1940-1997
This two-part exhibition at the Queensland University Art Museum was a rare occurrence: curated by David Pestorius and spanning over half a century, the exhibition traced the history of an aspect of international modernism that has received little attention in this country.
Constructivist tendencies began to appear in Australian art during the 1940s, entering the country quietly, almost covertly. Since then, other styles, such as Post-Painterly Abstraction, Minimalism, Pop and Op art have followed but without the critical controversies that surrounded these trends abroad.
Over the decades these styles have been practised in Australia by a minority of dedicated enthusiasts, who believed in the legitimacy of the forms and their potential to perhaps rival the dominant representational, impressionistic, landscape tradition which has ruled Australian painting since the days of the Heidelberg School. And why shouldn't they? Surely these 'ring-ins' from around the world are not so far removed from the brand of impressionism Tom Roberts smuggled home in his tucker-bag from France in the late 1800s, or Leger's cubism, swiped from the volumes of the Heide library by Nolan in the 1940s?
After all, as papist Paul Taylor and appropriationist Imants Tillers have told us in recent years, this is what Australian artists are best at. We are dealers in secondhand goods, so why not come clean about it?
For those raised on realism, the world of Geometric Abstraction might likely prove an alien address. The exhibition offered few toe-holds for those unfamiliar with the terrain. This was a soiree of the sensuous, where colours, shapes and surfaces collided and combined to disorientate and delight.
In many ways, Pestorius's exhibition was not unlike a stroll through a hall of mirrors