Antipodean Inquiry

Yavuz Gallery presents Antipodean Inquiry, a group exhibition of leading artists from Australia and New Zealand, curated by guest curator Owen Craven. The exhibition will open on 22 January 2016 during Singapore Art Week, and will coincide with Gillman Barracks’ Art After Dark event.

Antipodean Inquiry explores the vast and varied artistic approaches that make up the fabric of contemporary art coming out of Australia and New Zealand. As nations of diverse beauty and extremes, landscape has been central to their art, as a reflection of its looming and defining presence in the Australian and New Zealand psyche. Antipodean Inquiry provides a fresh alternative frame of reference highlighting disparate narratives: nations as a complex, urban, immigrant and sophisticated society.

This ambitious exhibition looks beyond the confines of original perception to present the features that define contemporary Australian and New Zealand art: bold, quality, originality and diversity. Informed by global ideas and interactions, the artists on exhibition make work inspired by their collective, personal journeys in response to their antipodean place in the world. Their artistic practice reflects and embraces their experiences. Always distinct, their idiosyncratic voices confidently expand the global canon of Contemporary Art.

Antipodean Inquiry presents work in a variety of media. Sculptor Penny Byrne presents a politically poignant ceramic work Weapons of Mass Destruction. Photographs by Tamara Dean and Daniel Shipp explore our connection to the natural world. Works on paper feature by Steve Lopes and Joan Ross alongside paintings by Lucas Grogan, Andre Hemer, Anna Kristensen and Euan Macleod.

David Noonan works with silkscreen linen collages; Danie Mellor and Brook Andrew’s works look at their indigenous heritage and the legacy of a stolen culture; Joan Ross engages humour in her new- media video works about colonial history; and Lindy Lee’s personal works on sheet metal give insight to the complexity of Australian multiculturalism.

Antipodean Inquiry traverses a cross-section of artist practices by artists from varied sets of backgrounds, to present an intriguing and insightful look at Contemporary Australian and New Zealand Art.