Past Exhibitions
Seriously, Relax
Banana Republic
opening celebration Thursday 16 February, 5.30 – 8.30 pm
Jebila Wolfe-Okongwu’s work questions issues of identity, appropriation, iconography and cultural stereotypes.
His graphic sensibility combines 1960s Op Art with Nigerian Igbo
traditions. Also inspired by music, including the songs of Stevie Wonder
and Nina Simone, much of Jebila’s imagery plays with the limited
Western concepts of ethnic artistic expression and what the artist
himself refers to as "the imposed exotic".
Welcome to the Banana Republic.
Kamikaze Wasabi
opening celebration, Saturday 12 November, 3 - 5 pm
Kamikaze Wasabi is an exhibition of extraordinary variety (with works across the mediums of collage, drawing, pastel and painting). Hitesh Natalwala exposes his fascination with the intricacies and iconographies of different cultures.
Born in Africa of Indian extraction, educated in Britain and now an Australian citizen, Natalwala’s work reflects his experience of cultural migration; the vast and ongoing shift in many societies from uncomfortable confusion, hostility and violence, towards acceptance and inclusion, indeed appreciation of difference.
Polychrome
Back and Forth
Templeman developed an early appreciation of the illusory quality of veneers, laminates and polishes and saw potential parallels with Minimalism, and continues to explore the possibility of an illusory quality coexisting with a literalist approach, oscillating between hard edge reality and perceptual trickery.
Deborah Kelly Awfully Beastly
In my dreams I remember space, stars, unknowable entities echoed in the unfathomed realms, and fear of monstrous fecundity projected across human millennia from treacherous man-eating seawitch siren lairs through fearsome folktales and onto the impossible physiques of fertile future babes.
I wake trailing this thread, the sense the archetypes connect in ways we know, in old awe from before we were smooth, before we were upright. Pre-mammalian? And possibly post.”
BBQ this Sunday, BYO
gbk awardees: where are they now?
- Tara Cook
- Nathan Babet
- Marilyn Schneider
- Lachlan Anthony
- Ben Norris
- Dan Simon
- Ioulia Terizis
- Rosie Deacon
- Hugh Marchant
- Dara Gill
- Joel Beerden
- Shalini Jardin
- Melanie Boreham
Each year since 2008, gbk has been helping selected College of Fine Arts Honours students realise their end of year project with a cash injection. It’s time to see where they are now. This exhibition in the main gallery space presents recent work of the 13 awardees: Lachlan Anthony, Nathan Babet, Joel Beerden, Melanie Borham, Tara Cook, Rosie Deacon, Dara Gill, Shalini Jardin, Hugh Marchant, Ben Norris, Marilyn Schneider, Dan Simon and Ioulia Terizis.
gbk @ Hong Kong Art Fair 2011
gbk is participating in ART HK 2011 and will be exhibiting work by Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy, Debra Dawes, Deborah Kelly, Fiona Lowry, Jess MacNeil, Hitesh Natalwala, Cameron Robbins and Joan Ross.
Stand number 1G05
LSDM- Lunar/Solar Drawing Machine
Would Cameron Robbins please make up his mind? He has been described as an artist / scientist / engineer / inventor / musician / alchemist. His special interests concern natural phenomena and the way they are documented, or, perhaps more accurately, ways they can illustrate themselves.
From invisible to visible: over the next month a newly installed solar panel on the roof of the gallery will feed Robbins’ Lunar/Solar Drawing Machine, transcribing the sun’s energ.
Drunken Clarity
Project Space: Blank Surface
First. One. Thing. Then. Another.
Employing the properties of acrylic sheet to facilitate direct access to the space ‘behind’ the image, whether painting or video projection, this space has become an active component. The images’ supporting structures are made explicit, underscoring the materiality of the image and playing with slips between literal space, material presence, and conceptual or illusory space opened up by each work.
Abstraction (Citizen)
Citizenry has implications of community and belonging, but does commonplace labelling clarify or obfuscate the layerings of identity?
The exhibition continues until Saturday 18 December.
Joan Ross: Enter At Your Own Risk
Exposing a creeping colonisation of the mind and the eye, is this a history lesson or harbinger? Past, present, or future? All three.
The exhibition continues until 13 November.
Tender Cuts
Horizons
In the wilderness of our modern lives, it can sometimes be difficult to get a clear view. Using a variety of media including video, photography and sculpture, Horizons presents new works that waver between substance and gesture.
Exhibition extended until 11 September
Complete
gbk @ Art HK 10
Where We've Been, Where We're Going, Why.
I loved you yesterday
"This is part of the paradox of her work – it is as much about formal qualities and beauty as it is about the evocation of impending doom or unease. Indeed there is a seductive weightlessness to the effervescent application of paint that belies the paintings’ thornier content…..the viewer’s vision shudders across the surface: the point of focus staggered over the painting, denying a single point of perspective and a conventional reading of foreground and background. Here, the historical specificities associated with the term landscape slide into the paradigm of place, a broad concept accommodating also nuance and imperceptibility. In the place of Lowry’s pictures narrative is subverted and the optical field oscillates, infused with a melancholy air that is often erotically charged.”
