Recent, Current and Upcoming

Joseph Marioni - Pestorius Sweeney House
Jens Haaning - Pestorius Sweeney House
Another Time - Pestorius Sweeney House
Dave Hullfish Bailey—CityCat Project 2012 - Pestorius Sweeney House
REPAINT - Pestorius Sweeney House
Sarah Morris - Pestorius Sweeney House

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Joseph Marioni, "Yellow Painting", 2013, acrylic paint on linen on stretcher, 102 x 107 cm

Joseph Marioni
11 May— 20 July, 2013
Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane

David Pestorius is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent work by New York painter Joseph Marioni (*1943).

Joseph Marioni is one of the foremost contemporary exponents of a modern tradition in painting that has its roots in the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School. Seamlessly integrating the liquid paint of Jackson Pollock, the intense colour of Rothko and Newman, and the sensuous physicality of Clyfford Still, Marioni’s exquisite light-infused paintings demonstrate the ongoing vitality of an art grounded in the ‘truth to materials’ dictates of Modernism and the concentrated act of looking.

In 1998 Marioni’s most insightful and eloquent critic, Michael Fried, described his monochromes as “paintings in the fullest and most exalted sense of the word”, while, more recently, he declared Marioni to be “the strongest painter of whom I have knowledge at work anywhere today.” They are remarkable claims that only someone with Fried’s own exalted status as a critic could make. For his Brisbane exhibition, Marioni is showing two new paintings, one a bush green colour, the other a golden yellow. Made with the predominantly glazed gallery of the Pestorius Sweeney House in mind, these jewel-like paintings will ‘come alive’ amidst the abundant but constantly changing natural light of the room. Indeed, as Fried has observed, there is something “almost Eastern” about Marioni’s paintings, which can be expected to resonate strongly with the Japanese-influenced International Style architecture and related garden design. The painter’s exhibition also continues a theme running through recent shows at the Pestorius Sweeney House, one that activates questions around nationhood, its colours and their codes.

Joseph Marioni first caught the attention of the international art world in 1975 with a solo exhibition at Artists Space, New York, selected by Brice Marden. In the 1980s, he was one of the leaders of a movement known as Radical Painting and was closely associated with the pioneering German gallerist Rolf Ricke. This period reached its apotheosis in 1988 with a solo exhibition at the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, while the 1990s were marked by important surveys of his work at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (1995), Vienna Secession (1996) and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (1998). In 2000, Marioni was included in that year’s Whitney Biennial, a show that was soon after followed by the painter’s first solo exhibition in Australia at the UQ Art Museum in Brisbane. Marioni’s most recent museum show was in 2011 at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., while a room of his paintings is currently on display (until 23 June) in the two-artist exhibition Marioni/MacPherson, curated by Rex Butler at the UQ Art Museum.

For further information, please contact David Pestorius on (07) 3262 4870.







Jens Haaning
2 March-27 April
Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane

David Pestorius is pleased to present a new exhibition by Copenhagen-based artist Jens Haaning (*1965).

Central to Haaning’s project is a socio-political dimension that is highly conceptual, non-didactic, and often Zen-like in its simplicity and degree of abstraction. The artist opens up to analysis the structures of modern society and the dynamics of power via key themes, including immigration, racism, intercultural dialogue, nationalism, and the relation between global capitalism and local economies.

Since 2004, Haaning has painted the name of the country in which he is exhibiting on gallery walls in giant black capital letters. The effect is intriguing: the typography appears anonymous yet has been specially designed, and at over a metre high with nothing else on display in the gallery, it has a strangely commanding presence: a bit like encountering a mirror, one feels self-conscious confronted by our own sense of place, history, and the here and now. Haaning’s ‘Australia’, however, has a very particular resonance, coming as it does when questions around Indigenous sovereignty, immigration, and ‘Islamisation’ (rendered acute by the recent visit of controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders), are increasingly in the public consciousness. For Brisbane, Haaning will tap into this moment, extending the ‘Australia’ wall beyond the limits of the gallery. The end result is deliberately confusing — it appears as if the builder of the house has misread the plans — and serves to complexify the inside/outside experience of the International Style architecture and associated sense of transparency and openness, which is so indebted to Modernist ideals of the public sphere.

Jens Haaning emerged in the 1990s as part of the so-called ‘Nordic Miracle’ — the most widely exhibited generation of Scandinavian artists in history. Closely associated with Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘Relational Aesthetics’, Haaning was included in Traffic (CAPC Bordeaux, 1996), the exhibition that launched the phenomenon, as well as several of the influential curator’s more recent projects. Haaning first travelled to Brisbane over a decade ago to participate in Parallel Structures (David Pestorius Projects, Brisbane, 2001), where he realised the intra-city light bulb exchange now in the Sammlung Haubrok, while the following year a related work was included in Documenta 11. In 2004 the artist was again in Australia, this time to participate in the Biennale of Sydney, while in 2004–05 he collaborated with one of the ‘Godfathers’ of Punk, Brisbane guitarist Ed Kuepper (The Saints, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, etc.) on a performance that toured internationally, including to the Foundation Cartier in Paris and Vienna’s famous Burgtheater and Film Museum.

