Title

Between Reality and Non-Reality: Works by Jon Molvig and Gordon Shepherdson.

Venues

QUT Art Museum (6 August 2009 – 11 October 2009)

Date

(2009)

Summary

Multi-artist exhibition. Located: Australia (QLD). Paintings.

Curator

Stephen Rainbird

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

Drawn chiefly from the QUT Art Collection, this exhibition investigates the connections and differences in the work of these two important Australian artists.

In the mid 1950s charismatic artist and teacher Jon Molvig (1923-70) brought a new vitality to Brisbane painting with his strong figurative expressionism. Pictures of lovers, of primordia and of panic-stricken or insane individuals translated the artist's private anxieties into a more general statement of the human condition and urban alienation.

In the early 1960s, contemporary artist Gordon Shepherdson (born 1934) attended Molvig's art classes in Brisbane. The influence of the latter's raw emotive approach is strongly felt in Shepherdson's extraordinarily powerful figurative compositions exploring psychic and emotional experiences.

The work of both artists oscillates between an imaginary, visionary world and observed reality. [Gallery media, 2009].