The Fourth Balnaves Foundation Sculpture Project
Hany Armanious, Damiano Bertoli, Claire Healy/Sean Cordeiro, Jonathan Jones, Nick Mangan, John Meade, Nike Savvas Curator: Wayne Tunnicliffe
The predominant frame was still minimalism, but this exhibition of contemporary Australian sculpture was enlivened by the inclusion of figurative approaches. In the awkward, strange objects of John Meade and Nick Mangan, that disrupted the normative minimalist quietude, the exhibition was able to claim a certain adventurousness. This is not to say that those works that belong squarely to the minimalist tradition failed to make an impact: there were some installations that use that language adeptly and with erudition. However, there was also a sense of overly exposed, overly explored themes and strategies.
In different ways, the works of Meade and Mangan are not easy on the eye. Meade’s polyester resin figures (such as Black Duo: Self portrait as Mary Magdalene and nude with pitchfork 2004) are contorted or transformed by the addition of human hair, and appear to have been left—deliberately—formally unresolved. Combining the strategies of Surrealism—Hans Bellmer is an obvious point of reference—with mass production techniques and dissonant colour, the works jar our sensibilities. They cannot be easily reconciled: not quite fetish object nor pop culture tribute, they are a clash of abstraction and figuration.
Mangan’s obsessive carvings of ‘exotic’ woods such as teak (including The Colony 2005) also sit uneasily in the pristine gallery space. And they too use a self-consciously unresolved visual language, bringing together archetypal ‘natural’ forms, such as thorns and tree trunks, with iconography as evocative of tourist kitsch as much as grand historical and religious themes. As in Meade’s work, the intuitive psychic excavations of Surrealism appear to be an inspiration; indeed Mangan’s sculptures at times recall a Max Ernst frottage come to life. And again, the awkward combination of figuration and abstraction