Mighty Melbourne

45DS Arthur Ted Powell, Midnight Melbourne (detail)A nod to Melbourne’s vainglorious rise as a global city, a new exhibition at fortyfivedownstairs this May will features the work of artist Arthur Ted Powell in Mighty Melbourne. His prolific output of over 300 works on the subject in eight years is testament to the urgency he feels to record its growth in real time.

From a birds-eye view and at street-level, Powell has captured and obsessively recorded the changing face of the city as it has grown in size, density and character in sketchbooks, as prints, on ceramics and canvas. On show are large scale abstract paintings on canvas and graffitied porcelain vases of Melbourne’s inner city precincts from the air and at street level.

Mighty Melbourne celebrates the Victorian capital’s rise as a vertical city and speaks of a modern humanity subordinated to architecture and infrastructure at a moment in time when the last vestiges of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ (as it was once coined in the nineteenth century) are vanishing beneath mighty glass towers.

Arthur Ted Powell is a British-born contemporary artist and advertising art director living in Melbourne, Australia. He studied Fine Art and Advertising Design at Ealing College of Art and St Martin’s School of Art in London, under influential abstract artists, including Roy Ascott, Anthony Benjamin and Bernhard Cohen, before embarking on a career in advertising.

For many years he worked full-time as an art director and creative director in some of the world’s largest advertising agencies in Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, USA, UK and Thailand, and won numerous international awards for his work. Powell returned to Australia in 2004 to embark on a full-time career as a painter and printmaker. He works from a studio at Gasworks Arts Park, Albert Park.

Mighty Melbourne
fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
Exhibition: 8 – 19 May 2018
Free admission

For more information, visit: www.fortyfivedownstairs.com for details.

Image: Arthur Ted Powell, Midnight Melbourne (detail)