After months of dedicated time in his atelier in Melbourne, Australia, Gristcher has created an exceptional body of new work for exhibition at Tête in Berlin. For this ‘The Way Out of The Way Out’ series the artist’s main medium is fabric – fabric that is stitched, unstitched, cut, patched, rearranged, added to, subtracted from – completely transformed into essentially three dimensional works that drape from the wall like a ‘Contemporary Tapestry’ or ‘Soft Graffiti’. At times works in this series are literally buttoned together to make a larger whole work comprised of parts. While his selection of materials appears limitless his work is cohesive and every visual clue intentional even if at times the edges are frayed, the materials look indiscriminately marked, placed or are hanging by a thread.
Hidden in the stitches of his sets of soft panels the content of what Gritscher aims to express is equally impressive, avoiding prescriptive, didactic, language to posit ideas and more benignly provoke or initiate responses.
Andrew Gritscher’s ‘The Way Out of the Way Out’ is his third solo exhibition with Jacob Hoerner Galleries and first exhibition in Berlin. Gritscher is in the Australian Government’s Artbank Collection and in numerous private collections in Australia and Europe.
“The Ancients have been around for millennia. They watched we humans come, and they may well watch us go.
Sometimes they shift – ancient rock adjusts his shoulders, weary from being in the same position for so long. A creak, followed by a small rockslide. Rarely are we there to see it. The sea moves as one, and along this southern coast the fiercest winds are always from the ocean, nothing between some of these cliff faces and Antarctica except that immense sea and sky.
This collection of paintings is my tribute to The Ancients. Tinker as we do, with our digging and planting and pumping of gasses into the air, ultimately the rock and the sea are greater than us. They have the time to wait that we don’t. The great face of rock jutting out to the ocean must look upon us as foolish things, with our busyness and motion.
As with all my work, my hope is to give the viewer pause. That the painting will draw the viewer in, and over time perceptions will shift, as different aspects of the painting emerge, together with the wandering of the mind.”
Alison Binks | 2017
Emma Stuart’s most recent work is based on the landscape of Arrernte country that she has been immersed in for several years in Central Australia. Arrernte in Renaissance is a series intimate desert paintings that explore the notion of Arrernte country in rebirth. Focusing on the burning landscape, Stuart explores the use of burning to conserve and regenerate the land and how this allows the rebirth of the land and all that lives there.
Gallery Open Saturday November 26 from 6-8pm
Day/Night – Tue Nov 15 – Sat Nov 26 – Window Viewing *
* Window Viewing – All works can be seen from the shop frontage (& by appointment)
‘Two themes that I keep coming back to whilst making these works are – Thinking which sits outside of logic, a different way to thinking, an intuition, simply an understanding of things and secondly our true nature. Throughout making some of these pictures I have been thinking about Zen Koans. One of the pictures directly references a Koan, another (the largest work) is my own Koan. So below, for an artist’s statement, is an old Koan – it relates for me very well to a number of the pictures and how I think as well as the title of the show.
“The Ch’uan Teng Lu records an encounter between Tao-hsin and the sage Fa-yung, who lived in a lonely temple on Mount Niu-t’ou, and was so holy that birds used to bring him offerings as flowers. As the two men were talking, a wild animal roared close by, and Tao-hsin jumped. Fa-yung commented, “I see it is still with you!” -referring, of course, to the instinctive “passion” of fright. Shortly afterwards, while he was for a moment unobserved, Tao-hsin wrote the Chinese character for “Buddha” on the rock where Fa-yung was accustomed to sit. When Fa-yung returned to sit down again, he saw the sacred Name and hesitated to sit. “I see,” said Tao-hsin, “it is still with you!” At this remark Fa-yung was fully awakened… and the birds never brought any more flowers.”‘ – Andrew Gritscher | October 2016
In Fiat, Mike Portley explores themes relating to the control of currency and the impact of economies on the natural world. The ubiquitous concept of fiat currency or legal tender is in itself a a token symbol for a stored unit of value; and historically relates to items or resources of value taken from the natural world. The extrapolation of the financial system, through time, has distorted the intrinsic symbolism or currency so that the unit itself has more value than the real wealth around us. Portley asks questions about the flawed logic of the monetary system and its disconnection from natural systems.
Portley infuses Egyptian symbols and Judeo-Christian mysticism to highlight the evolution and manipulation of economies via the ruling elites to the common citizen. The use of specific symbology and financial jargon are used to juxtapose their financial context with the natural world. Surviving ancient currencies such as gold and silver are used to allude to the past and to times where currency was finite and relative in value to items of trade. The analogy of flight is used consistently in the works to communicate ideals of freedom and a flight from the counter-intuitive systems that underpin many of our current problems.
