Photography, Popular Culture and A very Dutch ghost

On Friday night I attended an
exhibition of classic photographs, by deceased photographers Terry
O’Neill and Norman Parkinson, curated with the works of living
artists, Alea Pinar Du Pre, Patrick Rubinstein and Louis Pratt, with
Louis in attendance at the event. The theme was icons of popular
culture under the banner of Curated Wealth (with) Art Society International (ASI) who had a team of five or six representatives
present. The show took place at a new event space using the whole
expanse of a renovated 6^th floor loft on Kent Street,
Sydney.

The photographs by Parkinson and O’Neill are images you know. They are of major 20^th
century celebrities, Audrey Hepburn by N.P. and Faye Dunaway Faye
Dunaway at the Pool, 1977 and Brigitte Bardot Smoking by
T.O. The show went from photography of popular culture (past) to artworks that referenced popular culture, and curiously all of those artworks had sculptural qualities which provided a counterpoint all it’s own to
the flat physicality of the supersized giclée prints.

Photographs by Terry O’Neill and Norman Parkinson, Mona Lisa artwork by Patrick Rubinstein

There was a brief speech about the
works being exhibited and I had quite long conversations with most
ASI team members about the large-scale photographic works on display
– and I loved that they did not say photography. They simply said
art, all the time.

Mona Lisa artwork by Patrick Rubinstein, Woman in a striped sunhat by Alea Pinar Du Pre

The Patrick Rubinstein works are kinetic pictures that change as you walk past them revealing clever
takes on POP art, Warhol et. al. And you kind-of get
three-pictures-in-one which is perhaps a little too clever for my
taste, or maybe I just need to spend more time with them. The theme
of celebrity and fashion(able) icons continued in the Op art
paintings of Alea Pinar Du Pre. There was a youthful Op art Elvis
(also Warhol-ed back in the day) and beautiful pictures of a woman
‘CELESTINE’ in a striped sunhat, that you just know you know –
somehow, as Alea Pinar has so effectively nailed the visual identity
of female fashion archetypes.

In the early days of the explosion of
Instagram Social Media. I coined a phrase that I found myself using
repeatedly when talking with colleagues about the endless
appropriation of well established styles, forms and tropes online as,
‘last to steal it owns it’ (and that was well before all this hype
about A.I. which looks like the appropriation heist to end all art
heists…).

Can you tell I’m a old Punk from the
80s, a time when anything from the recent past was considered
some sort of toxic evil? ‘Death to hippies’ and all that. It was
an interesting time and we are clearly in interesting times again.

There is one artwork left to consider.
The sculpture by Louis Pratt titled ‘A very Dutch ghost’ which to my
mind is both the masterpiece and linchpin of the whole exhibition.
The sculpture is kinetic. It is bronze and stainless steel, and yet
it is ephemeral – a floating image made from hard forms. It is
modern. In part computational, and Old-Mastery in its oblique
references to Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Poppish and
blatant in it’s creative appropriation of Vincent Van Gogh, doyen of
art lovers everywhere,
(btw, I nearly threw up in the Musée d’Orsay when faced with the
heaving mosh pit of art-lovers trying to get a selfie with the self
portrait – of an artist that no one wanted to know about while he was
alive) an early painting – Head of a Skeleton with a Burning
Cigarette.

Artist Louis Pratt with his sculpture A very Dutch ghost

A very Dutch ghost seems to do
the impossible. It brings the history of art to a contemporary
audience. In a time of celebrity and Insta-celebrity-status
and nostalgia for a golden age, it presents us with a mirror
that reminds us nothing and no one lasts forever. From a technical
standpoint the piece could not have been created without the
collaboration of Dr Nico Pietroni who developed the software needed
to design the concave mirror, to model the skull and reflect, or
to my mind, project the Memento mori, the skull’s ephemeral image.
I enjoyed talking with both Nico and Louis about the sculpture which
as you can tell if you have read this far, completely blew me away.

Artist Louis Pratt & Dr Nico Pietroni with the sculpture A very Dutch ghost

If you would like to see this show
yourself, Art Society International are doing it all again in Sydney,
Australia on Friday the 27^th of September, by Invitation
only – if you would like to attend I would recommend heading over
to their website and sending them an email https://artsocietyinternational.com/

Telling Stories in Pictures all over..

0433 796 863