“Alison Binks came seriously to painting after establishing a career in architecture and interior design. Her sparse compositions, with their delicately worked surfaces, have the designer’s touch in the surety of their composition and intuitive sense of proportion. They combine an abstract simplicity with an understanding and feeling for the landscape, which comes from close direct observation. Seeing her beautiful interpretations of the outback makes it hard to believe that she came to oil painting while living and working in New York City. The works of Horizon are as far from the hustle of New York as one might imagine, but even yet they are imbued with a sophistication and coolness so different from most artistic interpretations of the outback. She has no need for rustic characters, tough shearers and picnic races, just the clear divisions of land and sky that dominate our view for thousands of kilometres around. The intricacy of her painted surfaces, the mix of wax and oil, provides the complexity of the close view, the micro contrast to the vast expanse of nothingness, familiar yet alien at the same time. She suggests the inherent mystery of the works is an opening for the viewer to enter a meditative place from which one can gradually expand our understanding and sense of place. It is work that will grow and develop in the mind, just as her subjects plot the subtle changes of the world flashing past our speeding car windows.”
– Gavin Fry, March 2015
Absorbed in the creative process at his studio and residence in Eppalock, Bendigo, painter and sculpture Rius Carson creates works that reflect on his experience of life and at the same time give voice to his concerns about contemporary issues. Deftly working across two mediums, the prevailing themes contained in Carson’s two and three-dimensional works refer to issues relating to environmental degradation, the implications of our current modes of behaviour on our collective future as well as a broader overarching themes relating to Buddhism, Hindu philosophies, spirituality and the omnipresence of nature.
hannah goldstein has been working as an artist for the past 15 years with her main medium being photography. She is drawn to work with archives and concepts of memory, and thus the questioning of authorship. She moves freely in the realms of self-documentary, narrative portraits and staged photography with political headings. She also works with collage, installation and video.
goldstein has a B.A in photography and human rights from Bard College, New York. She spent one year in residency at the Royal Collage of Art in Stockholm, as well as doing a one-year Master class with Arno Fischer at the Ostkreuz Schule für Fotografie, Berlin. Her work has been exhibited in various countries, most recently in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany. In 2013 goldstein self published her book family business. She is part of the feminist art collective Die bösen Mösen with Thérèse Kristiansson. goldstein is also the co-founder of Kaetha, a curatorial collaboration with Katja Haustein.
John Lennox was an enigmatic, alluring and charismatic painter that sought to show beauty as well as delve deep into the psyche of a world more akin to a surreal dream. While Lennox was formally trained when one focusses attention away from the meticulously and exceptionally well painted idyllic sections of his works a more complex existential side reflecting his in-depth understanding of the human condition comes to the fore. Renewed interest in Lennox’ career comes at a time when many academics and critics across the world have once again focused their attention on the place of outsiders in art history – those that are under-discovered or part of alternate histories – those artists that on occasion are some of the best contributers to grand narratives in art.
Lennox is represented in the Queensland Art Gallery, Benalla Art Gallery, St Vincent’s Hospital and in numerous private and corporate collections in Australia, UK and Europe. Since 2014 Lennox has had three significant solo exhibitions – Manifold (2018), Key works (2016) and Enigma (2014) – participated in numerous group exhibitions, as well as having been shown at Spring 1883 (2018) and shown in the viewing room of Fort Delta, Melbourne. During his lifetime Lennox exhibited consistently from 1972 for 24 years until his premature death in 1996. Lennox studied under George Bell, was a finalist in the Wynne Prize (1974) and won the Camberwell Rotary Prize (1974) in that same year. In 2008 Lennox had a touring retrospective at Benalla Art Gallery (2008) and Castlemaine Art Museum (2008).
In essence, the meticulous and precise hard edge abstract work of David Milne looks at sacred mysteries of Divine Geometry – ‘The Nucleus’. Referencing the alchemical engravings of the Seventeenth Century, Milne’s paintings are part riddle and part ‘the spiritualisation of matter’. In his complex yet clear compositions, designed around meditative inflection, Milne infuses intersecting historical iconography with elementary symbols without elaboration.
Since moving to Australia in 1966 Milne has participated in over 30 exhibitions here, several important shows abroad and consistently produced work by commission. Milne studied at the National Art School at the Sydney Technical College in the mid-1960s and is represented in the Newcastle Art Gallery, Benalla Art Gallery and numerous private and corporate collections in Australia, Asia, Europe and the United Kingdom.
Monique Morter is a Melbourne based artist that has developed her practice and consistently exhibited in Australia and Internationally – most notably Yogyakarta, Indonesia – in recent years. Since completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts at RMIT in 2010 Morter has developed a style that immediately engages and captivates her audience, her work has an elegance and sophistication that is created through her application and appreciation of the materials she experiments with.
