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What happened to the survey exhibition? Art Museums in Australia seem to have abandoned them in favour of the cult of youth, popular awards and themed group shows. While we understand their responsibility to developing ever-wider audiences, their responsibility to examine the sustained practice of senior artists as a mapping of our art history has taken a back seat, a responsibility increasingly picked up by regional galleries; recall Sydney Ball’s seminal survey at Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest in 2009. What does that say about the charter of our state institutions or, more pointedly, is this oversight a manifestation of ‘Curator Chic’ that relegates the artist to exemplar of a curatorial manifesto?
Like Ball, an artist who has contributed deeply to the dialogue of Australian abstraction is Ildiko Kovacs [b.1962]. Her superb survey curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham for Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, ‘Ildiko Kovacs: Down the Line 1980–2010’, was a loosely chronological presentation of the stylistic evolution that defined Kovacs’s practice. Her expressionistic fields of painted gestures from the early 1980s were teased out into ribbony lines that became volumetric during the 1990s, and she eventually took a roller to that line with bold confidence. ‘Down the Line’ collectively lands a jaw-dropping punch; it is electric in the space.
Revealed across the breadth of this exhibition, we see Kovacs’s Australian mentors, echoes of Ken Whisson, Tony Tuckson, and even Brett Whiteley at times, in the early gestural works such as Crowded Square (1980-81), Untitled (1989), and Red, Black and White (1986). It was more like a sensual tango than an appropriation or conscious influence that might translate into a curatorial rationale. Kovacs responded to the non-objective tendencies of