre-empt the devices of Expressionism and Surrealism of a century later.
 
It is a curious question, but perhaps one worth asking, who was the audience which Goya wanted to address through his Disasters of war. On one hand, apart from circulating a couple of proof sets amongst his intellectual and liberal friends, there was no audience for these images for the first half century of their existence. Was it a personal act of a cathartic nature? Modern etching has often played the role of the confessional image. Goya does here comment on many of his pet obsessions with violence, superstition, rape and hypocrisy in the Roman Catholic church. On a number of the etchings he notes “This is what I saw” and “I was here”. One of these plates is simply captioned “They don’t want to” and the imagery is self-explanatory.
 

 
Another image is quite loaded. A skeleton rises from its grave to inscribe a single word “Nada” meaning ‘nothing’. Goya’s caption to the work is unambiguous, he writes “Nothing, that’s what it says”. When the Royal Academy of San Fernando came to publish these etchings in 1863, even then, the inscription seemed too much an affront to the Roman Catholic church and it was altered to read “The events will tell”, rather than the bleak apocalyptic pronouncement which could be given an atheistic reading.
 
This is an incredibly powerful exhibition that demands several visits.
 

 
In our art schools today, printmaking is under attack. Throughout much of Australia, printmaking facilities in art schools have been cut, staff retrenched and, in some instances, students have been discouraged from enrolling in printmaking majors.
 
In contrast, some of the best contemporary Australian art has found expression through printmaking and, it is predominantly made by women artist printmakers. It is a sad irony in Australian art history that art forms dominated by women artists are the ones most under attack from conservative political establishments.
 

 
Sixty years ago, Sydney Printmakers held their inaugural exhibition. They arose, in part, because of the paucity of institutional printmaking facilities in Sydney. Today, they are even more critically relevant to the artistic life of this city than they were six decades ago. The calibre of work in this exhibition can be summed up in one word – it’s brilliant.
 

There are 47 artists in this exhibition, 34 of whom are women, and not a single dud amongst them (that includes the men). The quality control, if that is the correct term for steering the group, by Susan Baron, Helen Mueller and Angela Hayson, has been remarkable (not to mention the exceptional integrity of all of the artists involved) and Katharine Roberts’ curatorial contribution has been outstanding.
 

 
One of the inspirational aspects of this show, and of Sydney Printmakers in general, is that it spans the generations from the wonderful Barbara Davidson, who studied at the National Art School (then the East Sydney Tech) in the 1940s through to Angus Fisher, a printmaker of exceptional ability, who studied at the same institution sixty years later.
 

 
What is this exhibition, ‘To the edges’ about? Each viewer will take something different from it and every single opinion is valid and needs to be respected. For me, the show technically is about the art of printmaking – about pushing the art form to the edges. I do find it incredibly exciting – the delicate yet vibrant Balinese hand-coloured solar plate prints of Susan Baron, the pulsating relief colographs of Anthea Boesenberg, Danielle Creenaune’s amazing and complex lithographs, Angela Hayson’s graceful yet expressive alchemy of techniques on a monumental scale and the miraculous multi-block woodcuts by Roslyn Kean. The exhibition is studded with exceptional technical feats that to the eye of the viewer appear almost effortlessly breathed onto sheets of paper.
 

 
Thematically, at least for me, this exhibition is about a planet pressed ‘to the edges’ – to the edges of destruction through climate change and the threats facing our different environments. Glance at the layered organic and sensuous mangrove filters of Helen Mueller, the delicate cloud dreamscapes of Susan Rushforth, the watery miracles of Gary Shinfield, the burning visions of Laura Stark, the metaphors for our changing sources of energy in the striking work of Anna Russell, or the political vegetation of Michael Kempson. Many of the artists manage to combine lyricism, a note of eschatological gloom, plus a spot of irony or simple humour.
 

 
As you walked around this exhibition you will be constantly surprised, challenged and delighted. This is an exhibition of a very high order by a very talented cross-section of artists based in Sydney and the surrounding regions. An enormous achievement of Sydney Printmakers has been their ability to constantly reinvent themselves and to remain relevant with what is happening in art at the present moment. It is a huge achievement to present an exhibition of such calibre on the sixtieth anniversary in the life of an organisation.
 

 
Printmaking is a democratic art form – not necessarily the “friendly little craft” in Margaret Preston’s memorable turn of phrase – but an art form that frequently gives birth to multiple originals that are financially accessible to more people who love art than the more expensive easel paintings or sculptures.
 

This exhibition keeps this tradition of ‘art for the people’ alive and the Manly Art Gallery and Museum and the wonderful Sydney Printmakers need to be congratulated for this memorable show.

To The Edges: 60 Years of Sydney Printmakers,
Manly Art Gallery & Museum, West Esplanade Reserve
Manly NSW 2095
Friday, 25 June 2021 - 10:00am to Sunday, 1 August 2021 - 5:00pm