1/6/2007
Two solo shows
Conical, Fitzroy Victoria - Melbourne
PJ Hickman and Billy Gruner
PJ Hickman
The standard format and text ‘No image available' of each
painting mimics gallery website icons denoting there is no digital
photo of an artwork.
Fulfilling only the minimum expectations of ‘painting', each
acts as a proxy for other (unknown) artwork(s).
They allude to the ultimate abstract reductionism – an absence of
anything visible.
The paintings are made using a consistent production process, the
repetition suggesting a generic painting ultimately only
individualised through packaging as a commodity.
PJ Hickman is a Brisbane based artist who has previously exhibited
in Melbourne (Blindside, West Space and John Buckley), Canberra (CCAS)
and Brisbane (Metro Arts, Ryan Renshaw and Raw Space).
A constant point of departure is what constitutes ‘painting' by
exploring the conventions of painting, notably the historical
attributes of painting's ‘zero degree'.
The paintings are characteristically based upon a Minimalist
aesthetic of extreme simplification, repetition and reduction, and
rejection of the emotive and intuitive.
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Billy Gruner
As part of an ongoing series of collective works visitors are asked
to participate in the making of the project work, CM 5 by adding a
layer of blue paint to the canvas supplied.
Blue paints are only used in this series so works relate to each
other and to an earlier trajectory of monochromatic work; Kline,
Palermo, Burn et al.
In the CM process individuality and collectivity are conjoined in a
single but agreed gesture. That act attempts to manage a space
within a known binary in Australian art.
Personally, I think a distinction long upheld between realism and
its supposed antipathy, pure abstraction, is arbitrated into
something else.
Billy Gruner (excerpt from CM 5 room sheet)
Billy Gruner is a Sydney based artist and curator and co-founder &
Director of Sydney Non Objective (SNO).
In 2005 Collective Monochrome 1V was shown at NOT (Brisbane) & CM
V1 at Cheillerie, Amsterdam.
Conical
3 Rochester St - Fitzroy Victoria - Melbourne