Feasting on Art

Currently on view at Brenda May Gallery is a curated group exhibition titled Art + Humour Me featuring the works of twenty Australian contemporary artists. In addition to a cardigan-wearing tree, the show includes artworks in a range of mediums from sculpture to video and naturally I was drawn to the three cast resin jelly mold sculptures by Janet Tavener (pictured below). For a serious laugh or at the very least a bit of a giggle visit Art + Humour Me on view at Brenda May Gallery (2 Danks St., Waterloo), on view until 7 May 2011.

I am very excited to announce that I will be curating an art + food exhibition next year at Brenda May Gallery. We are now accepting proposals from artists so please read the exhibition outline below and contact the Gallery with any questions or visit the submissions page for further details.

‘Art + Food – Beyond the Still Life’ – October 2012

This exhibition will consider the representation of food within the visual arts and beyond the standard still life tableaux. The consumption of food is a universally shared experience, enabling viewers to connect with the issues surrounding consumerism, food production and cultural identity, explored by the artists. ‘Art + Food – Beyond the Still Life’ will be on exhibition during the Sydney International Food Festival.
Proposals for this show must be received by Friday 27 July, 2012.

Janet Tavener, Baby Blue No 3, 2011
coloured resin, 12 x 12 x 12 cm, Brenda May Gallery

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A fritter can be classified as an ingredient coated in batter and deep-fried. In my kitchen, it typically forms a rough patty, lightly fried in a skillet with a number of ingredients still visible through the crusted batter coating. According to the online etymology dictionary, the noun, not the verb, is derived from the 14th century Old French verb friture meaning ‘something fried’ which in turn is from the Late Latin frictura, ‘a frying’ (1). Precisely because of the double meaning of the word fritter, I am loathe to admit that when packing the little patties away for a beachside picnic, a few pathetic puns along the lines of ‘frittering the afternoon away’ made their way into my discourse.

Nora Heysen, Corn cobs, 1938
oil on canvas, 40.5 x 51.3 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales

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On August 5th, the exhibition Slow Burn – A century of Australian women artists from a private collection, will open at the S.H. Ervin Gallery. I have spent the past four months working very hard on the exhibition catalogue and am very proud to be a co-author on such an exciting and important project. Of the 102 artists from the collection, I researched and wrote 47 of the bios – the reason the Feasting on Art posts have been quite infrequent. The collection ranges “from the delicate pastels of Janet Cumbrae Stewart to the modernist prints of Margaret Preston through to the bio-techno sculptures of Patricia Piccinini. The works in the exhibition demonstrate the skill and versatility of women artists over the past hundred years” (S.H. Ervin Gallery). In honour of the exhibition I plan to do a mini-series featuring a few of the artists represented in the collection as well as one or two of the artworks that I did not write about for the book. The exhibition will be on view at the S.H. Ervin Gallery until the 19th of September.

Margaret Olley, Still life with mandarins, c.1975
oil on board, 76 x 122 cm, Private collection

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Only a couple more days left in the Recipe Contest, submit your entries now!

Last week my first curated exhibition titled Food in Art was hung at Eva Breuer Art Dealer where I work as a gallery associate. This is my first opportunity to bring my passion for food and art to a wider audience and to put together a collection of paintings and works on paper. Among the still lifes and banquet scenes a little oil on board by Weaver Hawkins of a pile of grapefruit can be found that I wrote about on this blog back in June 2009. If you are in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney please stop by to view Food in Art and to say hello!

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Culinaria – The Cuisine of the Sun is an exhibition of paintings by the artist John Olsen that recently opened here in Sydney at the Tim Olsen Gallery. The show is a foodie/art lover’s dream come true – a collection of paintings in Olsen’s signature squiggly style of all of his favourite recipes. In conjunction with the exhibition, Olsen penned a cookbook with Andy Harris. In this instance the art was directly inspired by a recipe – food to art and now back to food again. With my recipe I wanted to capture the colour of the sun, in reference to the exhibition title, as well as the colours and compositional shapes found in the painting.
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