More Paintings from No Man's Land

CONTENTS

6 Director’s Foreword 8 Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere14 Swamp No.215 Swamp16 Araluen No.117 Araluen No.218 Swagging at Araluen No.219 Araluen No.320 The rock at Mary Flynn’s around 7pm21 Mutawintji on the first morning22 Mary Flynn’s Reflection No.223 Mary Flynn’s Reflection24 Fall No.825 Swagging at Araluen; Mutawintji26 Turon Dream; Wilcania27 Turon Dream No.228 Mt Wedge No.330 Mt Wedge No.231 Mt Wedge No.1

32 Mutawintji from Homestead Creek33 Burrawang No.534 Fall No.735 Fall No.636 Pool No.2; Turondale No.237 Pool38 Turondale39 Pool No.340 Fall No.541 Fall No.442 Double Fall43 Fall No.344 Burrawang45 Burrawang No.246 Burrawang No.347 Burrawang No.448 Tanami50 CV56 Acknowledgements

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It is with great pride and excitement that The Cat Street Gallery presents a brand new solo show by the hugely talented Australian artist, Guy Maestri. As his third exhibition with us, opening on Thursday 20 September 2012 here in Hong Kong, ‘More Paintings from No Man’s Land’ brings a vast array of artworks featuring his latest (and perhaps fondest) subject - the expansive Australian landscape - which Maestri has documented over the many journeys he has made across the country.

Having won countless accolades, including the Archibald Prize in 2009, Maestri’s practice continues to go from strength to strength, and these most recent works are particularly masterful. His paintings, whether on their own or as a group, are a boldly woven and deeply atmospheric ode to the country’s dynamic pastoral vistas, tumbling waterfalls, vast hills and majestic cliffs that spread over the land. Admirers of Maestri’s work will revel in his return to abstracted thick trenches of oil paint on canvas, as he tests visual planes with his brushstrokes, and carves out sublime natural formations that are both recognizable and anonymous all at once.

Not only do these paintings display a skilful execution of paint on a surface, but they also seem to harness a spirit - the spirit of Maestri and his incontrovertible fascination for his surroundings - and in their numbers (for this show is by far one of Maestri’s largest, totalling 37 paintings), this unctuous army of canvases packs a visceral punch. Each image almost pulsing to a shared beat, they seem excited to charge forward and confess secrets they hold, or whisper the story of how Maestri came to weave them into his vision.

As an internationally recognised talent that is truly on the rise, it is especially exciting to bring Maestri’s latest work to Hong Kong for his third show with The Cat Street Gallery, and we look forward to welcoming all his admirers - whether old or new - to view these fabulous paintings in all their glory.

Mandy d’Abo

Founder and Director The Cat Street Gallery

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD

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Landscape is the central medium of the impossible. This must be the reason that Cezanne painted Mont Saint Victoire over and over in his dogged meticulous assault. The scale of landscape, the physical solidity and the mass is impossible to compress into two dimensions. The impression, the stain left on the eye by the view, is forced into a creative distortion, a magnificent reduction of the whole. Unlike cartography or wide-angle photography or even satellite surveillance, which all lend an illusion of possession, the act of representing the spatial reality of nature in paint remains a stubborn entity. The scene continues where the canvas ends and the mutability of light and the illusion of perspective only serve to loosen our grasp.

The experience of the landscape in Australian painting contains some of these knots of impenetrable dissatisfaction even though we have been led to believe the terrain is simple to recognise and easy to celebrate as an epic scene or a signature palette.

A shorthand in terms of spectrum has been developed for the different zones of a huge terrain. The coast is green. The centre is red and the sky, harbours, rivers and lakes are every shade of violet and blue. Such conventions have given rise to an artificial sense of the familiar. By virtue of landscape painting dominating most other genres in Australian art, we have internalised a Fairweather mangrove or a Williams outcrop as the ‘actual’ terrain. Abstractions of the most famous landmarks as oddly the reality of the Australian outback have been made more famous by paintings than photography. We know the bush as much from a Russell Drysdale one horse town in red ochre as we do from a completely psychedelic rendering by James Gleeson. Most of us have to admit it doesn’t matter where the line melts from fact into hallucination, we’ll never go there.

