archives
1 & 2: Installation views of 9 Shades of Whiteley
Whiteley & the third dimension
On view: 26 July 2008 – 15 March 2009
(Click a thumbnail image for a larger view)
Sculpture is totemic, phallic, something that grows 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 of 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.
The current exhibition at the Brett Whiteley Studio expands on this statement by Brett Whiteley through a suite of interior spaces, which allow a fluid relationship between free-standing sculptures and paintings and drawings.
Indeed it is quite surprising to realise – once the significance of sculpture to Whiteley’s oeuvre begins to be explored – how fascinated he was with the dynamic possibilities of the third dimension even in his flat pictorial images. The artist launched his international career with spectacularly beautiful flat abstractions in London in the early 1960s. But it was not long before collage and extrusions began to embellish his surfaces, followed by fully three-dimensional entities launching out of them like birth sites.
But apart from the pure aesthetics of beauty, Whiteley explored some of the terrors of psychic space, in which the themes of imprisonment, evil and death were part of the contract with beauty. The third dimension in other words could be related to an idea of incarceration as much as its opposite, emancipation.
Hence The third dimension begins with an installation, or tableau, based on the London necrophile murderer John Christie, who lured prostitutes to his room and gassed them to death. Whiteley became interested in a kind of virtual horror experience of Christie’s story from a visit to Madame Tussaud’s in London, and replicated its conception by literally constructing a chair to symbolise the principle instrument of murder. It sits in the centre of the current tableau.
Adjacent to this is an installation on the theme of Vincent van Gogh, with zoom lines flying into deep perspective representing the trajectory of an artist’s madness; an actual razor referring to the famous ear severing incident; and a huge canvas with an easel and mass of white paint oozing out into our space, signifying the emotional excess and instability that led to his ultimate annihilation.
But most interesting here perhaps is Whiteley’s reference to Vincent’s famous chair, an actual chair, which hangs from the wall in synergy with the Christie tableau. In each case the chair occupies a pivotal position, or focus: for Vincent a yearned for, comfort zone centring of his life; for Christie a sordid means of empowering his perverse sexual fantasies.
Visitors may now wander through a forest of animal and bird sculptures, from shark pieces inspired at once by Brancusi and the elemental fear of sharks in Australian beach culture; the surreal forms of giraffes seen at the London Zoo; and a homage to Whiteley’s great love of birds, fashioned through actual specimens affixed to scaffoldings of found branches and a rain-boot. A charming little piece, and one of Whiteley’s favourites, is an owl form created out of an old shoe.
This section is dominated by two majestic totems, again inspired by Brancusi, holding aloft huge eggs, the meeting points of nature and civilization and the eternal hope in both for renewal.
Finally, upstairs amongst Whiteley’s records, books and other memorabilia, is a magnificent group of sculptures and drawings based on his most consistent theme. Nude female figures, or allusions to them, principally inspired by the frankly erotic response to the naked form of his wife Wendy, have appeared throughout almost the entirety of the artist’s career.
The pieces here are mainly carved from mangrove wood in the 1970s, but there are a few surprises; including a bronze head of Anna Schwartz; and a group of three, albeit awkward ceramic pots decorated with nude drawing which are Whiteley’s only attempt in this medium. He normally commissioned other ceramicists to make pots that he could decorate with various forms in his ongoing fascination for three dimensional space and the need to actually walk around the object to embrace its effect. A choice few of those pieces are here to enjoy as well.
A journey through this exhibition above all reveals, through an enormous diversity of materials – wood, bronze, plaster, paint, fibreglass and found objects – the quality of Whiteley’s irrepressible sense of intuition and boundless creativity. He regarded everything around him as there for the seizing in the celebration of his – and our – existence.
