Anna Schwartz Gallery

Peter Cripps' exhihibition Endless Space will be on view at the IMA, Brisbane, 13 October - 24 November 2012.

Melbourne artist Peter Cripps has been a key figure in Australian art since the 1970s. He emerged at a time when minimalism and conceptualism were challenging an older idea of art generally, and of sculpture specifically. As an expression of those challenges, his work has been concerned with logics and technologies of display. Cripps explores the relationships—both formal-phenomenological and conceptual-ideological—between objects and the spaces in which they are presented.

Endless Space exhibition spans Cripps's career. The earliest works were produced in the late 1960s, while the latest works were made specially for the show. The show traces several ongoing strands of his inquiry. One strand is mirrors. The show includes examples of Cripps's mirror studies from the 1970s (which explore the spatial paradoxes mirrors produce) and the Public Project works that he has been making since the early 1990s (Tatlinesque towers mounted with convex surveillance mirrors). Another strand is the influence of landscape. Cripps's sculpture was informed by his childhood environment, particularly its distinctive coastal architecture (with its concrete-block bathing pavilions and World War II bunker remnants) and the Mordialloc timber yard (with its typography of drying kilns, timber stacks, and railway lines). This influence is apparent in the Above and Below Ground constructions he began making in 1968.

Alongside minimalism and conceptualism, museology has been a key influence. While working as an artist, Cripps has been employed as a curator, making institutional exhibitions of other artists' works. In the 1970s, he was an assistant curator at Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria, and, from 1982 to 1986, he was Director of the IMA. Partly because of this, thinking about archives and museums, and their languages and technologies of display, underpins much of his work. The exhibition includes Shells of Past Activities, a personal museum composed of photos, texts, and state-library reading cards.

For more information, see the IMA website.

Emily Floyd's This place will always be open, the inaugural Ian Potter Sculpture Commission at MUMA, opens Saturday 6 October, 2012.

Winding an unorthodox itinerary through the sculpture court at MUMA, This place will always be open, 2012 is a text-based sculptural work fabricated from painted and powder-coated steel. With a font designed by the artist, it derives its logic from modernist typography, albeit in a highly abstracted form. Almost – but not quite – pushed to the point of illegibil- ity (attesting to our distance from, and yet ongoing influence of the textual reference), Floyd’s high-key polychrome letters present a declarative, emblematic slogan, whilst being open from behind to reveal the constructivist manufacture and aesthetics of the work.

The letters themselves serve as a marker of place, and vari- ously operate as a form of civic discourse, public furniture, or library stack, creating a place where students and visitors can sit, read and enjoy the landscaped area of the sculpture court, while also reflecting upon a specific history and poten- tial invoked in what is an apparently simple sentence.

Emily Floyd’s work is the first in an annual series of com- missioned sculptural and/or architectural works, developed to establish new opportunities for artists, and new models of practice, thinking and research into public sculpture and architectural practice.

Details of the project are available here.

Work by Daniel von Sturmer is included in 'Contact, Artists from Aotearoa/New Zealand' at Frankfurter Kunstverein.
Exhibition dates: 5 October – 25 November, 2012

The Frankfurter Kunstverein pres- ents the group exhibition CONTACT. ARTISTS FROM AOTEAROA/NEW ZEALAND on the occasion of New Zealand’s role as guest of honor at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair. The title originates from a 1974 performance by Jim Allen in the Auckland Art Gallery, which was centered
on the expanded notion of “contact” as a mental, physical, and social interrelationship and thus exempli- fies a period in which New Zealand artists explored different paths for dealing with their history and cultural context. The word “contact” refers to the network of relation- ships between the two dominant ethnic groups in bicultural Aotearoa/ New Zealand: the indigenous popu- lation of the Māori and the white settlers, “Pakeha”.

The exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein brings together paint- ings, photographs, films, and instal- lations by 25 New Zealand artists, thus offering a complex picture of art production in Aoteaora/New Zealand over the past 40 years.

For more information, please click here.

The first annual commission for the Ian Potter Sculpture Court will see a major new public work by Emily Floyd explore the role and legacy of the university campus (and museum) as a site of political potential. Drawing its title and conceptual framework from the experimental student struggles at Monash University during the 1960s and '70s, and incorporating a series of activities and publications instigated by Floyd, This Place Will Always Be Open serves as a space for social encounter - reinvoking a utopian spirit that is open, inclusive, free, provisional and generative.

For more information, click here