Dec 6 - Dec 23

Painting becomes akin to staging, and the surface of the canvas, the set, in the work of Amber Koroluk-Stephenson. This November, at Anna Pappas Gallery, the Hobart-based painter brings bodies and buildings together in an indeterminate environment, an alternate world in which geographical distinctions of place are troubled, confounded, remade and rearticulated.

Painted by Koroluk-Stephenson during her recent 2017 residency at Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, the artist reflects on Shadows on the Wall, stating: ‘These works attempt to reconnect with the magic and romanticism of encounter and discovery, teasing out connections between man and nature within fictionalised territories to fulfil the desire to connect with nature and make visible what is out of sight.’

Since graduating from the Tasmanian School of Art with a BFA (Honours) in 2010 Amber Koroluk-Stephenson has held numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally including Bett Gallery, Hobart, MOP Projects, Sydney, Sawtooth, Launceston, Archive Space, Sydney, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart, Trocadero Art Space, Melbourne and Firstdraft, Sydney.

She has has been selected for a number of Australian prizes including The Churchie National Emerging Artist Prize, Portia Geach Memorial Award, Ravenswood Art Prize, Tidal National Art Award, Redlands Art Award, Albany Art Prize, Glover Prize and Paddington Art Prize. Koroluk-Stephenson has received several grants and awards for her practice, including an Australia Council ArtStart Grant, a NAVA Australian Artists’ Grant, Arts Tasmania ArtsBridge National and International Grants and a Highly Commended Soya Visual Art Award. Koroluk-Stephenson has also received numerous studio residencies including Contemporary Art Tasmania, University of Tasmania, Arts Tasmania, Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris.

OPENING NIGHT: Thursday August 3, 6PM - 8PM

Anna Pappas Gallery is thrilled to announce From Line to Form, an exhibition showcasing the fascinating sculptural work of Melbourne based artist Alex Lyne. From seductively abstract bronze to intricately carved wood alongside contemporary support structures, the very tradition of sculpture finds a new voice in the experiments of Alex Lyne.

Lyne’s practice exists comfortably in the collision between tradition and contemporaneity. His employment of timeless sculptural techniques is highly radicalised with contemporary injections of colour and remarkably detailed surface patterns. Lyne creates abstract and unknown forms out of bronze, wood, plaster and steel that are then treated with unconventional automotive paints and unusual plastic supports, reflecting the tradition of the ready-made. He engages in an extensive and highly physical process of casting, moulding and carving to transform his simple line drawings into exquisitely crafted three-dimensional forms. From Line to Form will exhibit his latest sculpture undertakings which have been manipulated to scale with the human form in mind.

Lyne returns his experiments to the body, describing his process as one that begins “internally and travels outward.” He finds inspiration for his work in the act of meditative line drawing, beginning by sketching out multiple forms on to the paper surface. After intuitively deciding upon which forms to realise sculpturally, he works via a process of addition, transforming his materials to varied scales and with unique hand marked detailing.

By working in this way, Lyne emphasises the ability of the artist and the human to carve into the physical world we inhabit and transform it by finding form in our true internal expression.

Alex Lyne is highly dedicated to the method of lost-wax bronze casting and has received extensive training in London with the Bronze Age Fine Art Foundry and in Melbourne with the Meridian Sculpture Foundry. Lyne further consolidated his sculptural practice by completing postgraduate studies in Art in the Public at RMIT in (2006).

Lyne’s sculptures have been included in the Lorne Sculpture Biennale, the Yering Station Sculpture Exhibition and the well-known Sculpture by the Sea, Sydney.

From Line to Form will be Lyne’s debut show with Anna Pappas Gallery.

Working with an earthly palette, Tim Bučković builds textural and gestural surfaces connected to a language of memory and information.
 
For Bučković, a painting is a repository of information, a reflection of a unique and personal visual language. Speaking about his painterly gestures, the artist states: ‘sometimes they are just lines and shapes and other times, a few centimeters below, they can repeat themselves like when we mispronounce something’.
 
