In 1985 Gertrude Street Gallery appointed a 20 year-old director, daring even by Fitzroy standards of the time.
Curators Sue Cramer and Emma Nixon are looking back at that period in a new exhibition A Fictional Retrospective: Gertrude’s First Decade.
Installation was big and the art world was playing with post-modern, pop, filmic and even material ideas. A flyer, staid to the contemporary on-line eye, was printed to advertise talks by artists on influences such as Heidegger, Deleuze and Rock n’ Roll.
Gertrude Street always gave the impression of being avant-garde and unafraid to be conceptual. The flyer was called Foreign Knowledge, even though more artists went for pop music than theory.
How do these heady times look today? In an exhibition of 48 works from the formative years of the gallery to celebrate its fortieth birthday, abstraction, unlike some of the other experiments, has stood the test of time.
Melinda Harper had her first solo exhibition at Gertrude Street in 1992 and curated a group show called Resistance in 1989, positioning abstract painting as a counterpoint to the large-scale prevailing figuration of the time.
Two of her paintings from that first solo exhibition are in the current exhibition, vibrant striped colour pieces brought into line by bold black constraints.
“It’s nice to see the paintings out of storage,” Harper told AAR at the opening which she attended with her son Joseph.
The curators have taken an historical view of the period as well as a critical one and written about the people involved, in a chatty but intelligent analysis of youth culture for sale as a pamphlet for $8.
There was a huge catch-up at the opening of artists, their friends and family. “We were young and full of the devil, and we wanted to make something happen,” Jon Campbell is quoted as saying.
The title of the show comes from an exhibition by Sandra Bridie who created fictional characters as artists, privileging post-modern ideas of nomination over imitation.
She recreated her work Susan Fielder, detail from ‘Institution’ for the exhibition and it is surprisingly prescient as a large simple abstraction, leaving the viewer wanting to know more.
Hard-edge work and abstract patterns are in vogue and those painters who showed artistry such Stephen Bram in colour coding in his two-point perspectives stand out to a ‘20s eye.
As a snap shot of a period, there is an unsurprising diversity in this exhibition that makes the break-out ‘90s a forerunner of values today.
A fact check of the catalogue and documents on display reveals a who’s who of Melbourne radicals and originals, including Bernhard Sachs, Howard Arkley and Louise Paramor.
This is a nostalgic, amusing exhibition that aims to be fair and square about a period and a studio program that was sometimes off-putting for outsiders but inspiring for insiders.
A Fictional Retrospective: Gertrude’s First Decade 1985 – 1995
Gertrude Contemporary, 21 – 31 High Street, Preston South
Exhibition continues to 23 March 2025
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.gertrude.org.au for details.
Image: Curator Emma Nixon at the opening of A Fictional Retrospective at Gertrude Contemporary with Sandra Bridie’s Susan Fielder, detail from ‘Institution’ – photo by Rhonda Dredge
Words: Rhonda Dredge