art, paintings, pop culture
Monumental Nobodies Statue Paintings By Matthew Quick
Modern Day Statue Art With Pop Culture References
In A Series Called Monumental Nobodies By Matthew Quick
THE LAST LAP
2016 Oil on Italian Linen 120x100cm
Fisher’s Ghost Art Prize 2016, Finalist
There are lots of women in the great art galleries of the world. Just not many women artists.
In 2012 about 62% of art and design students in the UK were female. But an audit of London galleries found that just 31% presented work by women. The Tate purchased only 21% of the works from living females artists, while in LA and New York galleries the number was 32.3%.
In an age where gender equality is legislated, it still seems the way for a majority of women to get into galleries is to be featured in the work. Often sans clothes.
But surely this life preserver keeping the old ideology afloat is an anachronism. Eileen Cooper (the first woman appointed Keeper of the Royal Academy) says the art schools graduates of both genders are as strong as each other. With both quality and numbers, the institutions must surely collect and promote female talent.
And yes, the irony that this painting featuring a naked woman was made by a man is not lost to the artist. Does this diminish the issue or lessen the voice?
ABOUT MATTHEW QUICK
Matthew has been named in Business Review Weekly as one of Australia’s top 50 artists.
Over the last few years he has either won, or been selected as a finalist for, more than 70 major national art awards, including the Sulman Art Prize, the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, the Mosman Art Prize, the Shirley Hannan Portrait Prize, the Glover Prize, the Redland Art Award, the Paddington Art Prize, the City of Albany Art Prize, the Fisher’s Ghost Art prize, the Blake Prize Director’s Cut, the Black Swan Prize for Portraiture, the Townsville Open Art Award, the Duke Art Prize, the John Leslie Art prize, the Churchie and the Prometheus. He also writes fiction: his first novel was short-listed for the Vogel Literary Award.
He’s painted since his teens but was distracted by other careers – working variously as a university lecturer, photographer, salesman, art director, copywriter & interior designer. Until returning full time to painting, he was the founder and Creative Director of his own advertising agency, Q&A.
Matthew’s paintings have been used as CD covers in Australia, Greece and the US, and as book covers by Penguin Books & Era Publications. His work has been reproduced in many magazines, books and journals including Hi Fructose, Plastik, Juxtapoz, Empty, Colossal, Design Taxi, Communication Arts, Idea, Design World, Graphis & Novum.
He travels frequently, has resided variously in the UK, Portugal & Malaysia, and once lived underneath a grand piano in Greenwich. He has spent nights under stars in India, under surveillance in Burma, under ground in Bolivia and under nourished in London. His scariest moment was having machine-gun shoved in his face during anti-monarchy riots in Nepal, although crashing a para-glider into a forest was also something of a highlight.
PERFORMANCE REVIEW
2016 Oil on Italian Linen 120 x 120cm
When you strip away the pomp and palaces, being a King is just a job. A kind of CEO if you like. Albeit one awarded at conception. And like all jobs, periodically a performance reviews is required. (different however, is that historically many of these involved violence, revolution, severed heads).
Louis XIV had this job. And he made some questionable business decisions. Like moving the entire Court from the Louvre to Versailles, thereby severing any semblance of connection to the actual people of France. Reckless and indulgent to the end, his successors bore the responsibilty of mopping up his mess.
Maybe it was because he got the job by birth rather than talent, but needless to say it didn’t go well. And when the time came for his performance review, the report concluded with his beheading.
They didn’t really go for the whole three warnings shtick back then.
STATUS UPDATE
2015, Oil on Italian Linen, 120 x 100cm
The Calleen Art Award 2015, Finalist
The Mosman Art Prize 2015, Finalist
Called The Dawn of Christianity, the original sculpture by Erastus Dow Palmer shows a Native American on her conversion to Christianity, whereupon her clothes fall off. These things happen, apparently.
Twisting Facebook’s terminology, the notion of a “savage” shedding heathen trappings to be born again before God, exposes notions of religious intolerance, racism and cultural superiority – and the absurdity of such a conversion might not involve any change in status at all.
Or she could just be sexting.
THE GREAT COVER UP
2015 Oil on Italian Linen 100x120cm
Talk about double standards.
Facebook stopped distributing the painting Domestic Goddess because it shows a stone nipple. Now let’s remember that the original 1705 sculpture on which the painting is based, Giuseppe Mazzuoli’s A Nereid, is in Washington’s National Gallery of Art and has been seen by hundreds of thousands of visitors.
To meet the stringent social mores of the new millennium, William Henry Rinehart’s sculpture of the water nymph Clytie has been clad. Albeit with not much.
It is probably worth noting that the painting Every Precaution also features a stone nipple. And Facebook had no problem with that one. Does anyone else think this is all just a bit odd?
BEHIND THE CURTAIN
2017 Oil on Italian Linen 120x100cm
Manning Art Prize 2017, Finalist
In the Wizard of Oz, the great wizard was revealed to be just a normal man. Behind the public mask are we not all the same, naked and vulnerable? Well, maybe. Depends on if you present yourself as a green felt frog or not.
ALL HAIL THE EMPEROR
2015 Oil on Italian Linen 140x168cm
It took 48 years after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech for a memorial to be erected in his honour.
By comparison then, the guerilla style installation in April this year of a statute of Edward Snowdon in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, New York, was relatively quick. Admittedly it was on display for just 12 hours before being covered by a tarpaulin and removed. Too soon, it seems…
In an age when inanity and celebrity is rated equally with real achievement, it is interesting to ponder what the monuments of the future may actually look like.
This is my guess.