Expeditions to the desert used to be mediated to the general population by the journals of explorers. So many of these smacked of pain and futility. If a lingering reluctance to probe our interior (for curiosity or even leisure) persists it might owe to the hard tales etched into our history. Who would follow Sturt with his long boat dragged by a dray across the rocks and sand searching for an inland sea? The compulsion to see Australia is limited by the perception that there is ‘nothing out there’, a fact upheld by the physical

EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE Recent works in the landscape by Guy Maestri

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size of the central desert and a general ignorance about what this terrain contains. In this century we no longer look to explorers to mediate, furnish or satisfy our ambivalence, fears or vague curiosity about the bush and outback. This role instead falls to writers and artists and each generation brings a very different view. Some painters interrogate one landscape over and over and make it their griffe. Guy Maestri is not on this trajectory. A passionate ecologist with a dispassionate relationship to media, his connection to the Australian scene is not literal. He doesn’t pretend to forge an integral or iconic image by connecting with the land. If anything his most successful paintings convey a vague discomfort, a very real sense of not belonging at all and instead simply watching the scene in a state of apprehension, static wonderment and doubt.

When Maestri drove into the Tanami desert his initial impression was one of emptiness and monotonous grandeur. For a coast dweller the desert represents a confronting lack of shelter and almost zero sanctuary. For a painter there is equally nowhere to hide. The pictorial conventions offered by furrows of foliage, cloud and shadow, hillocks, valleys and glades all seem evinced by an earth that seems to erupt with a violent enormity of scale and smother with its dinosaur hum of silence. Nothing leads to nowhere, as the artist puts it: “you drive for eleven hours just to get the beginning of where you might be going which all looks the same to start with”.

Maestri describes his encounters with the Central desert as simultaneously ‘completely alien’ and ‘overwhelmingly familiar’. His response was to create hundreds of small works on paper, tracking the enormity into smaller fragments. The drawings were not preparatory; no paintings were based on them. And instead they may have operated as a journal, providing a map to an environment the artist was slow to relate to.

This journey was one of several Maestri took into the bush over two years of travelling and painting, and each terrain created subtly different work. The works from the Tanami desert were deliberate exercises in simplicity. A reply in part to the story telling process of indigenous painting, Maestri was impressed by the

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rough immediacy of painting in desert communities and he applied (if not the mythology) then definitely the speed of local style to his work. And so, a magnificent ridge (in a painting like “Mount Wedge 3”) becomes as abbreviated as a child’s drawing of a breaking wave. An eternity of scrub is indicated by a scumble of lines and colour is anti-literal, the sage green belly in the body of a desert landscape could infer the dry grass beneath your feet or miles and miles of raw vista.

The confusion of scale gives the sense that the only way to maintain purchase on an endless horizon is to collapse perspective altogether. Indirectly the very distinct relationship to time engaged by the elders of this landscape bears some relation on this merge of perception between near and far. As Maestri tells it: “When we drove through the Tanami the community elders who were hosting us pointed out many landmarks that told important stories, but these stories were not mapped clearly, they could have happened in Dreamtime, ancestral time or real time. No one asked. It remained unclear.”

The outback at Mutawintji was something else again, set on the precipice between far western N.S.W. and central Australia. This is the territory of Burke and Wills and a far more fertile desert landscape studded with wildflowers, gorges and snaking river tributaries. The challenge for an artist here was in fact all of the many signposts to the sublime: violet sunsets, red river gums, sparkling waterfalls, bush arcadia. To avoid the re-creation of picture post cards, Maestri cleaved into the scene with thick paint and a high Modernist abbreviation created by striated colour applied straight from the tube to the canvas, or sliced on with a rapid brush or swiping palette knife. These works seem wetter, literally, but also more graphic and geometrically violent. Many were painted in the studio simply because materials were impossible to transport so deep into the bush and because Maestri had no intention of painting “portraits of trees and rocks”.

