Joan Brossa, Aleks Danko, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Mike Parr, Alex Selenitsch, Alan Riddell and Richard Tipping
Installation view
works from an anonymous collection II
, 2018Installation view
Joan Brossa, Aleks Danko, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Mike Parr, Alex Selenitsch, Alan Riddell and Richard Tipping works from an anonymous collection II
24 March –1 April 2018
There are many different kinds of collectors in the same way that there are different kinds of artists – and there are many different approaches and motivations for the collection you build. My advice would always be to expose yourself to as much work as possible and see what you’re drawn to.
Jennifer Higgie, 2017
works from an anonymous collection II is the second iteration of an exhibition from a reclusive art collector’s treasury. The focus of the current exhibition is specifically text-based works from Joan Brossa, Aleks Danko, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Mike Parr, Alex Selenitsch, Alan Riddell and Richard Tipping.
Joan Brossa was a poet, but his works stood at a crossroad of languages. Frequently collaborating with other artists, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, comedians and even magicians, his work constantly went against the grain and beyond the limits between disciplines. Aleks Danko’s prolific career spans over thirty years, working in a range of media from installation and performance art to public commissions. The past decade has seen Danko create a body of work which suggests, discusses and interrogates the social, political and cultural landscape of Australia. Ian Hamilton Finlay was a short-story writer, poet, concrete poet, visual and conceptual artist, sculptor, gardener and classical moralist, now internationally recognised for his contributions to each of these spheres of culture. Repetition, imitation and tradition lay at the heart of Hamilton’s poetry, and exploring the juxtaposition of apparently opposite ideas. Mike Parr is one of Australia’s pre-eminent artists with a practice spanning performance, film, painting, sculpture and printmaking. Emerging from a background of conceptual art in the early 1970s, his interrogatory poems and word works escalated into the provocative performance art for which he is now recognised internationally. Alex Selenitschhas worked as an architect and urban designer in public and private practices in Australia and England, with long stretches as a sole practitioner in Melbourne. His concrete poems were the first of the genre to be published in Australia, and he continues to research and publish the aesthetic possibilities of a spatial literature. Alan Riddell a poet and a journalist was the author of a well known work on typewriter art. He has been included in numerous journals for his poetry throughout the world; and worked as a journalist for the Age, Daily Telegraph and Sydney Morning Herald. Richard Tipping is known as both a poet and artist. His artwork often bridges text and image, from large public sculptures to photographs, prints of concrete poetry and ‘art signs’.