2022 - Fox Jensen Gallery

PLASTIC SOUL – AUCKLAND

foxjensen — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 04:48:13 +0000

Plastic Soul brings together paintings by artists whose work insinuates deliberate sonic qualities, qualities that appear to invite a broader sensory experience. Though it is unlikely that each painter sets out with synaesthetic ambitions, you do get the sense that assonance finds its way in somehow, and that these artists open the door for it.

The nature of the sonic undertones between each of these painters is clearly very different – from Knoebel’s glorious Be-Bop agitation to Delaere’s fierce, physical and jagged feedback – but each painting delivers an undeniable audible dimension – even if Umberg’s paintings in particular, approach statistical silence.

The exhibition includes mesmerising new paintings by Mark Francis, one of which, Jericho will be accompanied by a composition by acclaimed British musician/composer Andy Cowton. Their collaboration speaks to the heart of Plastic Soul – where our perceptions are spliced together in a happy cocktail of sound and vision. These works/collaborations form part of a suite of works conceived by Patricia Bossio that span diverse musical genres.

Also included are major paintings by Hanns Kuniztberger, Erin Lawlor and Todd Hunter and whilst the energy, pitch and tempo couldn’t be more contrasting, any dissonance will feel temporary.

Kunitzberger’s paints “volume”, its rise and dissipation with a sensitivity and feeling that is magical. Pigment gathers like grains of sound so that the interior of the painting has an amplitude and tone that is elemental. At the paintings edges sound evaporates into a hushed zone.

I regularly think of Lawlor’s paintings are meteorological. There is a swirling tumult in the accomplished brushwork that leads us headlong into the tempest. Of course, such wild conditions are measured as much by their sonic qualities as they are by their moisture and velocity. The momentum that Lawlor builds in her painting, the air pressure can be almost giddying. This sensation alone feels “inner ear” as much as optic.

Todd Hunter paintings often have a spikey electricity to the gesture. The brushwork turns fast, pivoting and dancing through chromatically charged fields. Hunter paints to an edgy soundtrack, much of his studio given over to the delivery of surround sound and that’s what the paintings convey – an enveloping version of quadrophonic sensation.

Fox Jensen McCrory & Fox Jensen are enormously grateful to the artists for their enthusiasm and support for the project and we wish to make special mention of Andy Cowton and Patricia Bossio whose collaboration on the composition for Mark Francis’s Jericho.

Andrew Jensen, November, 2022

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AIDA TOMESCU “the ear in the river and the prayer in the stone”

foxjensen — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 10:48:25 +0000

The real art of conducting consists in transitions.
Gustav Mahler

There is no texture in Tomescu’s paintings. These are not paintings about surface – nor are they made in the pursuit of legibility – rather, like Tomescu they aspire to clarity. There is no room for bravura in Tomescu’s performance. Such theatre would be an indulgence and certainly for her, simply too much is at stake to risk that.

For Aida Tomescu, work provides a metaphysical foundation that allows for evolution and the opportunity to be captive of deeper esoteric perception and most critically to discern the nature of transition.

For these are paintings about forms evolution, and as Mahler suggests, art consists/exists in transitions. In this sense they are less about fixity and more about freedom. Setting emotion well aside, Tomescu trusts that her deeper, anatomic ambition will facilitate the synthesis of openness and construction. The fusion or unity of these contingent states is expressed in the connections between forms.

In a recent conversation, Tomescu said that she is always prepared to “give up something good for something greater”. Look closely and you will find evidence of this exchange. This spirit became particularly apparent in the watershed triptychs Sewn onto Stones in the Sky, 2019 (Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales) and A Long Line of Sand III, 2021 (Collection: National Gallery of Australia).

Both paintings, in their panoramic fields, gave her the opportunity to concentrate a new sense of expansiveness that would allow structure to emerge through the body of paint. Perhaps counter-intuitively, these grand works also delivered greater delicacy and intimacy as they invite us into the construction of the painting. This notion of coalition between elements, recalls something of Cezanne’s famous dictum that “when the colour achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also”.

In “the ear in the river and the prayer in the stone” we see the same sweeping embrace and an even more open cadence. The raw linen areas are critical to the volume and presence that the forms deliver. In a sense the openness holds the weight and influence of the pigment. There is joy and beauty in these paintings, in their resolution of dissonance and harmony.

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TERRAIN

foxjensen — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 04:17:20 +0000

By early evening all the sky to the north had darkened and the spare terrain they trod had turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.

