GAGPROJECTS. 14 Aug 2024
In 1991, Paul Greenaway OAM established the Greenaway Art Gallery, more recently reconstituted as GAGPROJECTS. Since then, Greenaway has championed emerging and established artists and their work, and he has shown a who’s who of prominent Adelaide artists, as well as interstate and international artists, not only providing great support to them but also significantly broadening Adelaide’s visual art scene.
In 2008, he opened a gallery in Berlin and he has frequently exhibited in interstate and international art fairs, giving local artists significant exposure and helping to propel their careers.
Showing innovative, sometimes experimental artwork can be risky for a commercial gallery which is dependent on sales, and Greenaway has been willing to take such risks. As well as promoting the artists’ work, Greenaway’s exposition of contemporary art has educated the public’s tastes and broadened the appreciation of visual art generally. Greenaway was the founder of the South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival in 1998, a festival which initially involved hundreds of artists in 50 exhibition spaces. SALA has since grown in scale and importance to become a flagship visual art event, and this year it involves more than 10,000 artists and 700 exhibition spaces across South Australia.
Paul Greenaway has announced that the current exhibition at GAGPROJECTS, staged as part of this year’s SALA Festival, will be the gallery’s last exhibition and GAGPROJECTS will close its Kent Town exhibition space. He is showing the latest work of three artists who might typify the kind of art he has shown over the years: Deborah Paauwe, Danny Fotopoulos and Kurt Bosecke.
Deborah Paauwe, The Other Twin, 2024, courtesy GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide
Deborah Paauwe was one of the first artists to show at the Greenaway Art Gallery when her career had barely begun, a career which grew significantly and gained her national and international renown. She was the SALA featured artist in 2004 and the subject of the excellent SALA monograph by Wendy Walker, entitled Beautiful Games, published by Wakefield Press, which explored her work in depth.
In this year’s SALA exhibition, Paauwe’s exhibition The Other Twin continues her consideration of the development of female identity through adolescence and early adulthood with a series of photos showing young women, mostly in pairs, dressed in pretty, gender-defining dresses, with their faces masked in various ways. The images convey a powerful sense of tactility — the sensuousness of the skin, with all its blemishes, and of the fabric. By suggesting stages and events in each sitter’s life, the clothing acts as costume and as an index to social and historical position.
As the sitters are anonymous, they could represent any girl or female-identifying person to which the viewer might relate. The poses ambiguously suggest both formality, in which the poses are staged, and informality, in which personality and private action are discretely captured, rendering the viewer as voyeur. The sitters’ appearance and postures convey gender identity and conformity to social norms, recalling philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity. Their masking can also be seen as a teasing gesture to the viewer, variously suggesting coyness, modesty or unavailability. In some of the images showing two girls, their poses suggest familiarity and intimacy, adverting to the vital emotional bonds typical of close relationships.
Paauwe’s studies of female development have been a revelation throughout her career. Her photos are at once exquisitely beautiful and psychologically probing, reminding us that we must look beneath superficial attractiveness to understand the nature of that attractiveness and the beliefs and values of contemporary society that construct female identity and roles.
Danny Fotopoulos, Curved Fluidity, installation view, courtesy GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide
In his body of work entitled Curved Fluidity, Danny Fotopoulos’s beautifully crafted, abstract, cast bronze figures have an organic character. The exhibition catalogue states that, ‘His intent is not to recreate the physical shape of human anatomy but to express the fluidity present in all living things.’ The figures could be analogues for any lifeform including the human form, and in the context of this exhibition, they could be seen as analogues for human action, with their expressive shapes and curves suggesting personality and movement frozen in sumptuous metal.
In his body of work entitled Friends and Family of the Mosaics of the Multiverse, Kurt Bosecke’s minutely detailed and brightly coloured drawings, created using acrylic paint, ink and POSCA paint markers, convey a tumultuous world of strange characters interacting with each other, a kind of dreamscape teeming with buzzing, bustling activity. At the same time, they can appear as expressionistic abstractions, and the imagery thus suggests both a bird’s eye view of life and Bosecke’s immersion in it. Evidently, Bosecke is interested in fantasy and screen culture, so that his work recreates the kinds of imaginary world which we all inhabit when we read or view fiction. All kinds of characters appear in his work, representing the kinds of characters we confront in our own lives.
Kurt Bosecke, Friends and Family of the Mosaics of the Multiverse, installation view, courtesy GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide
The three artists showing in this exhibition represent diverse approaches to artistic form but seem to share a common interest in the representation of life, and the juxtaposition of their work illuminates the way in which artists might address the nature of human society.
Paul Greenaway has indicated that GAGPROJECTS will maintain offices in Kent Town and Berlin and that he will continue to represent some artists and maintain a viewing space by appointment. But the important exhibition space at Kent Town will be sorely missed. This excellent GAGPROJECTS exhibition caps Paul Greenaway’s long and prodigious contribution to visual art.
Chris Reid
When: 31 Jul to 31 Aug
Where: GAGPROJECTS, 39 Rundle Street, Kent Town
More information: gagprojects.org
SALA Festival: salafestival.com
Deborah Paauwe, The Gingham Society, 2024
Courtesy GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide
