BOOTH F04 – featuring works by Jane Guthleben, Grant Maxwell, Kerry Armstrong, Michael Taylor, Mehwish Iqbal, Agneta Ekholm, Sally McKay, Lionel Smit, Jarek Wojcik, Jason Moad, Lyndi Sales and Roger Ballen.
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Through still life paintings of Indigenous flowers, birds, and insects, Guthleben uses the traditions of vanitas and its messages of the transience of life to present a painted vernacular that spans humour, kitsch, historical and environmental themes.
Michael Taylor mimics the immediate and expansive nature of the drawing process in order to develop scenes and characters in his painted work. Removed from its purely observational qualities, drawing becomes a projection of the artist’s intuition, imagination and memory. Representational and figurative elements in Taylor’s paintings create narrative frameworks that are unravelled to varying degrees through abstract marking.
Finnish born, Australian based artist Agneta Ekholm’s work is by definition abstract and built entirely from imagination and engagement with her technical process. Each painting evolves on the canvas: no working drawings exist. The paintings result from the exploration and discovery inherent in a technique honed over the last 20 years.
Sally McKay was born in Melbourne and introduced to Photography at an early age by her father who was a Lithographer and Offset-Printing entrepreneur. She worked as a Portrait Photographer in Sydney for ten years before launching her career as a Photographic Artist. Her inspiration comes from her fascination with individual colour preferences, her introverted inclination towards creativity and mindfulness, and her love of learning. She largely creates works from artifacts found in her immediate environment.
Creating unordinary portraits of women, both representational and abstract, Lionel Smit sources his inspiration from the Cape Malay Community. Guided by influences of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Andy Warhol, he combines gestural brushstrokes, splattered and dripping paint, with patches of colour applied across the heads of his subjects. Smit’s sculptures invoke similar feelings to that of their two-dimensional counterparts, yet, a further addition of depth in its actuality, he imbues his pieces with less foreboding and melancholy. The opaque softness of the paintings is replaced with highly detailed hatching, clay protrusions, and grooved surfaces. The layers of intense colouring are reproduced as physically perceivable textures in this medium.
Jarek Wojcik was born in Szczecin, Poland. He studied painting and art history at the University of Poznan, Poland, graduating with an MA in medieval mural art. He held his first solo in 2015 and has exhibited in galleries in Hong Kong, Melbourne, Paris, Perth, Szczecin and Sydney.
Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Lyndi Sales (b.1973) explores themes of perception and vision as well as connectivity. She strives to create in her audience a corporeal response – a feeling of being in one’s own body, to “bring people to their senses.”
Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950 but for over 30 years he has lived and worked in South Africa. One of the most influential and important photographic artists of the 21st century, Ballen’s photographs span over forty years. His strange and extreme works confront the viewer and challenge them to come with him on a journey into their own minds as he explores the deeper recesses of his own.
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