SPACER

Inner Landscape

 

6 May – 12 June 2023

 

This exhibition presents selected works by artists from, or inspired by, Australia and New Zealand, in celebration of our season focused on Antipodean culture and heritage. The collection of work is diverse while the artists are connected by their emotional and psychological engagement with the Australasian landscape and outback topography. It is this deeply-rooted commitment to a sense of place that enlivens their imagination and fuels their practice – the landscape consciously or unconsciously entering their work and, ultimately, their values.

Euan Macleod has explored the Alpine area of New Zealand as a climber encountering the elemental and magnitude of forces in the environment.  His inhabited ‘landscapes’ offer representation of his internal world, rather than referencing a specific place.

Other Artists included in the exhibition are: Ros Auld, Dianne Fogwell and members of the Papunya Tula Artist group Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, Ray James Tjangala, Florrie Watson Napangati and Leonie Napaltjarri. 

Euan Macleod was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1956. He was awarded a Diploma of Fine Arts (Painting) by the Ilam School of Fine Arts, Canterbury University, in 1979, before moving to Sydney in 1981. He has held more than fifty solo shows in New Zealand and Australia and has taken part in numerous group exhibitions in Australasia and internationally.

Macleod’s work is represented in many private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, and the Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Macleod has won art prizes in Australia, including the Archibald in 1999, the Sulman Prize in 2001, the Blake Prize in 2006, the New South Wales Parliament’s inaugural Plein Air painting prize in 2008, the Tattersall’s Landscape Prize in 2000 and 2009, the Gallipoli Art Prize, 2009, and the King’s School Art Prize in 2011.


In 2010 Piper Press, Sydney, published a monograph, Euan Macleod: the Painter in the Painting, written by Gregory O’Brien.

Surface Tension: the art of Euan Macleod 1991-2009, a Tweed River Art Gallery touring exhibition, curated by Gavin Wilson, toured six regional Australian galleries, beginning at the S H Irvin Gallery, Sydney, in November 2010.

The touring exhibition, Euan Macleod – Painter, curated by Gregory O’Brien, travelled to several New Zealand regional galleries between 2014 and 2017.

In 2019 Macleod collaborated on High Wire, a book of drawings and words, with Lloyd Jones. It was published in 2020.

‘Euan Macleod paints from the core of his being, taking us into innermost regions of the human condition. His works explore states of youth and ageing, the relationship between humanity and the environment, and the processes of memory and forgetting which shape both people and places.’
Gregory O’Brien.

 

 

Internal Landscape 

An essay by Bradley Hammond

Euan Macleod spent his early years walking and climbing the alpine and coastal areas of New Zealand’s South Island. Drawn to mountaineering from a young age, he developed an affinity with remote wilderness areas which are now integral to his painting.

Read more

Prints
A selection of 9 unique etchings

Ros Auld & Tim Winters

 

Channel Country, Gum Flat, Iron Bark, Chain of Ponds, Desert Tracks, Desert Memories

These works are a collaboration: Ros Auld, Ceramic Artist and Tim Winters, Painter.

They are paper clay slabs, glazed with low temperature, coloured glazes, (Ros Auld); and black underglaze brushstrokes by Tim Winters.

The works speak of the fragility of the inland Australian landscape and are displayed in box frames to emphasise this.

 

Papunya Tula Artists Group

Ray James Tjangala, Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, Florrie Watson Napangati and Leonie Napaltjarri.

In the remote desert community of Papunya artists have transformed what had once been temporal body decoration and ground paintings into paintings on board and canvas using iconography and design drawn from their own culture.

Indigenous Australian people have lived in the remote deserts of Australia for tens of thousands of years. In the late 1960s, the Australian government moved several communities from the Western Desert region – primarily Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri and Arrernte peoples – to the Papunya settlement, which is located about 150 miles south of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. Whilst a tradition of body and sand painting was prevalent – historically passing from generation to generation, down each distinct family line and depicted old stories, sacred imagery and transcendental visual codes – it was not until the first years of the 1970s that members of the community began to paint on to canvas in acrylic. In 1972 the Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd was officially founded as an artist cooperative, owned and operated by members of the community. The group’s work, often referred to simplistically as ‘dot painting’, has since been shown on almost every continent in the world with Papunya Tula Artists’ works in the collections of major public institutions globally. This exhibition at Messums Wiltshire represents a rare opportunity to see works from the PTA group outside Australia – pieces that speak to ancient traditions carried through time, representing both temporality and permanence, representation and experience.

Dianne Fogwell

Dianne Fogwell is a national award-winning artist and one of the most respected printmakers and artists book practitioners in Australia.

In the distance and The discovery are taken from Dianne’s recent exhibition in Melbourne, Something this way comes.  From desolation a new beauty can arise. This was the sentiment behind the show. Implicit in the title is the belief that, despite the twin catastrophes of major bushfires and COVID that have upended lives and imposed a new way of living on us all, something worthwhile has to come out of it.