The paintings present in 1536 can be experienced as an archive of both the artist’s personal visual language, but also as a reflection of the murky and unpredictable nature of decision making, with layers of reworking and structural change embedded within heavy coats of paint and glaze. In this way, Bučković's  slow and measured approach to painting presents as a conversation between the artist and the canvas, a conversation that the viewer is ideally positioned to overhear.
 
Bučković’s immense sensitivity to ideas, chance and coherence is evidenced by the exhibition’s title 1536, the year of publication for a Croatian text about mountains that had found itself reverberating in the artist’s mind during the painting process. 1536 marks a moment in time for the artist, where imagery, information and praxis align in the studio.
 
Bučković's work consists of paintings and drawings. He has studied painting at the Victorian College of the Arts and in the master class of Prof. K. Grosse at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Bučkovic has held various solo and group exhibitions in galleries in Australia and Germany, recently including; Radical Immanence, 2017, Anna Pappas Gallery; Rundgang, 2016, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf; Pestilent Unground; Epidemic Openness, 2015, STATION and Grounds-, 2015, Bus Projects. 

Art Athina, Greece
25 – 28 May 2017

Announcing our participation in one of the oldest and most prestigious art fairs in Europe, Art Athina, in 2017, presenting works by Jayne Dyer, Michaela Gleave, Troy Innocent, George Raftopoulos, Karyn Taylor and Justin Williams.

Coinciding with the presence of documenta14 in Athens, Art Athina provides a unique opportunity for the exhibition of our artists on a global stage. 

http://www.art-athina.gr/

In Eden’s Hollow Dominic Kavanagh presents a site through which our contemporary relationship to urban decay can be explored. Using discarded industrial materials, alongside earth, weeds, water and light, Kavanagh constructs monuments to decay and regeneration within the gallery walls.

A focus on the architectural power of ruins informs Kavanagh’s engagement with the language of decomposition. With light mysteriously emanating from deep within Kavanagh’s installation of brick, steel, earth and rubble, and with water flowing from various crevices, Eden’s Hollow rejects passivity, and instead presents a growing, living, fluid testament to the ruins that emerge from sites of industrial abandonment.  

Solo exhibitions include The Beehive, Blindside Gallery, Melbourne, 2014; Relics of Utopia, Seventh Gallery, Fitzroy, 2013; Picnic at Phoenix Falls, Incinerator Art Gallery, Moonee Ponds, 2013, Requiem for Urban Ruin: The Lock-Up, The Lock-Up Cultural Centre, Newcastle, 2013; and Substituting Nature, C3 Contemporary Art Space, Abbotsford, 2012.

In 2016 Kavanagh was curated into the group exhibition This Place. That Place. No Place by Irina Asriian/In Exile Projects, an exhibition at Neon Parlour, as well as Under Construction, at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, curated by Claire Watson, and Closing Exhibition, curated by Marie Schoenmaker, at Conduit Arts, Fitzroy. Other group exhibitions include Seven Trumpets, Strange Neighbour, Fitzroy, 2014; The Gleaner’s Archive, D11, Docklands, 2014; and Noise Flash, curated by Todd Anderson-Kunert for the 2013 Liquid Architecture Festival, Melbourne.

Kavanagh has been shortlisted for numerous awards, and is represented in private collections.

For Justin Williams, Arcana represents an exploration of the self through painterly and sculptural engagements with mythology and folklore. Appearing in this new exhibition are recurrent figures from the artist’s oeuvre, including missing chef Willie Koeppen, and cult-leader Anne Hamilton Burns of the Family. These figures take on new meaning for the artist, as representations of an attempt to understand the self, through explorations of our folkloric pasts.
 
This exhibition sees Williams engage with large scale painting and ceramic forms, incorporating gold leaf and sand, alongside raw pigment and oil paint, to produce affect in his experimental, and textural works. Presenting like the fall of cards in a tarot deck, Arcana is an embodied attempt at understanding within the tumult of the contemporary, and allows the viewer a chance to divine possible futures for the artist, and themselves.
 
Williams has held numerous solo exhibitions, including the highly acclaimed Figures & Vessels at ART 3 in New York, in 2016. This exhibition, one of Forbes Magazine’s ‘Must-See’ exhibitions, garnered significant critical attention, with Williams described as ‘Australia’s latest Emerging Talent’. 2015 saw Williams present Stained Mountain at Anna Pappas Gallery, where the artist explored his relationship to place through the mythologies of various figures from local Victorian folklore. Other solo exhibitions include Viridian, 2014, Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne; Mountain I Miss You, 2013, Mild Manner, Brisbane; A Touch of Norway, 2012, Lapis Lazuli Pop Up Factory Gallery, Melbourne.
 
His selected group exhibitions include the  touring exhibition Got It For Cheap, which travelled across Europe from David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen to Steinsland Berliner Gallery, Stockholm and Agnes B’d Gallerie du Jour, Paris, in 2016. Williams was curated into the Anna Pappas Gallery Booth at the Melbourne Art Fair in 2014; Project 14: Free Range, 2014, Anna Pappas Gallery; Trouble in Paradise, 2012, Paradise Hills Gallery, Melbourne; and Group Show, 2012, Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne. He has been featured in Artist Profile, ARTSY, Australian Creative and New York Arts Magazine, and was featured as an artist garnering significant global attention in Australian Art Collector’s first issue of 2017.
 
2017 will also see Anna Pappas Gallery present works by Williams on the global stage at Art Athina Art Fair, Athens, taking place alongside documenta14, which will see a concentrated international art world focus on Athens.

Exhibition Opening: Friday 24 March 6pm-8pm

Exhibition to be introduced by Aaron Martin (Five Walls Projects)

Digital Abstract catalogue essay by Giles Fielke

In Pattern Recognition, Troy Innocent interrogates the hidden potential of geometric abstraction, through the visual language of code. For this exhibition, Innocent places agency in the hands of the viewer, challenging the static nature of sculptural forms. Through the use of an augmented reality application, the viewer reveals layers of animation, information and music, coded within the geometric language of Innocent’s works.   

From digital maps for wayfinding, to visualisations of climate change, or the predication of election results, pattern recognition is central to this worldview, as it is coded into the abstractions through which we understand the contemporary world. In this exhibition, Innocent applies strategies of pattern recognition to psychogeographic abstractions – spatial maps of cities he has walked, folded in time and space.

As Innocent states: ‘code mediates and creates the world simultaneously, giving rise to a rich multiplicity of meaning as it traverses the virtual and the actual.’

In the 1990s, Innocent represented the vanguard of Australian new media arts as the co-founder of the digital arts collective Cyber Dada. With Cyber Dada, Innocent heralded the cyber world as an ‘enveloping phenomenon, a techno-determinist vision of change’ and presented pioneering collaborative and collective digital works, including the language-oriented, interactive CD-ROM artwork Idea-ON! (1992).

Recent solo exhibitions see Innocent combine digital innovation, specifically coding, with sculptural forms and geometric abstraction. These exhibitions include Double Abstraction (2016), Five Walls Projects, Melbourne and New Abstraction (2015), Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne.

For Asemic Writing 1 (2013), Hugo Michell Gallery, Innocent mediated the visual language of graffiti through screen-based digital works. Nine Signs for Ogaki (2012) Hugo Michell Gallery, stemmed from Innocent’s 2010 residency at IAMAS – an Art & Science research institute in Ogaki, Japan – where the artist surveyed the landscape around him, creating visual codes and dispersing them throughout the town. Innocent’s work in Japan informed the exhibition Tokyo Pop // Ludean Play, at Trocadero Art Space, Melbourne (2011), which documented the artist’s engagements with play and mapping across Tokyo. Other solo exhibitions exploring language, cityscapes and digital media include Scenes from Ludea, Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney (2006) and Ludea, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne (2005).
 
Digital engagements with urban cityscapes inform Innocent’s strong public art presence, and includes works such as Zydnei (2013), an interactive street game exploring the lasting effects of colonisation, a work coinciding with the 2013 International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Sydney. Innocent presented an interactive sculpture garden entitled Colony (2008) in the Melbourne Docklands, and an alternate reality game reinventing the history of Melbourne, Urban Codemakers (2010), Docklands, as well as x-milieu, Federation Square Melbourne (2008) and Field of Play, Melbourne Docklands (2007).
  
