Exhibitions

This is the first survey exhibition of Brisbane painter Diena Georgetti's elusive work.

Georgetti achieved considerable critical attention when her blackboard paintings were first shown at the IMA in 1989, and subsequently at the 1992 Biennale of Sydney. Soon after her work took an abrupt turn, as she followed up with a series of orientalist paintings, marked by their modest scale, allegorical possibility and psychological intensity. More recently she has been producing work coopting early modernist styles to new ends.

The blackboard paintings were often exhibited in clusters. They featured phrases or words, scrawled, sometimes elegantly, sometimes awkwardly. Georgetti used a lexicon of obscure but suggestive German and Latinate words that resembled English ones. Her expressions seemed freighted with philosophical import. It is hard not to read the texts as self referential, as if inscriptions like 'Espectral lustro' embodied what they described. Georgetti's blackboards also suggest teaching aids, recalling the blackboards of Joseph Beuys. Fellow artist Eugene Carchesio characterised them as 'a darkened space of thought' and a 'poetry of severe purity'.

Georgetti's more recent paintings look rather different, but are also quasi-metaphysical. Drawing on the collage-logic of synthetic-cubism, she has grafted motifs drawn from an eclectic image-bank – favourite images from art, architecture, fashion and design – into formats inspired by early modern painting. The work is part mannerist, part hobbyist, part idealist, like someone's idea or fantasy of modern art. She forges a personal utopia from fragments of style she personally discovered, elected, identifies with and invests in. Or, as she puts it: 'In the residence of Rudolph Schindler, his colleagues and their wives, I invite myself to warm wine and communal sex... In living a parallel existence with these modernists, and all they have gifted me, I am provided more familial relevance than any blood or gene.' Curated by Max Delany and Robert Leonard; a joint project with Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne.

Catalogue Essay

For the last 11 years the IMA has mounted Fresh Cut, an annual best-of-graduates show featuring work from end-of-year shows at Queensland art schools. This year we are changing our approach dramatically. The New Fresh Cut will feature four emerging Queensland-based or Queensland-born artists, either at art school (graduating and post-graduate students) or up to six years out of art school, who have not shown at the IMA before. Each will be given $5000 towards the development of new work for the show. This support has been generously provided by our new business partner, Brisbane Airport Corporation. IMA director Robert Leonard, Queensland Art Gallery curator Russell Storer and artist Jemima Wyman selected this year’s artists from over 70 submissions. They are Eric Bridgeman, Laith McGregor, Gabriella and Silvana Mangano, and Ross Manning. [image: Gabriella and Silvana Mangano]

Catalogue Essay

Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan recently came to Brisbane from the Philippines. Much of their work concerns migration. Their window project Flight features a small house-shaped stack of domestic possessions, suggesting of the content of a suitcase. Alongside it are model aeroplanes made during art workshops the Aquilizans conducted with adults and children at Queensland Art Gallery. Made using classic art-room materials (cardboard, popsicle sticks, plastic containers, wire and wool), the models may be crude but they are inventive. Each plane has its own personality. Some are simple, others complex; some sleek, others squat; some rigid, others floppy; all are rather unaerodynamic. The collection is a study in morphology: some examples would not be recognised as aeroplanes were it not for the company they keep. Hung massed like ex-votos or fetishes, and recalling the aeroplane made by Mondo Cane cargo-cultists, the models suggest a collective fantasy of flight. The Aquilizans are also currently showing in the Singapore Biennale.
 

Greek philosopher Heraclitus is famed for his observation: 'No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.' With its stellar international line-up, The Same River Twice deals with a hot theme in recent art – historical reenactment. The artists all remake history, with a twist. In the first instalment, Gerard Byrne (Ireland) restages a 1973 Playboy roundtable on 'new sexual lifestyles' like a theatre piece, and films it; with Mike Figgis, Jeremy Deller (Britain) makes a documentary about historical reenacters performing 'the Battle of Orgreave', a 1984 confrontation between striking miners and police during the miners' strike; Thomas Demand (Germany) remakes politically significant scenes from affectless photos as paper sculptures and photographs them; The Third Memory, a video installation by Pierre Huyghe (France), explores the interplay of fact and fiction – interviewing bank robber John Wotjtowicz, immortalised by Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, we discover Pacino inspired Wotjtowicz's criminal style in the first place; and Slave Pianos (Australia) take experimental music made by artists and have it transcribed into sheet music so it can be performed by a robot piano player. Curated by Angela Goddard and Robert Leonard. (Part 2: Omer Fast, Emma Kay, and Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy; 7 March – 25 April 2009.)