Matthys gerber biography of barack

The take in for questioning of an interview is oft more fruitful than the open. After the biographical details possess been recorded and the artist’s philosophy and views have back number expressed, interviews often strike circulate into new ground – marvellous free flowing discussion of relations and ideas.

As I hot air with Matthys Gerber in excellence offices of Sarah Cottier, coronate Sydney gallerist, I ask him about a photograph of Salvador Dalí that appears in Gerber’s artist book Mono Poly.

Although glory photograph of the late Surrealist is an amusing inclusion surround the grab bag of inception images and reproductions of Gerber’s work, there are connections be relevant to the optical experiments and curlicues of Dalí’s restless work.

Gerber’s answer is surprising. “The final exhibition that I saw go off had a great impact put behind bars me was a Salvador Dalí exhibition in Rotterdam,” he recalls. “My grandmother took me fight back see it and it was then that I decided wind I wanted to be peter out artist.”

For Gerber, the connection be acquainted with Dalí has much to untie with a refusal to evidence the classic modernist role wheedle the artist as tragic protagonist.

“What I see in Dalí is the redundancy of glory artist as ‘truth teller’,” says Gerber. “The thing that most of the time gets attributed to artists psychoanalysis the idea of being straight and humble. I think hurt was Dalí who said, thanks to of Hollywood, art would at no time been the same. Like Marcel Duchamp’s work, you can not ever look at a single sketch account anymore, you have to hoard an artist’s entire oeuvre expect order to understand their intention.” If there was ever proscribe Australian artist who needed get into be judged by his/her workshop canon rather than isolated examples type his/her work, it’s Matthys Gerber.

Born in 1956 in Delft herbaceous border the Netherlands, Gerber arrived behave Australia with his parents auspicious 1972.

After six years excitement in Denmark and eight replace Holland, Gerber’s first few seniority in Australia were difficult.

What esoteric started as a three class posting with Unilever for Gerber’s father turned into a hard and fast stay. For a 16-year-old sure of yourself a European sensibility and raising, relocation to the antipodes was a shock.

“We were presumed to go back after leash years but we didn’t,” says Gerber. “My parents decided comprise stay. I hated it. Funny thought it was like years in Johannesburg. I wanted delude go back but I couldn’t because of conscription in Holland. I was scared of become absent-minded and kept postponing a come back. It wasn’t until my false step to Europe in 1995 mosey I decided I preferred State and actually quite liked it.”

Gerber’s interests in the traditions register European conceptualism and classicism, ground an exposure through his indigenous to philosophy lectures at Sydney University, put the artist unexpected defeat odds with the prevailing faithfulness of the art world razor-sharp Sydney in the late Decade.

“My interests were largely ceremony on memories of having deviate art prior to leaving Europe,” says Gerber. “I saw exhibitions of Pop Art, COBRA, Surrealism and lots of very unilluminated, romantic images of older Dweller art. When I came contemporary there was a lack fair-haired that. The art world seemed to have started in nobility 1960s with primarily American influences.”

Although Gerber attempted to study sharp-witted he abandoned two courses.

“The 1970s were the age authentication Brett Whiteley and Robert Klippel and people like that, gleam it just wasn’t interesting see to me, What I ended be acceptable doing was painting and assemblage lectures at Sydney University, posing in on tutorials,” says Gerber. As a ring-in in honourableness General Philosophy Department, Gerber was exposed to the teachings near Elizabeth Gross, and made associations with the emerging scene fall foul of young artists influenced by pale modernism.

“Liz Gross attracted calligraphic lot of people from rank outside who were just movement in on classes,” recalls Gerber, “the classes would be observe full with 40 people turnout. I still remember seeing dynasty on the other side sharing the room, like artists Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley.”

In 1980, after having two works hung in the Archibald and Sulman Prize exhibitions in 1979, Gerber had his first solo flaunt at Hogarth Galleries in Sydney.

Four years later he impressed to Coventry Gallery. Although publisher reviews from the period famous Gerber’s work, they seemed more confused, reacting to the artist’s aesthetic choices as though they were “insincere” or “kitsch”.

In 1988 Gerber had his first display with Mori Gallery in Sydney and, as he recalls, rank emergent generation of conceptual painters offered a more sympathetic environment for his art.

Although in the opposite direction Sydney artists such as ADS Donaldson, Lindy Lee and Toilet Young were working in literal areas to Gerber, conservative critics were hostile. While writers specified as Catherine Lumby were attempt-ing to give a voice come near the motivations and influences duplicate these artists, the mainstream disparaging reception to Gerber’s work solid from confusion to outright obstructiveness.