Cormac McCarthy

It’s hard to avoid landscape in New Zealand – practically and conceptually. One doesn’t have to move far from home before you find yourself ‘in’ it, forced to negotiate its edges and ravines, its clifftops – allow for its wild meteorological flux, accept its emptiness, respect its geological rawness, and simply get to grips with its simultaneous offerings of pleasure and risk. Then if you plan to spend any time in it, you are compelled to acknowledge something of its deeper symbolic loadings, knowing that its darkness can be significant, and invites a physical and psychological vulnerability.

These provocations are not completely peculiar to New Zealand of course. For each of the artists in this exhibition, choosing to respond to landscapes inescapable presence, either as a painter or photographer, gives them the opportunity to confront the allure and fear, the sense of significance that the landscape generates.

I have resisted making an exhibition about landscape (painting especially) for a variety of reasons. Firstly, there are simply so many awful depictions of landscape in goopy material and dashy brushstrokes (I grew up with a few of them) that I have always sought out art that nourishes other aesthetic notions in my mind. Secondly, I have long felt that being in the landscape and all that that involves – the heat, the chill, the buffeting wind, the light – eclipses any experience one can achieve through its depiction, whatever the facility. This is fundamentally still how I feel.

There have been some fine landscape painters in New Zealand – not surprisingly, the best of them have always used the landscape as a lens through which they can examine a wider, more complex human condition, so that whilst the subject may appear to be the contours of the land, the content may be much more – how do we find a place to exist (in it).

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GARY McMILLAN – OUTSIDE

foxjensen — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 02:15:05 +0000

Outside

Visual kinetics in the paintings of Gary McMillan

“Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you” (or a Gary McMillan painting…)

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Gary McMillan is a patient man. His paintings coalesce atom by atom, their volatile fabric feel perpetually in motion. His energised molecules, flitter in an aroused state, trapped between solidity and dispersion – as if casting around for a mate in the hope of forming a happy compound. And whilst all this ceaseless activity is underway, McMillan deftly loads the brush with another particle of paint – anticipating painterly fusion.

This visual fluctuation approximates the way that we see but pretend that we don’t. Our minds and senses constantly correcting, making allowances for the inherent instability of our visual world. In this sense Gary McMillan’s paintings lend yet another version of the truth to the fiction of stable vision.

At this point in “post-truth” history these paintings seem to quietly accept the precariousness, the unreliability of even the most careful depictions, by accepting that nothing is what it seems.

The virus has certainly changed our perceptions of what “outside” means. For those of a more nervous disposition, being outside may’ve always carried more inherent sense of risk – the notion of hunkering down inside, out of the weather, away from the maddening crowds, safe and warm… or cool as the season dictates, was true immunity.

However since “19”, outside has been simultaneously felt synonymous with fresh air, sunlight – “is there a way to get that inside the body somehow”, liberty in general, but also, ironically carrying with it a greater risk of transmission, if you were to stray too close to an infected carrier that is. This is truly the stuff of “Sci-Fi”, or worse “horror”, or heaven help us both.

This noirish territory has always pulsed away in the background of McMillan’s paintings – from the skewed rear window vistas of a car in flight, to the “triffid-like” treatment of the streetlights… or are they simply deep-state surveillance devices. I’m not suggesting that McMillan is a conspiracy guy at all, but he may well, like me, be increasingly nostalgic for the time when a good conspiracy was largely part of Hollywood fiction rather than front page news on Fox.

For those isolating indoors, the outside became more than simply losing the pleasures of “al fresco”. Anxiety about the impact of the virus, FoMO, or as David Bowie conveyed in his apprehensive and unorthodox, (when were they ever not?) 1995 album, Outside…

It happens outside

The music is outside

It’s happening outside

The music is outside

It’s happening

Now

Not tomorrow

Yesterday

Not tomorrow

Of course, Bowie always liked a glorious fiction. He himself came from Mars, possibly brought the virus on his red space boots. Wherever it came from, Wuhan market or Lab or indeed, the Red Planet courtesy of Ziggy Stardust, it seems that we’re going to spend much of our future debating whether the most protected place to be is in indoors or outdoors…

Andrew Jensen, July 2022

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RED SEA

foxjensen — Fri, 17 Jun 2022 09:42:20 +0000

Red rain coming down

Over me in the red, red sea

Over me

Red rain. Peter Gabriel

Red Sea brings together works by Gideon Rubin, Liat Yossifor, Hanns Kunitzberger, Imi Knoebel, Aida Tomescu and Tomislav Nikolic.