As an artist who began in large-scale abstraction, the foundation of most of his works is rooted within compositional dynamics, a matter of paint first and subject second. This is especially true of the Mutawintji landscapes where the dramatic rock formations and gushing streams of water (“Fall No.6”) seem to owe as much to Hans Hoffman and Clifford Still as they do to Tom Roberts.

In a spirit of ongoing experimentation this new collection of paintings also includes works created on an easel in the landscape. Those rendered around the riverbanks near Hill End bear the humid intimacy where rocks meet water with deep shadow and trees drain the sky of light. The compositions Maestri created in this terrain are more immediate, compressing the view without a liberating strip of sky, and the prevailing feels like a cold dusk. It’s an atmosphere that seems uncomfortably close. And this sensation increases

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when small forest and river scenes are studded together in inverted duets. Playing with the idea of a reflection in a body of water, the small double canvases throw up different facets of the same view: hazy, abstracted, simplified or roughed up into cruder tones.

It’s in these small works (such as “Pool No.2”) that the conventions of landscape get thrown about, the sky falling in the river bed, the mountain diving beneath the clouds, tree-tops forming root networks, and horizon be damned.

Modern landscape painting has to interrogate classical conventions, or at the very least toy with them to retain traction. The challenge of painting a scene considered traditionally beautiful (like a meadow in a butter commercial) is to shatter the potential for the merely pleasing image. The Southern Highlands of N.S.W. is exactly the sort of pastoral that soothed a colonial eye and continues to represent rural Australia in the general imagination. Maestri’s response to such sodden turf is to use the bare canvas to indicate light, bodies of water and sky (in works such as “Burrawang No.2” and “Burrawang No.3”) and, unlike Constable, the paint is thick, fast, raw and impatient. The vertical scale of these works creates a static feeling, more like a painting from a blurred photograph and the distance between the viewer and the scene is uniform in each image, creating a formality and random sense of sequence.

These works owe something to European art but not in the classical sense. There is some element of detachment at play here, like a Richter portrait, that obstructs the strong chance of kitsch evoked by familiar scenes.

In this vein the palette Maestri utilises is cold, almost muddy, anti-lyrical - a grunge alternative to Watteau’s glade or Frederick McCubbin’s hazy gum forests. Paint, on the central palette of his studio, has mounted up and grown dirty, like our memory of the ‘real bush’ and the painter seems reluctant to bathe each scene in faithful tones. “Green” says this artist “is the hardest thing. Green is bloody impossible.” But of course we accept this as given.

Landscape, is also inherently impossible. And that is why it will always pose a taunting challenge to painting and remain critical in every sense.

Anna Johnson, Sydney, 2012

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Plate 2: SwampOil on linen 61 x 51 cm

2012

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Plate 1: Swamp No.2Oil on linen 61 x 51 cm

2012

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Plate 4: Araluen No.2Oil on linen 61 x 51 cm

2012

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Plate 3: Araluen No.1Oil on linen 61 x 51 cm

2012

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Plate 6: Araluen No.3Oil on linen 61 x 51 cm 2012

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Plate 5: Swagging at Araluen No.2Oil on linen 61 x 51 cm 2012

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Plate 8: Mutawintji on the first morningOil on linen 61 x 51 cm 2012

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Plate 7: The rock at Mary Flynn’s around 7pmOil on linen 61 x 51 cm 2012

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Plate 10: Mary Flynn’s ReflectionOil on linen 101 x 60 cm

2012

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Plate 9: Mary Flynn’s Reflection No.2Oil on linen 101 x 60 cm

2012

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Plate 11: Fall No.8Oil on linen 61 x 82 cm 2012

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Plate 13: MutawintjiOil on linen 60 x 101 cm 2012

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Plate 12: Swagging at AraluenOil on linen 60 x 101 cm 2012

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Plate 15: WilcaniaOil on linen 60 x 101 cm 2012

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Plate 14: Turon DreamOil on linen 60 x 101 cm 2012

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Plate 16: Turon Dream No.2Oil on linen 60 x 101 cm 2012

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Plate 17: Mt Wedge No.3

Oil on linen 107 x 92 cm

2012

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2012

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2012

1 2

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Plate 21: Burrawang No.5Oil on linen 107 x 92 cm

2012

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Plate 20: Mutawintji from Homestead Creek


