FEBRUARY 1-18th, 2017
Five Walls is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition in our new gallery space ( 5 x 5 ) ‘Roadie Punk Paintings’ by Kyle Jenkins & Billy Gruner. We invite you to join the artists in celebrating the opening of their show and welcome you to share with us important occasion in Five Walls’ developement.
The 1970s produced many things least of all a spectacular rebellion against conservatism in many tiers of western culture. Punk music and related conceptual art practices seem to be not unrelated to a deeper cultural conflict, one that also saw truckers and roadies rise as sex symbols of working class life. The everyday is today a norm or convention itself but the blistering social criticism of that period has ramifications in contemporary practice. In painting the post 20thc rise of reductive art owes a legacy of thought to that period and poignant at a time when cultural conservatism is reaching a new apogee. Post Formalist artists Gruner and Jenkins make paintings (and other works) emerging from a late 20thc purview on Painting that in themselves are both objects of criticism and refreshed aesthetic judgement. These artists have been seminal to a ‘New Wave’ of reductive art in Australia and Gruners’ non objective series titled ‘New Work For A Failed System’, and Jenkins monochromes from his destructive ‘Celare’ series, speak of these topics directly. All via a long relationship to legacy and homage paid within a revision they produced of critical post 20thc painting practices in post 20th Australian art – while still at university conducting phd research. The artists have done much since locally and internationally and are invited to present 5 studio works each for the Five Walls’ opening show for the new project space in 2017. This is fitting as they were the first to present radical hard core work’s at the original opening of Five Walls itself.
Sarah Keighery. Artist and co founder of SNO
image credit : Patricia Todarello
