Imants Tillers

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PREVIEW Imants Tillers

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Capricornia is the latest exhibition of new work by Imants Tillers, an Australian artist of great acclaim whos dedicated his career to producing work that has questioned and challenged our national identity and our place within the world. In 1986 he was selected to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale, which further propelled his ideas onto the global stage. The son of Latvian immigrants, Tillers used his work on a very personal level to explore Australia and grappled with the perceived distance from Europe, the United Kingdom and the Americas. Tillers embraced and celebrated this distance by forging an innovate mode of making his art. He painted original images but, in a post-modern sense, he also brought together and appropriated images by well known artists as well as those by lesser known artists. He linked the places that were perceived to be separate from one another through the voices of his peers, giving a voice to Australian art and those artists on the sidelines of the international art world stage. His work has constantly, and continues to, make enquiries of who we are in a national context. With an immigrant background, Tillers work has been steeped in a self discovery and understanding. The process of art making has allowed him to explore concepts of identity, place, race and displacement. For over forty years,

Tillers has been portraying the Australian landscape, an iconic image of much importance to our national identity in his paintings. Tillers has developed a unique and iconic style of art that merges landscape painting with the written word. He overlays his painting with text by way of exploring and discussing the conceptual drive behind a piece of art, which allows him to engage in a dual mode of communication the visual and the written word to reinforce his message. This most recent body of work on exhibition at Jan Manton Art, Brisbane, continues in this vein. Capricornia is a suite of works inspired and influenced by recent trips he has made to North Queensland. The paintings are reminiscent of the desolate, Australian desert and have overtones of Indigenous painting aesthetics. The earthy, background colours of some pictures are marked with lines that elude to the wind ripples of a sand dune. Other images, like Thou Majestic, are composed in two parts a vast amount of earth in the foreground with seemingly endless sky sitting above it. Each of these paintings features word, all of which represent the names of long forgotten ghost towns and mining communities of rural Queensland. By remembering these forgotten or abandoned places, Tillers comments on the raw history of colonial Australia. He intersperses the townships with their

Indigenous place names, pointing to the waste white Australia has left and the broken and dark histories their settlement has cause. The body of work and exhibition, in addition to his travels to the land, was inspired by the Xavier Herberts novel of the same name as this exhibition. Like the novel, this exhibition is a thought provoking and confronting tale of race relations in colonial Australia. The works are compassionate offerings to the first people of this land, acknoledging their place, their identy, their role important role in Australias history.
Imant Tillers is represented by Jan Manton Art, Brisbane www.janmantonart.com EXHIBITION 25 Feb to 24 Mar 2012 Jan Manton Art, Brisbane

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01 Nature Speasks, 2012 02 Capricornia, 2012 03 Thou Majestic, 2012 Images courtesy the artist and Jan Manton Art, Brisbane

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