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10/12/2007

Tim Hawkinson / Callum Innes

Museum of Contemporary Art - MCA, Sydney

Tim Hawkinson: Mapping the Marvellous

For his Australian premiere, the MCA Sydney presents Los Angeles-based Tim Hawkinson, whose ingenious constructions have brought him widespread recognition as one of the most original artists working today.

Known primarily for his large-scale kinetic and sound-producing works, Hawkinson works across a range of media to create highly imaginative two and three-dimensional assemblages. His intricate and playful works engage with the human body and portraiture, using materials such as latex, plastic, cardboard, string and mechanical components.

For his MCA solo exhibition Tim Hawkinson: Mapping the Marvellous, the artist presents sculptures, photo-collages, and drawings from the mid 1990s to the present. It introduces his extraordinary new creations – among them a bat created from shredded black plastic bags and twist ties – as well as inflatable and collaged self-portraits, monstrous beings and fantastical structures that chatter, whistle, rotate and spin.

A ‘balloon self portrait’ of the artist takes centre-stage in the MCA’s double height gallery, comprising a suspended latex cast of the artist’s body that is inflated via a wall-mounted reservoir of air, like a gigantic bladder or lung.

Another work, entitled ‘Drip’, comprises a monstrous form with white coiled plastic tentacles, like unruly tree branches, that release droplets of water into steel buckets ringed about its base. Other works refer to our obsessive human need for order and containment, using maps and charts, volumes and measurements to document the world in all its excess.

The vast wall drawing ‘Petrie’ takes the form of spiralling knots and convolutions, created by attaching green pens and pencils to a modified drill head. Working from the centre of the paper outwards, the drawing grew, as the artist observes, ‘through accretion, or as in the growth of a crystal’. Hawkinson retained the many pens and pencils used in this work and re-grouped them to form the collective green iris of an oversized eyeball that sits nearby (pictured above) – a mute witness to its own creation.

Curated by MCA Senior Curator Rachel Kent, and presented in association with the Sydney Festival, Hawkinson’s MCA Sydney exhibition represents the first time that this significant artist has been seen in Australia. It is accompanied by a major 170pp publication in full colour with critical essays by Rachel Kent and John C Welchman, available through the MCA Store.

His work has previously featured in the Whitney and Corcoran Biennales of 2002 and in a major solo exhibition at The Power Plant, Toronto in 2000.

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Callum Innes: From Memory

This summer the MCA presents the first solo show in Australia by Scottish painter Callum Innes, with a major exhibition from Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery.

Curated by Fruitmarket Gallery Director, Fiona Bradley, Callum Innes: From Memory brings together a diverse selection of paintings which trace the development of this acclaimed British artist.

Since the 1990s, Innes has emerged as one of the most single-minded and successful painters of his generation. His work has a visible presence at the forefront of the international art world, hanging in many prestigious public and private collections including the San Francisco MOMA and TATE Britain
in London.

Innes explores the possibilities of paint on canvas. Seemingly simple to the eye, his works are a complex process of addition and subtraction. His paintings are created through the application and removal of paint – a systematic layering and dissolving that has come to typify his practice. He often paints a canvas in one colour before using turpentine to wipe away sections of paint from the surface. In short, he paints and ‘unpaints’ several times. The end result encapsulates this action: the paintings always bear traces of their chaotic production. Simultaneously, they are absorbingly calm
and authoritative.

Innes believes it is his manipulation of this painting process that gives his work its complex beauty. He says: ‘I know now how I want a painting to look, and how to achieve it: it has to have a rhythm, a natural rightness when things start to flow together. You have to edit – it’s not enough to rely on the process, though I always know what the process is doing.’

In 2002 Innes was awarded the Jerwood Painting Prize and in 1995 he was short-listed for the Turner Prize. He lives and works in Edinburgh, and it could be suggested that his paintings draw on the clarity of the light associated with his homeland.

The exhibition incorporates the ‘Exposed Paintings’ series, as well as the seminal ‘Monologues’ and ‘Identified Form’ paintings. Working in series, Innes has developed a unique painterly language. The exhibition can also be considered an installation - each work has been carefully placed in relation to the architecture of the space. The earliest work ‘From Memory’ 1989 lends its name to the show’s title.


Image: Blastula 1999 green pens, resin Private Collection, New York Photograph by Ellen Labenski, courtesy Pace Wildenstein, New York © Tim Hawkinson, courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

Exhibition related events:

Free Curator Talks with Exhibition Ticket
Sunday 16 December at 2.30pm

Sun 3 Feb at 2.30pm
MCA Senior Curator, Rachel Kent leads a special exploration of the exhibition providing fascinating insights into the artist and his practice.

Media Enquiries:
Kym Elphinstone | 02 9245 2434 | kym.elphinstone@mca.com.au

MCA | Museum of
Contemporary Art
140 George Street The Rocks Sydney, Australia
The MCA is open 7 days, 10am - 5pm. Admission is free.

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