archives
1 & 2: Installation views of 9 shades of Whiteley
A different vision
On view: 4 April – 23 August 1998
Sculpture has always been for me totemic, phallic – something that grows upwards from the earth – or from the gallery floor. Brancusi was the first kick-off, and a lot of African carving... it’s a reaching up to the sky... Maybe I should devote two years to doing nothing else but courting and causing sculpture. I love it. I love moving around something and I love sculpture next to or in front of paintings - a kind of dialogue can bounce between a sculpture and a painting.
- Brett Whiteley in the film Difficult Pleasure dir Don Featherstone, 1989.
Brett Whiteley was a largely self-taught artist who worked in all media and whose work new no technical boundaries. His natural preference was for the curvilinear and the organic and his vast output of paintings; drawings and sculpture reflected above all his passionate love of the landscape and the figure.
He had always planned to have a sculpture exhibition. This exhibition – an overview of some 35 pieces with related paintings and drawings from public and private collections, chosen by Wendy Whiteley – covers key periods in Whiteley’s career of over 30 years.
Wendy Whiteley said, 'It was during his first solo exhibition in London, the Christie/Zoo show at the Malborough New London Galleries in Autumn 1965, that Brett exhibited sculptures as an integral part of an exhibition. Around this time he had seen the new installation at Madame Tussaud’s with the waxwork model of Christie (the serial killer) together with the actual kitchen of Rillington Place where the murders were committed. Christie’s broken down old deck chair with the rubber tube and the bulldog clip, which were all used in the murders, added a chilling aspect to the installation. In response to this experience, Brett made his own chair and began to extend the two dimensional picture surface into the third dimension.'
In 1967, Whiteley was granted a Harkness Fellowship to work in the USA and showed new work, which included some surrealist sculpture in New York’s Malborough-Gerson Gallery in the Spring of 1968.
‘This New York show was a real push into sculpture and his attempt to extend the boundary of the flat, painted surface in all directions was at its most extreme at this time.
‘These kinds of three-dimensional extensions from the canvas continued in Brett’s work in 1969 in Fiji, with additions of branches - sometimes with seedpods extending from the landscape. Sometimes holes were cut in boards and lights added. The cutting in - and extending out - during this time were done in a less aggressive, much more gentle way.’
On returning to Australia, Whiteley exhibited his Fijian pictures and a major work from the USA ub 1969, The American Dream, at the Bonython Gallery in Sydney.
‘Included in the exhibition were free-standing sculptures based on the Aboriginal burial poles which stood in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and much loved by Brett. These totem-like sculptures were ultimately extended to create the Get Laid Totem 1978-88, and its two, final, accompanying pieces White female 1978-88 and Tan female 1978-88.
‘After our return to Australia in 1969, he began working around Lavender Bay. He discovered how much he loved to carve the buttery mangrove wood,- releasing the female nudes he saw in them. He often made reference to the sculptures in his paintings, such as Self portrait in the studio 1976.
The final sculptures were a series of birds – a great favourite was the humorous Boot owl 1985, made from what Brett referred to as ‘seasonal carcasses from God ... nature’s droppings’ strung together with bits of wire, plaster and nails. Sometimes these sculptures were assembled in the Meridian foundry in Melbourne to be cast in bronze.’
Many of these were exhibited in the 1988 Birds show at the artist’s Studio, Surry Hills, Sydney, now the Brett Whiteley Studio, where visitors will again be able to savour some of the spirit of this and other memorable exhibitions. This exhibition includes a number of sculptures that were in his Studio when he died in 1992, such as the Get laid totem, the distinctive matches at the entrance to the Studio and the Bonsai Tree.