Each of these painters, some more candidly than others, accept the emotional capacity that colour can deliver. Some painters may say that ‘colour chooses them rather than they choose it’ and that decisions about colour are equally decisions about form and structure.

Well, whatever the nature or direction of this transaction between painter and colour is, whatever the express intent in ‘using’ red is, having taken up that pigment it would be disingenuous to not acknowledge that is likely to deliver clear visceral impact for the viewer, not least because of the associations red has collected along the way.

Having said that, whilst this exhibition doesn’t seek to place the fervid capacity of red front and centre, it does quietly underline the fact that red can inflame the composition and that there is a chromatic imperative that red communicates, and no amount of disclaimer can make red’s authority feel blue.

In Liat Yossifor’s wild ‘alla prima’ maelstrom, Wide Red, the surface is forcefully etched, incised by her selection of brushes and tools in a concentrated swirling performance. The viscous body of paint becomes increasingly like a raw topographical map, a chart perhaps of a turbulent and contested land.

Tomislav Nikolic’s Hiding in the shadows of your heart, takes the proportions of a classical portrait. Nikolic’s use of colour is always in the service of character and temperament and this sitter is very pleased with their red ensemble. Extravagant, dashing and determined.

Hanns Kunitzberger’s, deep red is perhaps the most demure of all the paintings in Red Sea. The pigment in Hälfte 2021- FRÜH 2021 appears of have settled, like a red mist delivered in the night. The intensity of the pigment builds and swells towards the interior and dissipates at the edges like a single modulated note.

Imi Knoebel’s Big Girls, both by title and form, approach portraiture too. This has long been a thread in his work. From the famous Grace Kelly Portraits through to the Anima Mundi paintings, Knoebel has used colour and the thickness of his supports to insinuate body and personality.

Aida Tomescu resists the connection between colour and emotion and yet for many Tomescu’s work speaks to an intensity and commitment that must be somehow impassioned. Well, it is, critically however in Tomescu’s hands, colour is also structural, anatomic, and poignant. In Violet with Candles, this is more than apparent.

Gideon Rubin’s small portrait painting, White Veil has no red at all. But it insinuates something of Red Sea as an idea, a place, a time, and a continuum. This emblematic work is joined in Red Sea by Red Bikini – less modest, more recent, more universal but as different as they are, both share a quality of introspection, solitary figures “standing up at the water’s edge in my dream.” Peter Gabriel.

Andrew Jensen

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DELUXE – IMI KNOEBEL & WINSTON ROETH

foxjensen — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 00:11:37 +0000

Deluxe

“Before, when I didn’t know what colour to put down, I put down black. Black is a force: I depend on black to simplify the construction. Now I’ve given up blacks.” Henri Matisse

At the end of the 2021 we presented a beautiful exhibition called Raven in both the Auckland and the Sydney galleries. Each of the works followed Henry Ford’s much quoted dictum…”you can have it in any colour you want, as long as its black. And though both Knoebel and Roeth are widely celebrated for their profound engagement with colour, from time to time, each set it aside as they reach back as if to reorient themselves – Roeth more towards the final paintings of Reinhardt, Knoebel certainly back to Malevich. Whatever this process invites, it is not long before each is once again lassoed by the psychological, emotional & visceral allure of colour. Neither have or likely will ever abandon black as Matisse suggested he had, it’s just that like Hockney, most all of the time they “prefer living in colour”.

My working relationship with Winston Roeth stretches back to the tail-end of the 20th century – still feels odd to say that. We met in NYC in the mid 90s and it was and continues to be a revelatory connection – for Winston is the rarest painter of deep and compelling sensation, a painter who seems able to access colour’s truly magical capacities. More critically, without meeting him in 1995 it feels less likely I’d have met Imi Knoebel five years later, such was the epiphany I enjoyed in Roeth’s Broome Street studio, about where the gallery’s future lay.

Despite his seemingly strict adherence to borders and grids, geometry itself may, ironically, hold less interest. Looking at certain works, the grids especially, this may appear to be a perverse suggestion, but my feeling is that his employment of regular calculus allows Winston to stabilise the buoyancy and volatility of colour. He delights in the activity that the intersections can invite, the ‘op-ish’ animation that occurs as pigments double up and react to volume and speed – but perhaps such exacting architecture may be the only way that he can approach measuring the immeasurable.

