Obviously, colour is the shared creed amongst these works even if each artist operates from differing belief systems. With each artist embracing, utilising and celebrating colour differently, each delivers highly divergent impacts. From the elegant, prismatic vibrato of Mark Francis to the wild, pink assault of Jan Albers, to the quieter material symbolism of Jane Bustin… each of these artists acknowledge colours capacity to inflame, to calm, to beguile but they also understand its role in constructing the fundamental architecture of sight.

Joining Albers, Culbert and Nikolic’s colours are positively incandescent – Hunter’s and Vary’s swirling expressionist gesture are fuelled by colour, whereas Gerold Miller’s exquisitely honed reliefs unburden colour from any demonstrative obligation. On first sighting, Shila Khatami eschews colour but of course she gives us the polarities between which the full spectrum exists.

Fox Jensen McCrory is delighted to present Farben (IV) which includes works by Jan Albers, Shila Khatami, Elisabeth Vary, Mark Francis, Jane Bustin, Tomislav Nikolic, Gerold Miller, Bill Culbert & Todd Hunter. 

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One of Britain’s most respected painters, Mark Francis Transverse Wave series demonstrate his rare capacity to finesse material, establishing a weave of colour and form that feels partially rooted in Francis’s long interest in the making the invisible visible.

The tender procedural action of Francis finds its antithesis in Koen Delaere’s extravagant paintings that appear to be made by deep tectonic actions where pigment is driven from top to bottom and back again, revealing a complex stratum of pigments and polymers that gather at the top and bottom edges in unlikely accumulations that feels more geological than gestural. If ever there was a reimagining of Rosenberg’s “action painting” – this is it.

Jan Albers & Ulrike Schulze  are both sculptors, but neither can quite rid themselves of the influence of painting. Both use colour expressively and one senses that they both are drawn to colours capacity to inflame and to temper. Alber’s faceted works – carry a folded neo-Cubist sense of the figure and Schulze’s ceramic forms hold an echo of Cycladic sculpture, both in geometry and personality.

Tomislav Nikolic (AUS) is a painter but like Albers and Schulze he sees painting as an event in the round. His extravagant frames are fully complicit in the composition and in the complex cocktail of colours that comprise his neo-Rococo portraits. Sitting out from the wall they behave like sculptural reliefs and like ancient reliefs, which we have become accustomed to seeing as weathered marble monochromes, they are profoundly animated by colour.

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In 2010 Jensen Gallery became Fox Jensen/Sydney & Auckland – and a few years hence, Fox Jensen/Auckland became Fox Jensen McCrory. The individual energies of Emma Fox & Sarah McCrory are extraordinary, but together the dictum “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” is absolutely proven true.

2025 looms as a significant gear change for the galleries, much welcomed after the longer than intended hiatus for the Sydney gallery. Whilst this has not been without its frustrations, we are thrilled to be finally attending to a wealth of exhibitions, artist visits and projects

Andrew, Emma, Sarah & Tyler

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We live between two countries, between two climates and between two private histories. Australia is a vast continent whose climate is extreme – its sheer scale, comparable to all of the so-called ‘United’ States, drives its terrifying heat and aridity and nourishes its unexpectedly lush zones.

It is bathed in sunshine much of the time and we are mostly grateful for the light and warmth, but when it rains it can feel threatening, biblical. It’s the land of the flashflood, where water scurries over hard, dry ground in search of escape, of somewhere to be, often causing real havoc along the way and denying the landscape the rational irrigation system so much of it needs.

Coming from New Zealand where dampness and its associated chill are conditions most of the country regularly endures, all that sunshine just a short flight away, is symbolic of both Australia’s view of itself as the lucky country and New Zealand’s darker, gothic and self-deprecating atmosphere.

For all that I’ve never thought to make an exhibition called ‘sunshine’ for whilst we confess to loving it regardless of fire and dermalogical threat, it is rain that manifests our need for shelter and warmth, it is rain that carries us off to sleep and it is rain that encourages deeper introspection and poetry. 

When Katherine Mansfield said “I love the rain. I want to feel it on my face”, one can easily imagine that ‘rain’ could be substituted for ‘sunshine’ and find many, if not more adherents to this option. So too of John Updike’s statement, “rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life” – this is also true of sunlight. 

Whatever your meteorological preference, these artists and I share a regular and unreasonable enchantment with rain. It is a notifiable condition apparently – we are self-diagnosed pluviophiles. It seems inexcusable to not have at least one condition these days and I think better this than a more traumatic variant. 

Saul Leiter’s evocative photographs of mid-century NYC in the midst of torrential rain and snowstorms speak to the acute romanticism encouraged by inclement conditions and his likely life-long condition. 

His photographs mostly place us on the inside, warm and dry, looking out through windows to fairly severe wintry conditions, views blurred by rivulets of rain and compositions cropped with a casual quality of Japonism. Leiter’s images are about intimacy and the close scrutiny of condensation and he himself said “a window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person.” 