Natasha Bullock, Wilderness, Balnaves contemporary: painting cataolgue, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Open Studio - untitled
revolution
Jonathan Jones’ exhibition revolution, introduces new fluoro works that pull traditional Koori line marking into three dimensions and graphite works that resonate with the crystalline structures of salt from as far afield as the Murray River and the beaches of Gandhi’s Gujarat.
This installation reflects on the idea of cultural revolution within the Australian landscape by drawing on parallels found within India’s fight for independence, led by Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi famously led the passive resistance movement and in 1930 undertook his famous Salt March from Ahmedabad to Dandi, where he protested against the British-imposed Salt Tax, “the condiment of the common man”. This foundational act of Independence was driven by salt, a base material, the same material that today is encrusting the Australian environment from years of colonial farming practices. These two moments in history are cantilevered against each other in the structure of the light sculptures to create one narrative. The dense graphite drawings are detailed surveys of salt crystals, and their structure, collected in both India, at Dandi, and in Australian, from the Murray River.
group gbk
Thukral & Tagra 315, Sector 23 (opp. Bosedk mega mall).
Thukral & Tagra blur the lines between fine art and popular culture, product placement and exhibition design, artistic inspiration and media hype.
The work focuses on the dream-come-true burgeoning of consumer culture and a newly prevalent postmodern architectural style that can be found throughout India and is commonly referred to as “Punjabi Baroque.”
Vulgar and ostentatious, confused and desperately misguided, the style has been propagated by builders without the assistance of architects, reflecting the jumble of sensibilities that come together to create the new exploding middle-class of India.
T&T pump up the volume to turn these suburban homes into surrealist castles, sugar coated and floating on clouds of flowers. In paintings and sculptures, they explore this aesthetic of the proudly bastardized, the boisterous Mamma’s boys who pretend to be gangsters, the teenage farmers who dream of making it big in Bollywood.
Paksploytation
Paksploytation explores Hitesh’s diverse histories and those of the sub-continental diaspora with abstraction and the imagery of Holly- and- Bollywood, flora and the manmade world.
Opening of the Universe (Brahmasphutasiddhanta)
Through abstraction and figuration, the work engages with the Fibonacci sequence, which appears throughout nature - in the branching of trees, the uncurling of ferns, the arrangement of a pine cone and the spiral in shells. In the relationship of mathematics to the physical world, abstraction can provide a parallel visual experience in mediating the affects of nature.
another day in paradise
“Where we once had nature and god, we now have design and conspiracy theory.” (Boris Groys, Self Design and Aesthetic Responsilbilty, e-flux)
Prospect
Gemstones and gold are materials valued highly because of their rarity and, one suspects, their sparkle! Daniel Templeman has taken basic building materials and cut, assembled, polished and coated them to create wall relief and free-standing sculptures that now capture and reflect light. This process of refinement parallels prospecting and lapidary; the viewer the new prospector.
Salon Jetpack
Fox’s flight of fancy proposes a Jetpack Salon city transport network, each neighbourhood salon providing a style of hair and a corresponding jetpack, with a hair protector helmet to maintain the ‘do (chose from Quiff, Mohawk, Bob, Ponytail or Afro) as you and your tribe traverse the cityscape conveniently powered by hydrogen peroxide.
Paint
Wobbly
In our quest for peace and quiet, things sometimes get a bit unsteady. Using a variety of media including video, photography, painting and sculpture, Wobbly presents works that teeter between domestic bliss and emotional crisis.
The Floating Edge
Situated at the point of contact between the individual and the city, this exhibition negotiates the interplay between physical and psychological space and the resonances of ephemeral experience.
Drawing on recent personal experience living in the London and travel further afield and closer to home, the work traces the movement of bodies through space, and the pliancy of space as it is traversed over time, translating these into manipulations of paint and digital video.
A cartography of disorientation emerges as the individual traverses the city; a succession of possible understandings of temporal experience, motion, place, space, the mutability of matter and the shifting perspective of the subject.
The Landing
Alwast’s practice engages the construction of ‘reality’ in both the digital and painterly worlds. His seamless stitching together of the various modes of virtual reality which won him the recent new media award is in this exhibition contrasted with his paintings, which show a fondness for what many now see as the quaint naivety of the medium, and the foibles of humanity the painted surface exudes when compared to the clinical exactitude of the virtual world.
Come a little closer
Coincidental or controlling? Joan Ross’ peculiarly seductive new work co-mingles raw and refined human emotions with wild and manufactured materials.
Fur and acrylic, water and plastic, freedom and claustrophobia, attraction and repulsion in video and sculpture.