Since 2007, Jens Haaning has had important solo exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Secession, Vienna; Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Lyon; and the San Francisco Art Institute. The artist’s last solo exhibition in Brisbane was at the Pestorius Sweeney House in May 2003, when he removed the gallery windows only to re-install them facing ‘inside out’. The current project has been generously sponsored by the Danish Agency for Culture and PGH Bricks + Pavers.

For further information, please contact David Pestorius on (07) 3262 4870.







Another Time
26 January—23 February
Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane

In the early 1980s it was not uncommon for performances by Brisbane’s post-punk groups to be accompanied by elaborate conceptually themed environments. Another Time is structured around one such event. Held at the Baroona Hall on July 4, 1980, "The Sincerity Ball" featured several groups, including Zero, The Go-Betweens and the Four Gods (the so-called ‘Brisbane Sound’), and a visual polemic that took its cue from the black and white check motif deployed by the 2-Tone label groups (The Specials, Madness, etc.) as code for the racial diversity and musical hybridity that so defined this highly politicised milieu.

Brisbane has undergone many changes since 1980. Back then it was ruled by an authoritarian State government, which subjected Indigenous Australians, but also those involved in the emerging post--punk culture, to brutal treatment at the hands of its police force. This was the context that saw the 2-Tone check explode into life via wall paintings, tattoos, shaved heads, and black-and-white dress. From the ceiling hung illuminated constructions made out of newspaper day bills, their hyperbolic pronouncements serving to further dramatise the situation. And, finally, there were the Super 8 films of Gary Warner (*1957), one of the architects of the event. Screened as Zero performed, Warner’s films functioned as a kind of expanded cinéma vérité, documenting and intervening in the apparently madcap activities of those both on stage and off. Frequently sped-up, recalling the slapstick of Charlie Chaplin, they speak of a carefree existence brim-full of humour and poetic moments: a life, in other words, wildly at odds with the otherwise grim reality that was Brisbane circa 1980.

In 1987 the art historian Urszula Szulakowska surveyed the intensely collaborative practices of Brisbane artists over the previous decade and saw in them a Dadaistic impulse, something increasingly considered critical to relational and participatory art today. It is therefore timely that we remember "The Sincerity Ball", but also because the questions it was asking, all those years ago, are still with us. That the exhibition commences on Australia Day is designed to render those questions more acute. 

Another Time has been realised in close co-operation with Gary Warner whose Super 8 films for performances by Zero would later feature in Know Your Product (IMA, Brisbane, 1986), Ross Harley’s pioneering survey of crossovers between art and popular culture in Brisbane during the punk and post-punk years. Since then they have been presented in The Brisbane Sound (IMA, Brisbane, 2008), Queensland Art 2009 (Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane, 2009–10), and, most recently, in Melbourne >< Brisbane: Punk, Art and After (Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2010), where the installation here first began to take shape. Another Time also builds on Dave Hullfish Bailey’s recent exhibition of works from his collaborative CityCat Project and includes works from that show, as well as contributions from Liam Gillick, Anne Wallace, and Heimo Zobernig.

For further information, please contact David Pestorius on (07) 3262 4870.







Dave Hullfish Bailey—CityCat Project 2012
Saturday 8 December, 1–5pm
Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane
Exhibition
CityCat ferries, Brisbane River
Performance with Sam Watson
Saturday 8 December, 6–9pm
Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane
Roundtable with Sam Watson, Ian McLean, Michele Helmrich, and Rex Butler

For his series of variations on Harold Thomas’ (Aboriginal) flag, Proposals for some possibly useful reconfigurations (2011), Dave Hullfish Bailey was inspired, he says, by the 18-foot skiff, the ‘Aberdare’, which used technological innovations (and profits from the Aberdare Colliery near Ipswich) to dominate racing on the Brisbane River in the 1930s. What Bailey proposes is a possible set of sails for its descendants on today’s televised racing circuit, each of which would be composed of a cut-up and re-ordered version of Thomas’ flag. We have a small spinnaker for running, which is when a boat sails downwind with the wind behind it. We have a larger asymmetrical spinnaker for reaching, which is when the boat sails across or perpendicularly to the wind. And we have a jib or headsail for beating, which is when the boat engages in successive tacks back and forth in an attempt to sail into the wind. Bailey first came across the story of the ‘Aberdare’ through research stemming from his 2006 CityCat Project, a collaboration with Indigenous activist and playwright Sam Watson. In his Project, Bailey worked with Watson to have the Brisbane ferries at one point of their route momentarily veer off course, slow down and face Aboriginal actors standing in the Boundary Street Park, a historical landmark for the local Turrbal and Jagera people. Importantly, Watson hung a large version of Thomas’ flag at the site, which is significant not only for its Kurilpa Dreaming but because it lies on the historical curfew line that prohibited Aboriginal people from entering the city after dark. (Here those three sailing terms, “running”, “reaching” and “beating”, can also be understood to describe the interaction between the Indigenous population of Brisbane and the new European colonisers.)

