preview imants tillers
TRANSCRIPT
7/29/2019 Preview Imants Tillers
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w w w. a r t i s t pr of l e. c om. a u
140 Tillers has been portraying the Australian
landscape, an iconic image o much
importance to our national identity in his
paintings. Tillers has developed a unique
and iconic style o art that merges landscape
painting with the written word. He overlays
his painting with text by way o exploring
and discussing the conceptual drive behind
a piece o art, which allows him to engage
in a dual mode o communication – the
visual and the written word – to reinorce his
message.
This most recent body o work on exhibition
at Jan Manton Art, Brisbane, continues in
this vein. Capricornia is a suite o works
inspired and inuenced by recent trips
he has made to North Queensland. The
paintings are reminiscent o the desolate,
Australian desert and have overtones o
Indigenous painting aesthetics. The earthy,
background colours o some pictures are
marked with lines that elude to the wind
ripples o a sand dune. Other images, like
‘Thou Majestic’, are composed in two parts
– a vast amount o earth in the oreground
with seemingly endless sky sitting above it.
Each o these paintings eatures word, all o
which represent the names o long orgotten
ghost towns and mining communities o
rural Queensland.
By remembering these orgotten or
abandoned places, Tillers comments
on the raw history o colonial Australia.
He intersperses the townships with their
Capricornia is the latest exhibition o new
work by Imants Tillers, an Australian artist
o great acclaim who’s dedicated his career
to producing work that has questioned
and challenged our national identity and
our place within the world. In 1986 he was
selected to represent Australia at the Venice
Biennale, which urther propelled his ideas
onto the global stage. The son o Latvian
immigrants, Tillers used his work – on a
very personal level – to explore Australia
and grappled with the perceived distance
rom Europe, the United Kingdom and the
Americas.
Tillers embraced and celebrated this
distance by orging an innovate mode o
making his art. He painted original images
but, in a post-modern sense, he also
brought together and appropriated images
by well known artists as well as those by
lesser known artists. He linked the places
that were perceived to be separate rom
one another through the voices o his peers,
giving a voice to Australian art and those
artists on the sidelines o the international art
world stage.
His work has constantly, and continues
to, make enquiries o who we are in
a national context. With an immigrant
background, Tillers work has been steeped
in a sel discovery and understanding. The
process o art making has allowed him to
explore concepts o identity, place, race
and displacement. For over orty years,
ImantsillersPreview Owen Craven
01
Indigenous place names, pointing to the
waste white Australia has let and the broken
and dark histories their settlement has
cause. The body o work and exhibition,
in addition to his travels to the land, was
inspired by the Xavier Herbert’s novel o the
same name as this exhibition. Like the novel,
this exhibition is a thought provoking and
conronting tale o race relations in colonial
Australia. The works are compassionate
oerings to the frst people o this land,
acknoledging their place, their identy, their
role important role in Australia’s history.
Imant Tillers is represented by Jan Manton Art, Brisbane
www.janmantonart.com
EXHIBITION
25 Feb to 24 Mar 2012
Jan Manton Art, Brisbane
01 Nature Speasks, 2012
02 Capricornia, 2012
03 Tou Majestic, 2012
Imagescourtesythe artistand Jan Manton Art, Brisbane