From Friday 27th November – Sunday 20th December, three locals will present their varied visions: Dan Sibley’s pointillist Australiana, sleek and subtle oil portraits by Stephen Giblett and the infamously intricate line drawings of Frederick Fowler (NUROC).
Through his extremely refined, ‘print-by-hand’ technique, Dan Sibley explores the associations between visual syntax and culture, and plays with the ability of pointillism to create certain expectations and assumptions in an Australian context. Contemporary icons of Australian culture are unexpectedly appropriated: Ken Done postcards, twee tourist snaps, or, in this case, the confronting imagery of flame-engulfed cars.

In stark opposition to the searing oranges of Siblett’s paintings, the portraits presented by Stephen Giblett are cool and grey, almost clinical in their hyper-realistic precision. Though best known for jewel-bright beach scenes and heavenly bodies, here Giblett renders himself and his uncle (painter ____?) with a gentleness and reality removed from his earlier fantastic landscapes. Tiny, mundane details are delicately included, right down to the minuscule paint flecks on the uncle’s shirt.

Melbourne-based artist Fred Fowler, a.k.a. NUROC, has a long and esteemed history in Melbourne's graffiti culture. Since the tender age of sixteen, Fred has created over two hundred pieces of public art, both legal and illegal, and over fifty commissioned works. His work has been collected by the National Gallery of Australia, Multiplex, the City of Melbourne, and private collections across the globe.
Impossible to pigeonhole, Fowler’s dynamic work is full of unexpected contrasts. He juxtaposes line and pattern-based experimentation, influenced by Indigenous art from around the world, with 20th century iconography and logos. Violent, warlike imagery sits beside calm images of personal contact, sleeping women and small children.

Michael Koro Galleries has hosted a series of sell-out exhibitions since its 2008 inception, featuring artists ranging from infamous street stencillers to classic Australian painters. Directed by acclaimed local artist Adrian Doyle, the gallery is attached to the influential Blender Studios, a research and studio complex that has served as a base since 2001 for many of Melbourne’s most seminal and successful street artists.

'We Only Ever Meet On The Astral Plane'

15 Oct - 16 Nov

Opening night 16 Oct 09

Michael Georgetti and Ross Coulter

A long pipe emerges from the ceiling and dives into a sea of tennis balls. A makeshift trap balances precariously, perpetually waiting for a victim in an environment devoid of wildlife. A pump in a paddle pool quietly creates a painting in the corner. Everything is tense with potential movement...

 Duet exhibition We Only Ever Meet On The Astral Plane, created collaboratively by Michael Georgetti and Ross Coulter, explores interactions, relationships and tensions. The dualities of space and matter, the real and the pictorial, and stillness and movement are juggled and juxtaposed in a series of large-scale installations.

[The ways in which things move, the ways in which boundaries are traversed, and the ways in which things affect one another.]

Michael Georgetti’s [large-scale installations] employ a broad range of unexpected materials, from wood, rope and tape to water features, remote-control cars and microwaves. His practice is based in painting, installation, film and sculpture, drawing on all four disciplines to create dynamic, intermediary art linked to its environment. He has exhibited extensively in a variety of venues, including recent shows at local galleries Kings Artist’s Run Initiative and Westspace.

Melbourne-based artist Ross Coulter uses photography, video and installation to explore the tensions between the interior and exterior human worlds and the influence of technology on the human condition. Since his recent graduation from the Victorian College of the Arts, he has already exhibited locally and internationally and has been recognised with several awards. His recent performance in Lucy Guerin’s Untrained at the Sydney Opera House reflects his cross-disciplinary approach.

Michael Koro Galleries has hosted a series of sell-out exhibitions since its 2008 inception, featuring artists ranging from the infamous, to classic Australian painters. Directed by acclaimed local artist Adrian Doyle, the gallery is attached to the influential Blender Studios, a research and studio complex that has served as a base since 2001 for many of Melbourne’s most seminal and successful artists.

Adrian Doyle

New Australian Landscape

17 July - 16 Aug 09

Opening night '17 July 09' 6-9pm  

The house is a universal icon and in its simplest form it is one of the most recognised images on earth. It has many variations though culture and climate. Yet, the overall association with the home is generally the same worldwide.

For many the home is the height of success. The Holy Grail.

For others it is unattainable. Or a prison of balanced books and responsibility. The house is where people live out their lives. It is the mitochondria of everyday existence. I love houses and homes. I am fascinated by the designs, history and all that goes on inside.

In Suburbia, houses come together to create vast suburbs. Row after row of dreams, happiness and sorrow, scar the earth to become the new, modern, and more relevant Australian landscape.

The way we engage with the landscape has changed over generations.  We are an urbanised community, with an unfamiliar relationship with the rural landscape.

The romantic notion of the Australian landscape still exists. It has however been hijacked by sentimentality and Nostalgia. The true modern Australian Landscape is made up of identical clad suburban streets and small suburbs with small, but important suburban stories. It is in this mediocrity that Australia finds its greatness, and a large part of its identity……........

