Print media
As
a largely immigrant nation, Australia has traditionally embraced
those who seek to make a new life in this country. Sometimes,
those who come to these shores achieve great things as Australians;
and Jan Senbergs, the subject of a major new exhibition opening
at the Art Gallery of NSW this month is no exception.
Senbergs was born in Latvia in 1939. Following the
ravages of World War II, he came to Australia in 1950 as a refugee,
with his mother, grandmother and younger sister. He left school
at fifteen wanting to become an artist. But rather than attending
art school, he took an apprenticeship as a screenprinter. This
was a fortuitous move, as it provided him with the initial means
to make art.
One of the best-known of contemporary Australian
artists, his national reputation was established through exhibitions
in the latter 1960s and ‘70s in Melbourne and Sydney, largely
due to the efforts of Sydney’s Rudy Komon Gallery.
During this period, Senbergs produced about 70 singularly
interesting screenprints. These screenprints comprise startling,
obtuse and unsettling images that reflect the modern world, its
unease, fascination with technology and artificiality. These images
are amongst the most potent and original by a modern Australian
artist. He then turned his attention to the industrial reality
of our cities and ports, Antarctica and the mined landscape of
the west coast of Tasmania.
Jan Senbergs: from screenprinter to painter
comprises a generous selection of the artist’s screenprints,
some paintings related closely to them, and a number of his most
important and powerful paintings from the years after he abandoned
screenprinting in the late 1970s to the present. It presents the
artist’s prints within the context of his work as a whole,
underlining their importance to his evolution into a remarkable,
idiosyncratic and admired draughtsman and painter.
The AGNSW will also publish an illustrated catalogue
of the artist's screenprints to accompany the exhibition, which
will be the first of its kind on his screenprints. The exhibition
and catalogue of the screenprints is by Hendrik Kolenberg, the
Gallery's Senior Curator of Australian Prints, Drawings and Watercolours,
who has made a close study of the Jan Senbergs's work over the
last 25 years.
David Edwards