Of course, even if we share Leiter’s intimate snug viewing conditions, I sense that in each of these artists there is something of Caspar David Friedrich’s determined wanderer in the fog that actively seeks out intemperate conditions in search of a little natural adversity. 

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to do with one spoken here, or anywhere. Paul Celan

The dislocation of language

Painting can dislocate vision, dismantling the structures we fervently believe we depend on to make sense of our visual world.

Amidst this reorganisation of vision, new structures can emerge that invert the very architecture of sight, opening vision to its symbolic, interpretive and metaphorical potential, quelling its orthodox role as mere facilitator of depiction.

Poetry, in the hands of Paul Celan, ferociously dismembered language, and with it, deprived us of the calm, illusory narratives we prefer, those stories and rhythms that we use to sanitise remembrance.

Amidst this, at times, brutal treatment of language Celan achieved a new and uncomfortable sensate measure for words that simultaneously elevated and contaminated them. Cleaven, raw, alkaline – Celan’s language functions as a flagrant conspirator in the delivery of menace and indecency. Perhaps it is the uncomfortable synaesthesia that Celan’s poetry invites that makes it so alluring to artists – to painters more particularly. Paintings’ dependency on hidden dialects that dismantle syntax, offers us the opportunity to see with more than our eyes. 

The best art disrobes before us rather than covering up. Shed of garments, the fragile beauty and deprivations of immodesty ought to save us from our very worst instincts, but in Celan’s barren landscape there is little communion, infrequent redemption and only faint hope.

These works assemble quietly in a room on the other side of the world – more than a lifetime away from the stained soil of Europe. Why here and why now? “No reason – Nothing, No-one.”

Born a little ahead of Celan, Czech writer Franz Kafka’s family would suffer at the hands of the same malignancy.

Kafka said that “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us”. This is a harsh imperative and one I am certainly not up to. However I am grateful that artists with whom we are fortunate enough to work alongside, gently remind me and occasionally compel me to do just that.

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My painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil.
Ad Reinhardt (1975). “Art-as-art: the selected writings of Ad Reinhardt”
 
The image of Ad Reinhardt peering into his own painting shows a cooler, 20th century version of Caravaggio’s Narcissus. Though it was not vanity that drew Reinhardt to search in the dark recesses of the pool… it was the reverse. For painting might grant us the opportunity to lose oneself in the “desert of the non-objective” rather than to locate one’s reflection so as to admire it.

When Rothko said that “a painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience”, he implied certain shared obligations for both the painting and its viewer.  That judgement is suspended in favour of feeling, that we allow an encounter with (his) painting to approach transcendence. The pursuit of this metaphysical state, something some painters have long wished to attend to was central to Rothko’s aspirations, as indeed it was to Malevich, to Turner and to Casper David Freidrich. These painters wished that painting might shoulder the burdens of theosophy, deliver the devotional clout of divinity and through their material depictions they may bring forth a “nonmaterial’, numinous episode.

I don’t think for a minute that any of the painters in Raven wish to emulate such cravings but what each of them do seem to seek is a distilled and open reception for work that speaks quietly and sincerely to a sensate register in us that has been reduced, subjugated by the clamour and white noise that popular culture fertilizes.
 
Raven brings together the works of major international painters and sculptors over two exhibitions, first in Auckland and then followed by Sydney later this year. Most works have never been seen before and the gallery is enormously grateful to those artists who have quietly embraced this opportunity – so much so that Raven has taken on an extraordinary dimension and life of its own.

– Andrew Jensen 

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Lawrence Carroll
Winston Roeth
Aida Tomescu
Jenny Topfer
Geoff Thornley
Boomoon
Tomislav Nikolic
Liat Yossifor
Callum Innes
Kemal Seyhan
Hanns Kunitzberger
Struan Teague

Permafrost brings together artists from Europe, USA and Australasia. For the first time in Australia, the gallery will stage a major exhibition in a stunning private exhibition space in Alexandria, Sydney. And also for the first time we will present works by new gallery artists Lawrence Carroll (USA), Liat Yossifor (USA), Hanns Kunitzberger (AUT), Kemal Seyhan (TUR) and Boomoon (KOR), alongside young British painter Struan Teague and artists familiar to the gallery’s program, Aida Tomescu (AUS), Tomislav Nikolic (AUS), Winston Roeth (USA), Geoff Thornley (NZ), Callum Innes (UK) and Jenny Topfer (AUS).

Many of the works are major in scale and ambition and despite their highly individual characters, share a mysterious double life. Between the rigour and authenticity of their making all of these works are profoundly metaphorical. They both conceal and reveal aspects of their material life and making but each transcend the recent fashion for “process”. Their collective whole is far, far greater than the sum of their parts and each work demonstrates how painting, more than any medium continues to enfold vision and tactility with poetry.

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Australian born artist Lawrence Carroll. Lawrence sustained a major career on either side of the Atlantic having moved to America as a child and his work has been presented and collected by museums worldwide. Lawrence sadly passed away on May 21st this year.

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