Of course, looking at Bailey’s 22 paper collages, we cannot but be struck by the obvious iconoclasm of his Proposal, almost in the literal religious sense. The burning or defacement of the flag, if not always strictly illegal, is usually heavily proscribed in most cultures, with the destruction of an enemy’s flag being the ultimate act of political contempt and opposition. So what is it that gives Bailey, who is a white artist from Los Angeles, the right to destroy this flag by Thomas, an Aboriginal man, who has moreover had such difficulty first of all asserting his copyright over the design and then enforcing his legal rights over it? What allows Bailey to think that he has anything to contribute to the cause it is seen to stand for by displaying it in these various sail-shaped formats in an art gallery? Undoubtedly the negotiation of the permissions to make and display Bailey’s altered versions is one of the actual subjects of the work, one of the things that, after a while, we become conscious of while looking at it. (This is just as in the CityCat performances the passengers would gradually have become aware of the co-operation or even “reconciliation” between the ferry driver and the actor standing on the shore, whose actions are necessarily synchronised, even if they could not actually see them signalling to each other.)

But – to pick up the analogy to sailing that the work proposes – we might indeed think of Bailey as the wind that animates Thomas’ flag. Bailey in cutting up the flag might appear to destroy it, but in fact his act queries how it might travel further, how it might occupy sites – real, historical and ideological – the original might never otherwise have got to.7 He merely continues that process of dissemination that is already at play from the very moment that Thomas made his flag and gave it to others to fly. At that point any original meaning it might have had was lost as it became a boat – a kind of Argo – that others could sail in. And, indeed, for Bailey – who was a keen sailor in his youth – the wind always does have something of this utopian dimension about it. In his 2001 Schindler Shelter project, he not only created sail-like structures covered with maps in a style that recalled Malevich’s Suprematism, but reconfigured the architect R.M. Schindler’s famous Kings Road House in West Hollywood to resemble a community shelter after a natural disaster by bending bamboo trees down on one side with sheets to form temporary shelters. The sail for Bailey is always the sign of a certain openness, a receptivity to the future, an ability to respond to unknown circumstances and make the best of them.

Edited excerpt from “The Wind in his Sails” by Rex Butler.

Dave Hullfish Bailey (*1963) lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches at Art Center. The artist's approach to investigating sites is focused upon how geography, physical infrastructure and social narratives of emancipation intersect in specific places. His performative staging of research mobilizes standard tools of intellectual enlightenment (empirical inspection, historical contextualization, scientific analysis, etc.) alongside more heuristic techniques including language games, experimental mappings, re-purposed logical machines, and hypothetical scenarios. What emerges are narratively experimental and critically reflexive super-ecologies, characterized by active feedback loops between two already complexly organized systems: the internal ‘signal’ of the place, and the ‘noise’ of the attempt to describe it. Recent exhibitions and projects include the 30th Sao Paulo Biennial (2012); For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there (Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, ICA London, De Appel Amsterdam, and other venues, 2009-10); Surrounded by Squares: Dave Hullfish Bailey and Nils Norman, Raven Row, London (2009); Lyon Biennial 2007; What’s Left to its own Devices (On reclamation), Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht (2007); and CityCat Project, Brisbane (2003/ongoing). Recent publications include the exhibition catalog Elevator (Secession, Vienna: 2006) and the artist’s book What’s Left (Casco/Sternberg Press, Utrecht/ Berlin: 2009).

For further information, please contact David Pestorius on (07) 3262 4870.







REPAINT
8–22 December
Opening: 8 December, 6–9pm
Closing event: 22 December, 3–5pm
Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane

Following the renovation of the central stairwell at the Pestorius Sweeney House, the exhibition REPAINT will dramatise this space with five paintings by five artists who emerged in the wake of the ‘crisis in painting’ precipitated by Minimal Art in the 1960s.

The earliest and perhaps the most significant is a hollow log coffin by Maningrida artist England Bangala (1925–2001). Leaning casually in a corner that marks the true centre of the house, Larkan, c. 1988, signals the important role Aboriginal art has played in the renewal of painting after Minimalism. The dynamic forms of Bangala’s painted pole also echo the circular experience of the space, with its subtle colours, textures and distinctive serpentine handrail carved out of Queensland maple by local master craftsman Robert Dunlop.

