Agent provocateur
Winner of the Archibald Prize, painter of controversial
portraits and enfant terrible of Australian art, Adam Cullen’s
larger than life persona has sometimes overshadowed his art. Now
the Art Gallery of NSW seeks to redress the balance with an exhibition
that brings the focus back to the remarkable paintings and sculptures
that brought him to art world attention in the first place.
This is Cullen’s first survey show in an art
museum. Cullen has a substantial body of work from the last 15
years and has a strong presence in the Sydney art scene, controversially
winning the Archibald prize in 2000. While Cullen is best known
for his paintings, this exhibition of some 35 works also includes
early ‘grunge’ sculptures, which introduce key themes
in his practice.
Cullen’s abrasive but often expressive paintings
are a confronting, incisive and at times humorous view of life
as we live it now. His satirical paintings are a form of social
allegory, a portrait of our national psyche caught in a suspended
stage of development.
The other factor that distinguishes Cullen from
some of his peers is his loyalty to his homeland. Cullen was born,
lives and works in Australia shunning the option of working overseas,
but he is also one of the few artists of his generation who works
within a ‘national’ idiom. Cullen paints types, stereotypes
and genres that have been identified as ‘Australian’:
larrikins, bushrangers, drovers, footy players, beauty queens
and antiheroes including criminals, prostitutes and drunkards.
He also regularly depicts a particular type of soft-bellied, butt-crack-exposing,
balding older male who seems as overly familiar as Donald Bradman
or budgie-smugglers.
However, it is not just in this iconography that
his Australianness can be located, but in a space he embodies
in his work, a fractured space as much psychological as it is
physical, one in which broken mirror shards reflect back to us
our sense of self and nation as equally fragmentary, shattered
and coming apart.
A dark sense of humour pervades Cullen’s work. He doesn’t
hesitate to go for slapstick in images or titles, but it is always
the sort of humour that makes us feel uncomfortable; we’re
not quite sure if laughing would be funny or cruel.
Wayne Tunnicliffe, exhibition curator, says “Cullen’s
paintings are raw, aggressive and angry with, at times, a narcotic
intensity. They are also empathic, melancholic and expressive.
In many paintings, beauty can be found in such formal elements
as his use of colours, the ways paint is applied to canvas, how
people, words and things are arranged on the monochromatic backgrounds.
The pathos of his subject matter also has a form of abject beauty,
the beauty of the decayed and coming apart, of a humanity that
is to be found in failed endeavours, misunderstandings and missed
connections.”
David Edwards
