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James Gleeson, Australia's greatest Surrealist artist, was also a scholar, esteemed writer, art critic, arts administrator and a poet. The works in this exhibition are from Gleeson's Estate and have never been exhibited before. In the year he died (2008) he finished over 300 drawings, a gargantuan achievement for a very sick 93 year old man.
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JAMES GLEESON 1915 - 2008
His Last Drawings
The works in this exhibition are from James Gleeson’s Estate and have never
been exhibited before. We are grateful to the Art Gallery of New South Wales
and to the Gleeson O’Keefe Foundation for inviting us to join them in the
development and promotion of the Estate.
Front Cover: 1. No 536 15.9.08 42.0 x 59.5cm
We believe this to be the last art work James Gleeson ever completed.
He died 35 days later, on 20th October 2008. In 2008 he finished over 300
drawings, a gargantuan achievement for a very sick 93 year old man.
This exhibition is a selection from his last drawings.
Opening 6-8pm Wednesday 7th May 2014 Closing Saturday 24th May 2014
109 Riley Street, East Sydney NSW 2010 Ph: (02) 9331 2556 www.wattersgallery.com [email protected]
tues and sat: 10am - 5pm; wed thurs fri: 10am - 7pm
Watters Gallery
3. No 403 11.05.08
59.5 x 41.9cm
“I start with a drawing always......”(James Gleeson, 2001 - interview with Anne Ryan and Hendrik Kolenberg, AGNSW)
Drawings were so indispensible to James Gleeson’s way of thinking about and making
art, it seems inconceivable that they are not better known and celebrated. From his very
earliest days as a young man struggling to determine his life’s path – as a poet?
a writer? an artist? – he made drawings, almost always with an eye to developing them
further into paintings.
Gleeson’s drawings were made with a purpose, even if that purpose was not immediately
clear. He built up a rich visual vocabulary that encompassed both the figurative (often
using collages of found images such as mechanical apparatus, microbes and 19th
century illustration), and the abstract. His never-wavering commitment to Surrealism
was mirrored in his embrace of techniques associated with it, such as decalcomania
and frottage. These encouraged chance effects using his chosen mediums of pencil,
gouache, ink, pastel and charcoal. Evenings were never wasted; if he wasn’t reading he
was making tiny drawings in trim sketchbooks or on scraps of paper - rich cornucopias of
ideas and images that often made their way to canvas.
In the early to mid 1970s Gleeson started concentrating on collaged ‘text-drawings’ to
the exclusion of all else. They proved to be a bridge between the hyper-real paintings of
the 1950s and 60s and what was to come after, and revealed to him the full potential of
Surrealist techniques including frottage and decalcomania, text and collage.
In 1977 Gleeson sold much of his past drawing oeuvre to the National Gallery of Australia,
a clean out of his studio that proved to be a spur to fresh creativity. Holidaying at
Peregian Beach on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, he embarked upon an intensive period
of drawing that explored the dissolution of forms into their essential elements. For the
next five years he drew prolifically, making collages and also experimenting with pastel
and watercolour.
His imagery was turned on its head – literal depictions of the human body as seen in his
early paintings and his imaginary landscapes populated by buff male figures in the 1960s,
were replaced by flayed and visceral bone and sinew, mechanical parts and grotesque
microscopic organisms writ large. In late 1983, he started turning them into paintings.
Charcoal gave Gleeson a freedom and ease in drawing imagery from his subconscious,
while the tonal possibilities afforded him by charcoal were particularly useful with
the translation of his imagery into colour, in oil paint on canvas. Once the charcoal
substructure was complete, it was ordered and resolved with the addition of collage
taken from boxes of pre-cut or photocopied images from books and magazines. This
period proved to be a breakthrough that was to direct the rest of his life, when Gleeson
developed a new vocabulary of forms that became the defining feature of his greatest
works, made in the extraordinarily rich and prolific three decades that followed.
The drawings in this exhibition were made in the last year of Gleeson’s life and have all the
power and resolution that comes from a lifetime of drawing. Remarkable ‘dreamscapes’,
they suggest imaginary worlds of forms suspended in space, pulsating with energy and a
sense of the infinite. The powerful expansiveness of the universe – both the outer space
of science fiction and the infinite worlds of the microscopic – is all there on these modest
sheets of paper. Gleeson always believed in the power of the subconscious mind and
actively sought to expand conceptions of reality beyond the materially visible, through
a commitment to imagination and chance in his art – these drawings are nothing if not
manifestations of that. They leave no doubt about James Gleeson’s status as the grand
Old Master of Surrealism in Australia.
Anne Ryan is the Curator of Australian Prints, Drawings & Watercolours at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 2003 she co-curated a major exhibition on James Gleeson’s drawings for the Gallery.
Exhibition catalogue Watters Gallery, Sydney, 7 - 24 May 2014 © Artist,James Gleeson Estate Photographer: Mim Sterling This catalogue is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted by the Copyright Act no part may be reproduced by any other process without written permission.
List of Works
1. No. 536 15.9.08 42.0 x 59.5cm charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel, black felt pen on white wove paper
2. No.357 24.4.08 56.9 x 76.8cm charcoal, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
3. No.403 11.5.08 59.5 x 41.9cm charcoal, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
4. No.375 1.5.08 42.0 x 29.7cm charcoal, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
5. No.425 21.5.08 29.7 x 41.9cm charcoal, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
6. No.370 30.4.08 41.8 x 59.4cm white pastel, watercolour, brush & ink, wash on white wove paper
7. No.457 12.5.08 41.9 x 59.2cm watercolour, pastel, powdered graphite, paper collage, rubber on ivory wove paper
8. No.452 5.6.08 59.5 x 42.0cm charcoal, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
9. No.426 22.5.08 29.7 x 42.0cm charcoal, powdered graphite, pastel, black fibre-tipped pen on white wove paper
10. No.219 14.1.08 41.9 x 29.5cm charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
11. No.325 6.4.08 41.9 x 59.5cm charcoal, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
12. No.391 6.5.08 41.9 x 59.5cm charcoal, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
13. No.275 3.3.08 41.9 x 29.6cm charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
14. No.5 2008 29.5 x 41.8cm charcoal, powdered graphite, white pastel on white wove paper
15. No.336 12.4.08 42.0 x 59.5cm charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
16. No.369(b) 1.5.08 29.5 x 41.8cm white pastel, watercolour, brush & ink, wash on white wove paper
17. No.533 26.8.08 29.7 x 41.9cm charcoal, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
18. No.209 4.1.08 41.9 x 29.6cm charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel, pencil on white wove paper
19. No.207 4.1.08 42.0 x 29.5cm charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
20. No.515 20.7.08 29.6 x 41.9cm charcoal, paper collage, pastel on white wove paper
21. No.241 28.1.08 41.9 x 59.5cm charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
22. No.279 4.3.08 29.6 x 41.8cm charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
23. No.285 9.3.08 42.0 x 59.5cm charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
24. No.193 17.12.07 29.7 x 42.0cm charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel on white textured wove paper
25. No.359 25.4.08 41.9 x 59.4cm charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
26. No.255 11.2.08 29.7 x 42.0cm charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
27. No.295 20.3.08 29.6 x 41.9cm charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel, black fibre-tipped pen on white wove paper
28. No.354 21.4.08 29.6 x 41.9cm charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
29. No.384 4.5.08 42.0 x 59.5cm charcoal, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
30. No.314 1.4.08 42.0 x 59.5cm charcoal, paper collage, powdered graphite, pastel on white wove paper
31. No.501 5.7.08 27.4 x 39.6cm watercolour, pastel on white wove paper