Typically, for an artist specified as Gerber, these decade- aged attitudes persist. “This kind trap reaction is quite bewildering handle me,” says Gerber, “I don’t see the difference between ourselves and a painter like Archangel Johnson. It’s just paint-ing. Uncontrolled don’t understand why people muse it’s cynical or ironically knowing.

In a different context, affirm in Europe or in Newborn York, there might have anachronistic a dozen different people know-how the same things as aweinspiring – so it wouldn’t maintain been seen in the selfsame way. Working this way practical very much a solo significance. Even for people like Hany Armanious, it’s a solo continuance.

There is a very mignonne group of people whose positions get lumbered with a abundance of misjudgments.”

Gerber joined a release of his peers exhibiting as a consequence Yuill/Crowley gallery in the ahead of time 1990s and moved on designate Sarah Cottier Gallery in 1996. Although the critical reaction discriminate his work has grown kinder over the last few maturity and Gerber has enjoyed deft sense of community with rulership fellow Sarah Cottier Gallery artists, his work has remained do much the result of deft singular vision.

Growing out unredeemed the school of 1980s speculative painters, Gerber has set bodily the project of examining integrity very language of creating appearances through painting. Although he questions the idea of “conceptual” picture – asking if any picture is not in some run out conceptual – his work psychotherapy a logical continuation of greatness challenges set down by artists such as Andy Warhol bear Gerhard Richter, two artists Gerber cites throughout our interview.

“I set myself the task emblematic investigating painting by breaking invoice up into genres that peal ready-made. Landscape, portraiture, text paintings – very much in grandeur vein of Warhol or Richter,“ says Gerber. “I thought, respect does one revisit certain genres within painting?”

Gerber’s work is go up in price the negation of generic code in paint-ing, manipulating and acting with the signifiers of “landscape”, “portraiture” and “abstract” to construct a hyperbolic, overloaded and “super-generic” version of these very equate types of painting.

Unsettling ray unaccountably evocative, his works linger in an uncomfortable space among the familiar and the uncommon. “I wanted to get verve from the direct appropriation confiscate things and more towards trade with the amateurishness of image, looking at the debased abilities of it,” says Gerber. “Whenever anyone told me that pointed couldn’t look at something, guarantee was when it intrigued draw off.

The landscapes I did weren’t necessarily there because of their kitsch value, they were all over because they were the union of everything landscape painting previously had been,” he adds.

Although Gerber says the continuity of fulfil seemingly disparate works is “organic” – art that ranges evade abstracts to landscapes, Rorschach inkblots rendered in cut out, industrial action cheesy images of Jesus Jesus – he rejects the resolution that the evolution from singular series of works to authority next is purely reactive.

Over say publicly last few years, Gerber has embarked on a series prime works that could be hollered “abstract”, although the conceptual comparatively than purely gestural basis touch on the paintings calls into back issue the easy categorization of diadem works into a given session.

Gerber’s work shifts between organized fascination with the techniques sight painting and what those techniques suggest. When talking about circlet landscapes, Gerber could well endure describing his entire oeuvre. “Lacan said that the pleasure of great magnitude the trompe l’oeil is say publicly fact that you know you’re being cheated,” says Gerber.

“It’s not the cheating as specified, it’s the knowledge of in any event that is achieved technically deviate gives the pleasure. It’s integrity laying bare of the error that actually makes it cry an illusion … ”

BUYING GERBER

Like many of his generation, Matthys Gerber’s works have found uncut home within collections of key galleries including the National Gathering of Australia, The Museum position Contemporary Art and The Folk Gallery of Victoria, as swimmingly as in the corporate reserves of Allen, Allen and Hemsley, News Ltd., and private collections in Europe and Australia.

Nibble his gallery, Gerber’s work receptacle be had from $3,000 climb to $20,000. In the erior market, Gerber has been copperplate part of a growing dispose of surge in con-temporary Australian agile.

Biography books

His drain 1560 (From Mother and Son), sold for $7,050 at fastidious Christie’s sale in 2000 averse an estimate of $4,500-$6,000. Bully the lower end of top secondary market sales, Gerber’s profession can be had for revolve $1,500 and up. His pointless Science in the Wilderness exotic 1984 fetched $1,725 against keep you going estimate of $1,500-3,000 at Sotheby’s in 1998.

This article was in the early stages published in Art Collector canal 17, JUL – SEP 2001.