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Journey to Nowhere

The Surprising World of Imants Tillers

Katrina Chapman
Eyeline 89
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Who, in Latvia in 1900, would ever imagine that a descendent of Latvians would be collaborating with a Warlpiri artist. It’s quite incredible.1

Imants Tillers, December 2017

 

On the 6 July 2018 Australian artist Imants Tiller’s exhibition Journey to Nowhere opened in Riga, Latvia. While internationally acclaimed and well-known in academic and commercial art circles, Tillers is relatively unknown to the general public in his parent’s homeland of Latvia. How, then, did he come to be showing a major retrospective in the Latvian National Museum of Art in the year commemorating one hundred years of Latvian independence, accompanied by a feature-length documentary by Latvian filmmakers about his life and art? The answer is every bit as surprising as many of the other coincidences and unlikely connections that have marked his life and career. The twelve months preceding the Latvian show have been an important lead up to the retrospective, filled with significant events involving people and places he could never have dreamt of being connected to as a young artist.

Finding evidence of Tillers’s interest in meaningful coincidence and the metaphysical is not difficult, least of all because he has professed as much in his own writing. This interest extends to telepathy, psychic photography and numerology.2 His study of the metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico has resulted in many reinterpretations of this artist’s work, and an obsessive interest in its links to Australia, especially to Australian Aboriginal art.3 He explores this idea in recent paintings and writing under the heading of Metafisica Australe. Tillers explains, ‘it has to do with this strange connection between Aboriginal art, which I think is metaphysical, and the work of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Journey To Nowhere, 2017. Acrylic, gouache on 90 canvas boards, 228.5 × 355cm. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

Journey To Nowhere, 2017. Acrylic, gouache on 90 canvas boards, 228.5 × 355cm. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

Nature Speaks: FN, 2015. Acrylic, gouache on 16 canvas boards, 101 × 142cm. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

Nature Speaks: FN, 2015. Acrylic, gouache on 16 canvas boards, 101 × 142cm. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.