2012

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1


1 2

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Plate 25: Turondale No.2Oil on linen 123 x 51 cm 2012

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Plate 26: PoolOil on linen 123 x 51 cm 2012

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Plate 24: Pool No.2Oil on linen 123 x 51 cm 2012

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Plate 28: Pool No.3Oil on linen 123 x 51 cm 2012

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Plate 27: TurondaleOil on linen 123 x 51 cm 2012

1 2

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Plate 30: Fall No.4Oil on linen

102 x 122 cm 2012

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Plate 31: Double FallOil on linen 82 x 128 cm 2012

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Plate 32: Fall No.3Oil on linen

102 x 122 cm 2012

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Plate 34: Burrawang No.2


2012

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Plate 33: BurrawangOil on linen

183 x 152 cm 2012

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Plate 36: Burrawang No.4Oil on linen 183 x 152 cm 2012

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Plate 35: Burrawang No.3Oil on linen 183 x 152 cm 2012

1 2

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Plate 37: TanamiOil on linen

183 x 152 cm 2012

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SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2012 More Paintings from No Man’s Land, The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong Road Show, Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney 2011 No Man’s Land, Tim Olsen Gallery at Christine Abrahams Gallery Paintings & Drawings from East to West, Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney 2010 The Soundtrack of our lives, The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong 2009 Google Earth, Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Field Studies, The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong 2008 Natural Selection, Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Field Studies, Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne 2007 Recent Paintings, Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney 2006 Recent Paintings, The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong Recent Paintings, Tim Olsen Gallery Queen Street, Sydney 2005 Recent Paintings, Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Recent Paintings, Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne 2004 Recent Paintings, Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2012 Tim Olsen Gallery at the Melbourne Art Fair, Melbourne Wynne Art Prize, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney The Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, Australia 2011 Salon Des Refuses, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney Mosman Art Prize, Sydney The Kedumba Drawing Prize, Australia The Fleurieu Prize for Landscape Painting, Australia Interpreting Portraits: Macquarie 1810-2010, Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, Sydney Signal 8, The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong

CV

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2010 Wattle: Contemporary Australian Art, The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong The Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, Australia 2009 Archibald Prize (Winner), Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney The Domain, Sydney (touring various Regional Galleries throughout Australia) The 2009 Blake Prize, National Art School, Sydney Taronga Artists Camp Charity Auction / Exhibition, Sotheby’s, Sydney Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing, Adelaide Perry Gallery, PLC School, Sydney 2008 Dobell Prize For Drawing, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney Four Visions, Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Melbourne Art Fair, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne 2 x 2, Tim Olsen Gallery Annex, Sydney Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne 2007 Dobell Prize For Drawing, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney Momento Mori, Blkmrkt Gallery, Queensland Paddington Art Prize, Mary Place Gallery, Sydney 2006 Melbourne Art Fair, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne Paddington Art Prize, Mary Place Gallery, Sydney 2005 Dugongs of Hinchinbrook II, Kickarts Gallery, Cairns 2004 Brett Whiteley Traveling Art Scholarship, Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney 2003 Young Artists, Mary Place Gallery, Sydney Brett Whiteley Traveling Art Scholarship, Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney 2002 Brett Whiteley Traveling Art Scholarship, Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney Recent Paintings, Stairwell Gallery, N.A.S. Discipline, Cell Block Gallery, N.A.S. Sculpture 14, Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney Salon Des Refuses, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney Cheltenham Studio Exchange, U.K. 2001 Sculpture 13, Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney Salon Des Refuses, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney New York Studio Exchange, N.Y.C.