Knoebel too uses geometry both logistically and expressively. Often his paintings are built out from the wall taking the form of an expanded matrix – thus colour gets opportunity to swell further as the construction of the object allows for its thickness and body. Knoebel is more inclined to jolt the orthogonal, destabilising the conformity of the grid so as to adjust and enliven it – as Mondrian demonstrated in the glorious New York City 1. Like Roeth, Knoebel doesn’t seek answers in mathematics. Such Formalism is a dead-end and neither would dare entertain such Calvinist restrictions when colour offers up such carnal pleasure.

In Deluxe both paintings by Winston Roeth comprise 24 stone slates. Each are essentially the same size with two holes through which nails fix them to the wall. Roeth selects his slates carefully – he has always been mindful about the supports he uses, having long ago abandoned the orthodox linen-stretcher combination. The surfaces of the slate have a flattened topography complete with gentle ravines and ridges that have telling implications for the way that pigment and light gather across this territory. The variegated edge of each slate heightens this activity as the iridescent qualities on his pigment become even more evident. The juxtaposition of colour has a nigh-on bebop jazziness to it, your eye moving around the grid in search of the next note. The gold grid is quieter, positively hushed by comparison. It works a tonal register…a little more Bob James than Bitches Brew.

Imi Knoebel’s Anima Mundi works have grown incrementally over many years to now feel like a profound statement of chromatic and symbolic intent in his broad and energetic practice. Harking back to the form and character of the Grace Kelly Portraits, these small vertical panels operate as single works and then gather into clusters of 2, 3, 4 & 5. As they gather, they assemble a glorious chromatic discord and funkiness. Like Roeth’s more bebop compositions, the eye is not invited to rest and be seduced by the calm of the monochrome. Knoebel’s playing is spikier, unexpected – we understand colour by contrast and collision.

However idiosyncratic these two wonderful painters’ exploration of colour is, it is a rare treat to see them in such close conversation. Such retinal pleasure feels especially welcome, and it seems Matisse was right…no surprise there…

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MARCH – COEN YOUNG – AUCKLAND

foxjensen — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 23:48:32 +0000

“For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.” – John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

Coen Young knows this. Thus, he shrewdly leverages our abundant narcissistic urge simultaneously engaging and disrupting our gaze. Young’s ongoing series, however mirror-like, obstruct pure reflection through the glitches of material and contingencies of making. Whatever hope or chance we wished we had to glimpse ourselves in a tranquil pool, to even pretend that we are seeking anything other than our own appreciation, is undone by the veils of distortion that his wilfully faltering alchemy invites.

Selfie stick in hand, Narcissus would’ve got up and left long ago, in search of a new, more flattering reflecting pool. It’s not that Young’s mirrors don’t reward our attention, it’s just that they have long denied any obligation to adulate in this mutual exchange between object and viewer.
And in this culture that relentlessly, even voluntarily confuses recognition with understanding, Young’s faltering mirrors compel us to ask what it is that we see, what might we feel, what we can sense about ourselves, without the comfort of likeness and the dull amusement of self-absorption?
Good painting, like literature should and does make us curious – surely that is what Steinbeck sought – that by being curious we elevate our sentient selves, by being alert to the possibility of an unexpected encounter. On the face of it this seems like very little to ask for, but perhaps it is increasingly rare when the most common image we make, save and look at is of ourselves…or our dog…

– Andrew Jensen

“I don’t care what you think unless it is about me.”– Kurt Cobain

Fox Jensen McCrory is thrilled to present six new works by Coen Young at the Auckland gallery. This is the third solo exhibition the gallery has presented of Young’s works. His work has also been included in Portrait Without a Face (Sydney/Auckland), The Authority of Death (Sydney/Auckland) and at Art Basel Hong Kong. Young’s work is held in collections around the world and most recently acquired by both the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.

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FOX JENSEN SYDNEY

foxjensen — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 03:07:19 +0000

FOX JENSEN OFFICE

1/8 SOUDAN LANE
PADDINGTON, NSW 2021
TUE – SAT 11.00 – 4.00
TELEPHONE +61 2 8084 4298
ANYTIME BY APPOINTMENT

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FEBRUARY – CALLUM INNES – ALEXANDRIA

foxjensen — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 00:30:57 +0000

The paintings of Callum Innes have long expressed his desire to use the practice of painting as an act of analogue accounting. Not one that simply seeks to define time but one that measures pressure and release, and evidences touch and persuasion of a material that might well resist or misbehave, given its own tenacious character.