The Sydney artist A.D.S. Donaldson (*1961) also adopts a severely vertical format with Untitled, 1995. However, the association is as much to Barnett Newman as it is to Aboriginal art. If the format appears to underscore the verticality of the paint image, Donaldson also manages to question a certain orthodoxy in the ‘truth to materials’ dictates of modern painting. Using thinned liquid pigments, Donaldson’s mode of production is both wholly manifest and almost impossible to discern and even suggestive of industrial fabrication.

The paintings for the space of car windows by Frankfurt artist Andreas Exner (*1962) also bring the industrial object into tension with the handmade. Only provisionally a monochrome, Exner’s Saab 900 1988 Turquoise Blue Light Studio Lascaux, 2006, bears the trace of a second colour and the vehicle that prompted it.

Untitled (I’m not an authority on art), 1989, by Melbourne artist Elizabeth Newman (*1962) also confounds our experience of it. A subtly crafted blue monochrome overlaid with the brief textual pronouncement of its subtitle in faux-naïve script, Newman’s painting both lauds and criticises modern painting and the complex rhetoric that surrounds it.

Finally, Untitled, 2006, by Heimo Zobernig (*1958) is a similarly ambivalent undertaking. A white monochrome, its pure surface projects the idealism and utopian promise of modern painting. Closer inspection, however, reveals a more complicated scenario. As with many of the Viennese artist’s paintings, a coloured masking tape is used not so much to achieve a perfect finish, but to raise questions about finish and the role of the viewer.

REPAINT also wants to remember the Malcolm Enright curated exhibition Minimalism X Six (Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1983), a critical moment in the evolution of Minimal Art in Australia. On the afternoon of Saturday 22 December, Enright and Minimalism X Six artist Jenny Watson will cast their minds back to that moment almost 30 years ago when Minimalism, having embraced the lessons of Conceptual art, began to engage with the ‘return to painting’ of the early 1980s.

For further information, please contact David Pestorius on (07) 3262 4870.







Sarah Morris - Points on a Line
Saturday 3 November 2012, 4–9pm
Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane

The Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois and the Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut. Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe. Curator and architect. Architect and architect. Points on a Line, 2010, directed by artist Sarah Morris (*1967) documents a shared desire to build structures that might change the way we think about a house, a form and a context. These two buildings were the result of shared ideas and collective desire. But they also complicate ideas of the copy and the original and the chronologies of Modernism.

The two buildings demonstrate a legacy of focus upon details and surface – inside and outside. Capturing the tension of ego and authorship in precisely deferring architectural statements. By carefully documenting the daily maintenance of these two buildings and lingering over the precise placement of the structures in space and of objects within each structure, we are presented with a clear view of places that have gone beyond their initial use and become the intersection of a dialogue that was both personal and professional. Morris's deployment of cinematic codes in relation to architectural precision produces images that go beyond a record of functionality or the streamlining of needs. These are places that remain elusive despite their openness – structures that are open vessels where we search for markers of the corporate aesthetic to come and the legal wrangles that marked the struggle to complete and maintain them. Buildings that require constant representation and new documentation in order to recode and understand what came before and what came next. Obtaining complete unrestricted access for each location of the film, Morris has woven together art, architecture and corporate image production with flowers, the behavior of bees and the patterns of butterflies — window washing, cooking, power-broking and collecting.

Morris filmed at both sites over the course of several months, among other locations including The Four Seasons Restaurants, the Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe’s infamous Lake Shore Drive, and Chicago’s Newberry Library. Morris utilizes The Four Seasons, a place that Philip Johnson practically used as his personal office, as the meeting point between the two architects. Ultimately, Points on a Line is a record of preservation of two structures and a document of power plays that left a mark in the pragmatic idealism of the late modern period.

Sarah Morris lives and works in New York City. She has widely exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions since 2005 at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museo d'Arte Moderna, Bologna; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. This space-related installation of Points on a Line will be the first time the work has been presented in Australia. 

This project has been organised in co-operation with the Centre for Architecture Theory Criticism History at The University of Queensland and will be preceded by a number of short presentations, including Alexandra Brown on Superstudio, 9999, Radical Architecture, and the S-Space Mondial Festival in November 1971; Andrew Leach on Reyner Banham and the question of quality in contemporary architecture; David Pestorius on the calculated misrepresentation of Ian Burn and his work in official Art & Language histories; and Andrew Wilson on colour in the work of Brisbane architects Hayes & Scott. Attendance is free, however, persons wishing to attend are requested to register in advance. Acknowledgments: A|T|C|H, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, MAAP Media Bank.

For further information, please contact David Pestorius on (07) 3262 4870.