New works is Morter’s first exhibition with Jacob Hoerner Galleries.
Michael Portley moved to Melbourne from Brisbane after completing his Bachelor of Visual Arts at Queensland University of Technology in 1991. During his time as a student Portley was taught by the esteemed artist and painting lecturer William Robinson whose influence is still evident today although now, after over twenty years of exhibiting and refining his style, Portley has now fully developed an iconic visual language of his own.
Predominantly a painter of the Australian landscape, the scope of Portley’s ideas and practice when interpreting the environment is not limited to formal notions of site-specific representation. The landscapes that Portley paints accept that virtually all of our environment has been impacted by human actions and in so many cases are not in essence natural but constructed environments. In addition symbolic dreamlike interventions have also increasingly been prevalent in his approach to depicting the world around us.
Born in 1933 in Kent, England, Andrew Sibley migrated to outback Queensland with his family in 1948. After leaving the family property he spent a short time in Papua New Guinea before returning to Brisbane in the late 1950’s. In the early 1960’s Sibley was a part of the ‘Brisbane School’ with Jon Molvig, Roy Churcher and, further away on Bribie Island, Ian Fairweather. Sibley found early success winning prestigious prizes and was invited to exhibit at the Whitechapel Galley in London in 1962 and the Paris Biennale in 1963. In the mid-late 1960’s Sibley was a part of the Rudy Komon gallery stable in Sydney that included many of the most important Australian artists of the time and where he established life long connections with these fellow artists.
After moving to Melbourne in the late 1960’s Sibley was appointed a lecturer at RMIT – a position he held from 1967 – 1987 – the impact of his teaching and disciplined methods imparted on generations of Melbourne based artists. Later Sibley went on to be a senior painting lecturer at Monash University from 1990-1999.
In his own career, the 1970’s was a decade of inspiration and experimentation spending time in Europe firstly at a residency in West Berlin in 1972 where he drew influence from artists such as Max Beckman, Jean Dubuffet, Gustav Klimt, Paul Klee and the like, as well as travelling back and forth to London for new exhibitions of his contemporaries such as Francis Bacon. The influence of this early part of the 1970’s were profound on Sibley and his style developed to be more avante-garde as he explored the ‘human condition’. Sibley began to experiment with new materials and created many works in which his depictions of the human figure, or figures, were encased in perspex boxes “trapped like petals between pages, or moths between glass plates.”
In the 1980’s Sibley again evolved as an artist and in this period achieved major success with his Circus Series that continued his exploration of the vices and virtues of humankind. It was at this time that Sibley was regularly exhibited in Europe and the United States, while in Australia Sibley exhibited prolifically Nationwide. In addition to his commercial success Sibley’s work was acquired by the vast majority of museum collections throughout Australia.
In the 1990’s and 2000’s the mood of Sibley’s work shifted to less confrontational imagery as he came to grips with the angst and complication of his youth. ‘Sibley’s people’, the same cast of characters that had travelled with him in his early years appear to transition through life with him, moreover the works from this era are profoundly more joyous as he entered a more content part of his life.
In the early 2010’s to the present Sibley saw a renewed interest in his career after a number of important solo exhibitions of his early experimental work at Kick Gallery in Collingwood as well as having a solo presentation of his work at the Melbourne Art Fair in August 2014 and the Art Stage Singapore art fair in January 2015. This renewed success and recognition was important to this life-long artist in his later life. Sibley passed away at 82 in September 2015. While this exceptional artist has passed his works continue to be shown and his legacy celebrated through the representation of Jacob Hoerner Galleries.
Jewels Stevens is an artist who creates visually luxurious paintings that are a reflection of her mind’s eye. Informed by the sights and sounds of the places she travels to and explores, Stevens is a voyager, not voyeur. Delving deep in to inner realms through meditation, music, dance and ceremony Stevens also draws inspiration from the wonders of the physical world we come from. Rather than these inner and outer realms being seen as separate there is more of a melding of both that manifests in her work.
While there is most often an immediate impact in her bold and expressive paintings, as one delves further in to the layered brush work more detail and nuance unveils. Concerned with colour, composition and the atmospheric mood of the work there is a constant flux between more quiet and more chaotic forces. In essence Stevens is interested in creating a pictorial landscape where the paintings seem to possess their own logic, knitting together both strong feelings and nonsensicality, always with an endeavor to translate her reverie for music in its poetic sense to a physical form.
Emma Stuart is a visual artist who in recent years Stuart has sought to explore new ways to visually communicate through painting. This shift toward a fine art practice has allowed her to show her innate draftsman ship skills that were previously most manifest in her commercial children’s book illustration.
Stuart has been based in Berlin, Melbourne and in Central Australia near Alice Springs and while these three locations are different in so many ways travelling between these three distinct places has not effected Stuart’s ability to create new work that is cohesive and consistent in both theme and in technique.