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AWARDS AND GRANTS

2012 Finalist, Wynne Art Prize, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney Finalist, The Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, Australia 2011 Winner of Commendation Prize, Mosman Art Prize, Sydney 2009 Winner, The 2009 Archibald Prize, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney 2003 Commission Award, St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne William Fletcher Fellowship, Sydney Highly Commended, Brett Whiteley Traveling Art Scholarship Paris Residency Award, National Art School, Sydney 2002 Highly Commended, Brett Whiteley Traveling Art Scholarship Paris Residency Award, National Art School, Sydney 2001 People’s Choice Award, Salon Des Refuses, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney

QUALIFICATIONS AND TRAINING

2010 Drawing Lecturer, National Art School, Sydney 2003 Painting Lecturer, Mosman Evening College, Sydney 2002 B.F.A. Honours Painting, National Art School, Sydney 1999 Anatomical Studies, Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney 1998 Life Drawing, Ku-ring gai Art Center, Sydney 1997 Life Drawing, Willoughby Workshop, Sydney

COLLECTIONS

National Portrait Gallery, Australia Macquarie Bank, Australia Hawksberry Regional Gallery, Sydney Maitland Regional Gallery, NSW Parliament House, Australia

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MEDIA AND PUBLICATIONS

News.com.au, ‘Artist Guy Maestri wins Archibald prize for portrait of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunipingu’, March 6, 2009, Anon Smh.com.au, ‘Yunipingu portrait wins Archibald’, March 6, 2009, Louise Schwartzkoff Theage.com.au, ‘Archibald Honour’, March 6, 2009, Anon The Australian online, ‘Yunipingu portrait wins Archibald’, March 6, 2009, Ashleigh Wilson Perthnow.com.au, ‘Archibald Winner’, March 6, 2009, Anon ABC Online, ‘Archibald Prize Winner Announced’, March 6, 2009, Oscar McLaren The Sydney Morning Herald Weekend, ‘So long, des refuses: ninth time lucky for artist’, March 7, 2009, Louise Schwartzkoff The Daily Telegraph, ‘Reluctant Subject Wins Prize’, March 7, 2009, Elizabeth Fortescue The Weekend Australian Financial Review, ‘Blind Faith at Airport Brings Fame’, March 7, 2009, Katrina Strickland ABC 702 Sydney, ‘Guy Maestri wins Archibald prize and economic downturn’, radio interview, March 7, 2009, Simon Marnie The Weekend Australian, ‘Vision of Blind Singer Wins the Archibald’, March 7-8, 2009, Ashleigh Wilson The Weekend Australian, ‘Big’s Not Beautiful for a Mug on a Massive Scale’, March 7-8, 2009, Christopher Allen The Sun Herald, ‘Favoured Face: The Eyes Have It’, March 8, 2009, Matthew Benns Adelaide Advertiser, ‘We’ve Got The Best’, March 8, 2009, Patrick McDonald Daily Liberal, ‘Mudgee-born artist Claims Archibald’, March 10, 2009 The Wentworth Courier, ‘Persistence Pays Off’, March 11, 2009, Menios Constantinou The Daily Telegraph, ‘Exhibition: Archibald’, March 17, 2009 Maitland Mercury, ‘Archibald Exhibition To Visit’, March 19, 2009, Emma Swan Redcliffe & Bayside Herald, ‘Learn from Maestri Win’, March 25, 2009, Richard Lancaster Inner Western Suburbs Courier, ‘Arts’, April 1, 2009 Australian Jewish News, ‘Archibald for Portrait of an Aboriginal’, May 1, 2009 GQ Australia, ‘The Old Masters of Tomorrow’, September 1, 2009, Virginia Wilson

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

222 Hollywood Road | T +852 2291 0006 | www.thecatstreetgallery.comThe Cat Street Gallery

Exhibition Acknowledgements

This book was published to accompany an exhibition of the same name‘More Paintings from No Man’s Land’, 20 September to 14 October, 2012

Artist Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ben Quilty and Luke Sciberras, this show is for you both. You were there, dragging me up the mountain. Thanks also to Shirin and the Litkouhi family, Mum and Dad, Lily Maestri and the rest of my family.

My studio mates, all at The Cat Street Gallery, and the Tim Olsen Gallery, the Persians, Justin, Phil James, Horder, Ben S, Sevy D, and the rest ...

Book Acknowledgements

Catalogue Design Danielle Midalia at The Cat Street Gallery

222 Hollywood Road | T +852 2291 0006 | www.thecatstreetgallery.comThe Cat Street Gallery

210 Hollywood Road | T +852 2361 1210 | www.thespace.hk

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