Group exhibitions have taken place at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; Tate Gallery, Liverpool, UK; Performance Space, Sydney and the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. Innocent is represented in numerous collections, including the V&A Museum, London, ACMI, Artbank, the Lyon Collection, and other private collections.
 
Innocent holds a PhD in Animation and Interactive Media from RMIT University, Melbourne.

Exhibition Opening: Friday 24 March 6pm-8pm

Exhibition to be introduced by Dr Terri Bird (Monash University)

Andrea Eckersley in Conversation with Meredith Turnbull

Andrea Eckersley works with an expanded understanding of painting, where the surface of the artwork becomes more than the application of pigment to canvas and instead manifests itself as a site of material investigation. Through recasting relationships with painting practice, Partial coherence presents a space within which the canvas, the wall, lighting and the body are implicated in the realisation and experience of an artwork. Alongside painterly works, Eckersley utilises light installations, bronze sculptures, constructed shelving and garment making, in order to position surfaces, affect and material as uniquely interrelated concepts.
 
Eckersley is a lecturer in Fashion Design, at RMIT University and received a PhD in Fine Arts (Painting) from Monash University in 2016. Primarily interested in the way the body interacts with abstract shapes, Andrea’s work investigates the material aspects of painting with a particular focus on surfaces. She has recently contributed a chapter for the upcoming book Practising with Deleuze: design, dance, art, writing, philosophy (forthcoming Edinburgh University Press). Eckersley is the art editor at the Deleuze Studies Journal and contributes to national and international conferences.
 
Previous solo exhibitions include Shed by the sun in eclipse in 2016 at Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, in which the artist explored painterly surfaces as events, felt as differences in intensity. Eckersley’s exhibition Surface Activations, 2015, Monash University School of Art, Design and Architecture Graduate Gallery, Melbourne, considered relationships between painting and the surface, through materials including light and sculpture, as well as painting. The exhibition was the culmination of the artist’s PhD research project. In 2014, Eckersley was curated into Depthless Flatness by artists Bryan Spier and Steven Rendall, as part of ‘Incidents Above a Bar’, a series of exhibitions interrogating contemporary painting theory and practice.

Eckersley has exhibited at Platform Public Contemporary Art Spaces, Nellie Castan Gallery, Craft Victoria, c3 and West Space in Melbourne. In 2016 she was the inaugural winner of the Royal Como Art Prize in 2016. Eckersley is represented in various Australian private collections, as well as the Justin Art Foundation.

Antonia Sellbach | Ben Jones | Franky Howell | Isabelle de Kleine | Max Lawrence White | Melanie Irwin | Nanou Dupuis | Paul Williams | Renee Cosgrave | Tai Snaith | Teelah George | Tim Bučković

Curated by Chantelle Mitchell

Exhibition Opening: Friday 10 February 6-8pm

Guest Speaker: Helen Hughes (Research Curator, Monash University Museum of Art)

What could it mean to engage with material in sincere terms? 
To what extent is this a radical, contemporary act?

The annual APG Project Series, a keystone within the Melbourne arts program, provides a significant platform through which contemporary currents and key concerns can be interrogated and explored. 

A curated group exhibition, Radical Immanence brings together the work of twelve Australian contemporary artists to explore concepts of sincerity and materiality as located within an expanded field of painterly practice. 

Within the whorling maelstrom of contemporary culture, the exhibition invites sincere contemplation and engagement with materiality and form, an acute sensitivity to the vibrations which ‘underlie the solidity of things’. Within this context, the exhibition asks: what could it mean to engage with material in sincere terms? To what extent is this a radical, contemporary act?

Oscillating between highly gestural mark making, embodied practice, geometric investigations and colour theory, each artist is united by unique reverence and conviction in their explorations of material potentials, and individual concerns. Eschewing self-consciousness in favour of a sensitivity to material and form, this exhibition encourages a return to looking inward, to sensitivity, in order to better orient ourselves within uncertain and tumultuous times. 

Although the exhibition looks toward the experimental potential of both representational and non-representational painterly practices, it also seeks to break down traditional material boundaries, emphasising possibilities as occurring within and outside the formal limitations of medium and concept.

Review by David Wlazlo for Memo Review

Selected Works