New paintings from Innes’s Oslo studio have joined a collection of works in Sydney, so as to make a beautiful exhibition where we can feel the gentle arc of time and studied progress that have defined this most consistent and celebrated painter.

– Andrew Jensen

Group and solo exhibitions
Fox Jensen Sydney / Fox Jensen McCrory Auckland

Callum Innes, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2000
Six Degrees of Separation, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2000
There’s Joy In Repetition, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2004
C6 H10 O5 II, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2004
Lux, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2005
Callum Innes, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2005
Melancholia, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2005
C6 H10 O5 III, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2005
Points of Orientation, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2006
Detox, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2006
Headspace, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2007
Callum Innes, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2008
20/20, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2008
The Estrangement of Judgement
Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2009
E=MC2, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2009
Cimmerian Shade, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2010
Kelly Knoebel Roeth Innes Judd, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2010
Callum Innes, Jensen Gallery, Sydney 2011
E=MC2, Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2011
Saturation, Jensen Gallery, Sydney 2012
C6H10O5 V, Fox Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2012
The Architecture of Colour, Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney 2012
The Anatomy of Loss, Fox Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2013
The Architecture of Colour, Fox Jensen Gallery, Auckland 2012
Points of Orientation, Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney 2013
Farben, Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney 2014
A Discreet Vessel, Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney 2016
A Discreet Vessel, Fox Jensen McCrory Gallery, Auckland 2016
Group Exhibition, Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney 2018
Permafrost, Fox Jensen Alexandria, Sydney 2019

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FEBRUARY – BILL CULBERT – AUCKLAND

foxjensen — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:52:55 +0000

My primary exploration is about light – light-marks in space or light-in-light, light in darkness, night-light, daylight, those kinds of things just intrigue me.

– Bill Culbert

Light, light, light, in the light

Light, light, light, in the light, ooh, yeah

Light, light, light, in the light

In the Light Led Zeppelin 1976

It’s lyrics like this that made me feel that stadium rock got all it deserved when the flash grenade of punk exploded in 1976 and reset the dial…I will confess that I’ve since become a somewhat hesitant revisionist of LZ and others but good grief…

Light has been something of an obsession in New Zealand’s shortish art history. Of course, New Zealand is not particularly special in that preoccupation but there is no doubt that there is an unrelenting bite to its quality. Whether one accepts the geographical determinism that was offered up as the driving force in so much sharply delineated painting in the 20th century or not, there is an experience of light and its capacity to throw the folds and ravines of Aotearoa into extraordinary relief, which if not unique, feels particular to New Zealand. Even New Zealander’s continue to be surprised by it – witness regular seasonal sunburn.

Bill Culbert’s practice is without question mediated by light. But rather than stay in New Zealand he spent much of his life living in France – Provence, the domain of Cézanne in particular, but more broadly the Impressionists. Whether it was the more atmospheric or poetic light that attracted Bill or that he shared McCahon’s sentiment that NZ was a “landscape with too few lovers” that drove him there. There was no doubt that his life and work would always be spread between two geographical poles, two landscapes, two differently illuminated worlds and that he seemed destined to happily straddle that distance and its accompanying contradictions.

Being with Bill’s works in recent times of course makes me hugely frustrated to have not spent more time in his company. As with the late Lawrence Carroll, an Antipodean/American painter who also chose the warm patinas of European light, we have joined forces rather too late. So, I find myself installing these unexpectedly poignant works at arm’s length with Claudia, lamenting his absence and sensing very much that the wry humour that surely accompanies any thoughtful disciple of Duchamp, would’ve been yet another enjoyable contradiction at the heart of this most intelligent and poetic artist.

– Andrew Jensen

Bill Culbert had his first solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 1977 and participated in the first Auckland Triennial in 2001. In 2013 he represented New Zealand in the 55th Venice Biennale, with an installation entitled Front Door Out Back. Permanently commissioned Culbert sculptures may be found in London, Wellington, and Auckland. Amongst his most notable collaborations were his explorations with Ralph Hotere (Te Aup?uri). With one of the most beloved, Fault, a rip of light, permanently installed on the façade of the City Gallery, Te Whare Toi, Wellington.

He was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to art, particularly sculpture, in 2008. Bill passed away at his home in Provence in 2019, three years after this wife, British artist Pip Culbert.

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