Curator: Gary Willis
One chapter in the long arts feud between Melbourne and Sydney was the export south of the exhibition, '9 Sydney 1961', a response that year from Sydney's abstract artists to the fame and figuration of the Antipodeans. Now Melbourne painter-turned-curator Gary Willis has returned the favour with the export north to Canberra and Sydney of 'X Melbourne'. With one work from each of sixteen artists, it is a snapshot of contemporary art practice in Melbourne, crossing generations and the mediums of painting, sculpture, video, computer imagery and installations. Modestly resourced, the exhibition has not the means or the pretence of being a comprehensive survey. The cooperation of the artists included depended more, one suspects, on the respect for Willis among his Melbourne peers. Nor is Willis restrained by the stance of objectivity required of institutional curators-his selection clearly reflects his own interest as an artist in the medium of paint and the exploration of myth in landscape.
With his career at one time supported by Arthur Boyd, Willis' investment in the legacy of the Antipodeans is obvious in the exhibition, in his own series of paintings around Don Quixote, and later, from 1998, the ghostly figure of Leichhardt 'vost' in the Australian desert. Juan Ford's oil on aluminium shows a similarly iconic young woman suspended over like barrenness, Waiter Burley Griffin's elegant city plan for the national capital engraved onto the metal above her. The virtuosic painter is also at work in Alex Zubryn's grungy but strongly composed rendition of a young tree caught in the empty grid of a suburban car park.
Dominating the exhibition space is Peter Churcher's large oil portrait of The Artist and his Muse. The