Aquasaurus
Jitish Kallat’s installation ‘Aquasaurus’, at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, is a monumental seven-metre long skeletal sculpture of a water-tanker morphing to become prehistoric creature that personifies the radical transformation of Indian city life. Resembling a prized natural-history museum piece, Aquasaurus – with its grinning mouth, menacing teeth and interior void – is both inviting and repulsive.
Blind faith
Blind faith releases a selection of paintings of wildly varying scale that began as studio experiments; paintings that bridge the ideas between discrete bodies of work, that pull threads from a previous painting to a future work. The exhibition reveals the various beginnings and afterthoughts of systems explored in Dawes’ practice since 1988.
untitled (the tyranny of distance)
In Jonathan Jones’ immersive installation ‘untitled (the tyranny of distance)’ at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, six free standing walls have been covered in blue tarpaulin and glow with filtered light from fluorescent tubes articulated in a continuous chevron design. The chevrons are derived from elements of traditional Koori (South Eastern Aboriginal) line work and resonate with Western minimalism.
2008 Melbourne Art Fair
I ACT AS THE TONGUE OF YOU
solo exhibition
Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney
July 2008
2008 Hong Kong Art Fair
Exhibited artists:
Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy
Debra Dawes
Hayden Fowler
Jitish Kallat
Hitesh Natalwala
Jess MacNeil
NY / LA
new works by artists resident in New York and Los Angeles:
Mark Bennett (LA)
Ivan Navarro (NY)
Vincent Ramos (LA)
Guy Richards Smit (NY)
Seher Shah (NY)
Grant Stevens (LA)
Rosha Yaghmai (LA)
Disruptive Colouration
Gallery Barry Keldoulis
inaugural exhibition at 285 Young Street, Waterloo
Education, Education
solo exhibition
Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney
November 2007
you and me we're on the same team
gbk @ silvershot
Exhibited Artists:
Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy
Richard Dunn
Fiona Lowry
Joan Ross
Daniel Templeman
Cross Currents: Focus on contemporary Australian art
South Africa on Paper
Exhibited Artists:
Conrad Botes
Liza Grobler
Norman O’Flynn
Johannes Phokela
Lyndi Sales
Johan Thom
Guy Tilim
Andrew Tshabangu
I'm having dreams about you
solo exhibition
Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney
May 2007
gbk @ silvershot
Exhibited Artists:
Debra Dawes
Sarah Smuts-Kennedy
Grant Stevens
Paul Wrigley
Now That The Neighbours Can Dance
solo show, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, February 2007
The Devotee Exhausts the Forces of Activity
Exhibited Artists:
Mala Iqbal
Yamini Nayar
Prajakta Pallav
Seher Shah
Aditi Singh
The Path of the Accident
2006 Melbourne Art Fair
Exhibited Artists:
Debra Dawes
Richard Dunn
Hayden Fowler
Chris Fox
Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy
Bronia Iwanczak
Jonathan Jones
Deborah Kelly
Fiona Lowry
Jess MacNeil
Hitesh Natalwala
Joan Ross
Sarah Smuts-Kennedy
Grant Stevens
Daniel Templeman
Paul Wrigley
light maps
Mani-Fold Paintings+Photography
Boarded
EMPTY
Handle on nowhere
gbk @ Elastic residence, London
Hayden Fowler
Grant Stevens
Many Fish Sacrifices
gbk @ Span, Melbourne
Simon Cavanough
Debra Dawes
Richard Dunn
Hayden Fowler
Chris Fox
Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy
Bronia Iwanczak
Jonathan Jones
Fiona Lowry
Jess MacNeil
Hitesh Natalwala
Joan Ross
Sarah Smuts-Kennedy
Grant Stevens
Daniel Templeman
Paul Wrigley
Jeez
International Painting on Paper
Exhibited Artists:
Ross Chisholm
Debra Dawes
Dan Ford
Jitish Kallat
Jess MacNeil
Andrew McLeod
Hitesh Natalwala
Seung Yul Oh
Nusra Qureshi
Guy Richards Smit
Arjan van Helmond
34R+H 15 371L
Like pulling hair from butter
Fixed
Clouded Signals
2004 Melbourne Art Fair
Debra Dawes
Bronia Iwanczak
Jonathan Jones
Fiona Lowry
Jess MacNeil
Sarah Smuts-Kennedy
Grant Stevens
Paul Wrigley
David Sequeira
David Watson
Seeing Things
Tarmac
Role Models
A Love Story....Unfortunately
Biennale Group
Jonathan Jones
Jess MacNeil
Sarah Smuts-Kennedy
Paul Wrigley
Executioner's Drop
solo exhibition
Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney
April 2004
it's either you or them
Terror Australis
Sir of One, Half a Dozen of the Other
The Practical Guide to Mental Hygiene
now or never
The Beetles
David Griggs
Matthew Griffin
Sharon Goodwin
Blair Trethowan
Painting Ecstasy
The Farm Comes to Town
Peter Alwast
Shaun Weston
Martin Smith