Title

Andrew Nicholls: Love sick.

Venues

Boutwell Draper Gallery (30 July 2009 – 22 August 2009)

Date

(2009)

Summary

Single-artist exhibition. Located: Australia (NSW). Drawings.

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

 Love Sick comprises ink pen drawings by Australian artist Andrew Nicholls that interrogate the relationship between aesthetics and desire. Nicholls draws upon histories of sentimental and religious art, decoration and camp to explore issues of power. He states, “I am interested in how the sentimental has become historically aligned with the marginalised (women, the lower classes, ethnic minorities and particularly homosexuals) yet remains such a powerful, often unacknowledged presence driving mainstream culture”.

Nicholls ‘steals’ elements from Victorian illustrations, old master artworks, botanical and religious art, china designs and gay pornography to create his intricate compositions. Imagery is painstakingly copied by hand, without the aid of a projector or grid - a process that allows for a level of distortion, lending the completed works a slightly uncanny affect. The resulting compositions may depict physical landscapes, bodies, or fields of pattern, all suffused with the slightly queasy sense of longing alluded to by the exhibition title.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a series of three large multi-panel works that can each rearrange to hang in an alternate configuration. These are the first three of a proposed series of four large works loosely based around the four elements. The ‘Earth’ drawing is a tangle of Western Australian wildflowers, ‘Fire’ a swirling swarm of Bosch-inspired demons and baroque ornamentation. The latest work in the series, ‘Water’ is a seascape that in one formation depicts a drowned male body, but rearranges to transform him into a merman, staring longingly at a swimmer. Among other works, the exhibition additionally includes a commission for Duke University press’ upcoming publication Shakesqueer based on the notoriously erotic Shakespeare poem Venus and Adonis and Wild Man, a hybrid conglomeration of 1980s beefcake models, originally exhibited in the second Australian national erotic art prize. [Gallery media, 2009].