current exhibition
1 & 2: Installation views of 9 Shades of Whiteley
Endlessnessism
On view: 28 August 2010
This exhibition explores the dynamic influences, themes and ideas contained in the pivotal work Alchemy, which was created over an 11-month period from February 1972 to January 1973 in the gasworks studio in Waverton, Sydney. This 18-panelled self-portrait is acknowledged as one of Whiteley’s great masterpieces – an internal journey of Whiteley’s self discovery. Within the skin of paint, collage and assemblage is a visual autobiography, from sex to death to rebirth.
Wendy Whiteley, the artist’s widow, said of this work:
'Brett, like a lot of artists, was fascinated with the notion of alchemy, changing base metal into gold, the ordinary into the extraordinary, changing yourself through something else. He would have loved to have been a rock star for a month, to feel the power of that mass adulation in an audience. On the other hand, he would have loved to have been Howard Hughes for a month, to experience that intense isolation. It’s all alchemy.'
This notion of duality is an intriguing insight into the artist’s approach, anchored by the painted yin-yang symbol appearing on the installed human brain, dividing hemispheres – the creative and analytical, the emotional and reasoned aspects of what makes us human, the extremes of humanity to create, to destroy, to love and to hate, the seen and the unseen, the reality and the dream. This surrealist fluidity of transformation from one scene to another linked by brushstroke is still astonishing to follow.
It is a work of its time and, with the social and political issues prevalent in Australia and Vietnam, the country’s involvement in the war and its division of and impact in the populace, it was a contemporary view of how Whiteley felt about this war and war in general.
This work was his most ambitious. Whiteley attempted to put in all of his creative influences and inspirations: musicians Bob Dylan and Beethoven, writers and poets Arthur Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Yukio Mishima and Patrick White, artists Francis Bacon, Picasso, Van Gogh and William Blake, and the philosopher Plato, to name a few. Each of these artists, writers and poets left their mark on Whiteley and here is the acknowledgement.
'It’s an artist’s struggle with his own head. It’s about struggle of spirit, joyous moments, weird ideas, sex, waves, leaves, birds, minutiae and bigness and trying to work it all out, a major symphony. It’s his most difficult work to get into.'
– Wendy Whiteley
As Brett Whiteley wrote in his exhibition catalogue, which accompanied the display of Alchemy at the Bonython Gallery in Sydney, 'The quest is the transmutation of self'.