Opening July 9th and running until August 16th, New Australian Landscapes presents a collection of large-scale paintings by acclaimed artist Adrian Doyle, exploring the idea of the suburban home as Australian cultural icon.

Through meticulous use of colour and medium, Doyle’s paintings explore the idea of suburbia as a vast library of small, important histories, and the ways in which these stories of mediocrity form a large part of Australia’s identity.

Doyle studied painting at the prestigious Victorian College of the Arts, completing his Master of Fine Arts by Research in 2002. Since then he has exhibited internationally, from group shows in Dublin, Budapest and New York to a series of successful shows throughout Asia. He has completed residencies in Pakistan, China and Thailand, and will complete a residency with Artistay in France next year, during which he will carry out an intensive investigation of the relationships between Baroque architecture and rural French landscapes.

His artwork is widely collected and is included in important national and international collections such as the National Gallery of Australia. He is a recipient of the Pratt Family Scholarship, Australia Council grants as well as the Martin Bequest Traveling Art Scholarship.

The paintings featured in New Australian Landscapes are super-detailed, multilayered creations rich in pattern and recognisable iconography. Unexpected colours – khakis, umbers, bright magentas - are masterfully harmonised, drawing beauty from visual elements of our suburban surroundings that often go unnoticed.

Exhibiting concurrently to New Australian Landscapes will be I’m Here, at Ochre Galleries from 10th to 2nd August. In addition to a selection of paintings by Doyle, the exhibition will feature contemporary Australian works by leading Australian artists that further challenge notions of the urban landscape and cultural identity.  

Michael Koro Galleries has hosted a series of sell-out exhibitions since its 2008 inception, featuring artists ranging from infamous street stencillers to classic Australian painters. The gallery is attached to the influential Blender Studios, a research and studio complex founded by Doyle in 2001 that has served as a base for many of Melbourne’s most seminal and successful artists and street artists.  

photofigure 

June 2009

Opening May 29th and running until early July, photofigure brings together four of Australia’s most exciting contemporary photographers in an exploration of the human figure. Totaling thirteen large-scale prints, the artists’ diverse visions share themes of artifice and construction, as well as a palpable tension between banality and magnitude. From Michelle Tran’s starkly sensuous constructions to Paul Batt’s voyeuristic ode to the mundane, each image gently toys with concepts of the human figure and what constitutes a portrait.

Paul Batt’s critically acclaimed series Service Station Portraits 2006-08 has been the subject of numerous articles and essays, including a feature article in the current edition of Photofile. Poignant and sinister, the images’ seemingly lo-fi, surveillance-style execution belies a rich undercurrent of critical engagement. Leading art reviewer Robert Nelson describes the series as connecting “the everyday realities with a cosmic burden, almost reaching beyond the photography to a higher level of moral consciousness.” In their accusatory capture of unsuspecting subjects, he writes, Batt’s images “transform the idea of portraiture” (The Age, 2008). Selected exhibitions include solo shows at The Centre for Contemporary Photography and Kings Artists’ Run Initiative, as well as group shows at the National Gallery of Victoria and the Australian Centre for Photography.

At the age of 23, Michelle Tran has already been recognized by a number of leading national art prizes, including the National Youth Self Portrait Prize (finalist, 2008). Her quietly minimalist images, featuring footballers, fake flowers, and severely posed young women, have appeared in over 13 exhibitions and feature in the collections of the Australia Council and the Athenaeum Club. She is currently completing her Master of Fine Art at the prestigious Victorian College of the Arts.

Debuting in photofigure, Robert Starr’s painterly images inject traditional, grandiose portraiture with arresting immediacy. Inhabiting an undefined, imaginary historical world, his subjects project a realness and tangibility that contrasts sharply with their constructed costumes and set-piece background.

Though strikingly bright, airy and open, the works of Simon Cross are perhaps the most mysterious of all. A lone figure in a hazmat suit conducts inscrutable outdoor experiments, waving fluorescent orange implements against a perfectly blue sky. In one image, we are allowed a glimpse of the figure’s face, but it remains shadowed, his expression elusive. Like the other images featured in thephotofigure, the work hints at a narrative that the viewer can only imagine.

Exhibiting concurrently to photofigure will be a new work by video artist Jenny Hall, to be displayed in the gallery’s Melbourne Propaganda Windows after dark. The unsettling and deeply personal imagery complements and completes the exhibition’s overarching somber mood.  

Michael Koro Galleries has hosted a series of sell-out exhibitions since its 2008 inception, featuring artists ranging from infamous street stencillers to classic Australian painters. Directed by acclaimed local artist Adrian Doyle, the gallery is attached to the influential Blender Studios, a research and studio complex that has served as a base since 2001 for many of Melbourne’s most seminal and successful street artists.