Department of Youth
It’s a sad fact of life that we all have to
grow up at some stage. So it is with the Art Gallery of NSW’s
annual ARTEXPRESS exhibition, which turns 25 this year.
Compared to the ages of the participating artists, the event itself
is becoming positively middle-aged.
ARTEXPRESS
began life as a small display for principal and teacher conferences.
The exhibition has however grown to attract hundreds of thousands
of people annually.
Drawn from works submitted for the NSW Higher School
Certificate Visual Art examination, ARTEXPRESS provides
insights into students’ creativity and the issues and ideas
that are of importance to them. The exhibition presents the
independent voice of young people to a large and diverse audience
and exemplifies not just their exceptional talent but also the
expertise of the visual arts teachers that guide them through
their studies.
This year’s ARTEXPRESS includes 62
outstanding art works selected from over 9000 students who sat
the HSC Visual Arts in 2007. These works include painting,
drawing, photography, textiles, ceramics, graphic design, film
and video, digital animation and sculpture. Students are
required to submit a ‘body of work’ that explores
themes related to personal and social experiences, world events
and politics, reflection on the past and visions of the future,
debates and dialogues about contemporary art issues as well as
of art histories.
The diversity of the materials is reflected in the
diversity of approaches in the finished works. While you’d
think that digital media would feature prominently, there’s
a surprising amount of good old fashioned painting in the exhibition.
One of the best examples is provided by Leo Benhart Kaligis’s
‘Definitive Cast’, a self-portrait with considerable
style and more than a little wit.
Sothearoth
Loeu’s collage piece ‘Untold story of the tortured
faces’ impresses with its thoughtful approach; as does Phoebe
Boyle’s work ‘Scattered images (Fragments of existence)’.
At the other end of the spectrum, Thomas Barkel brings a real
sense of playfulness to his ‘Imogen’, a piece clearly
influenced by manga but with a viewpoint all its own.
Over the 25 years of ARTEXPRESS many exhibiting
students have gone on to a diverse range of careers in the arts,
including curators, educators, photographers, animators, graphic
designers and contemporary artists. Ben Quilty and Jasper Knight,
both finalists in the Archibald Prize in recent years, are two
who have become successful artists.
If you can’t get to the AGNSW for ARTEXPRESS,
you can see virtually all the exhibited art works together with
the artists’ statements about them at the exhibition’s
special website at www.insideartexpress.com.au
.
David Edwards
