Inside Out: Space and Process - Erwin Fabian and Anne-Marie May

INSIDE OUT SPACE AND PROCESS ERWIN FABIAN & ANNE-MARIE MAY

INSIDE OUT SPACE AND PROCESS ERWIN FABIAN & ANNE-MARIE MAY

Inside Out: Space and Process Erwin Fabian and Anne-Marie May 29 March–8 November 2020 McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery 390 McClelland Drive, Langwarrin Victoria 3910 Australia www.mcclellandgallery.com Cataloguing-in-Publication data Authors: Dr Jane Eckett, Simon Lawrie Editors: Simon Lawrie, Susie Raven Inside Out: Space and Process – Erwin Fabian and Anne-Marie May / Dr Jane Eckett, Simon Lawrie ISBN 978-0-9946191-6-7 Published by McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery March 2020 The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not reflect those of the publisher. Copyright © 2020 McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery, authors, artists, photographers and designer. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of this publication may be reproduced in any process, electronic or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher. Every effort has been made to contact persons owning copyright in the works of art or photographs illustrated in this book. In cases where this has not been possible owners are invited to notify McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery.

All works by Erwin Fabian courtesy the Estate of Erwin Fabian, Australian Galleries, and Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney. All works by Anne-Marie May courtesy the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne.

All images reproduced with kind permission of the artists and the Estate of Erwin Fabian, courtesy Australian Galleries, Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, and Murray White Room, Melbourne.

Photography credits: Mark Ashkanasy: pp. 44, 46-47, 50 John Brash: p. 48 Christian Capurro: pp. 6-12, 29, 32-35, 42-43, 54-59 Christo Crocker: pp. 45, 49, cover Anne-Marie May: p. 52 Viki Petherbridge: pp. 16-28, 30-31, cover Curators: Lisa Byrne, Simon Lawrie Director: Lisa Byrne Design: Mary Callahan Design Printing: Impact Printing Edition: 100 Cover image: Anne-Marie May, Untitled 2016; Erwin Fabian, Cipher 2009

Contents

Foreword | Lisa Byrne 5

Erwin Fabian: the attitude of scrap | Dr Jane Eckett 14

Anne-Marie May: sensing space | Simon Lawrie 41

List of works 56

Artist biographies 58

Acknowledgements and contributors 59

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Director’s Foreword

McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery is committed to showcasing the development of spatial practice in Australia, with a particular focus on the history of sculpture. The exhibition Inside Out: Space and Process – Erwin Fabian and Anne-Marie May presents two Melbourne artists from different generations, born 50 years apart, who evidence an enduring concern with material and process through sculpture and installation. Erwin Fabian and Anne-Marie May use a range of industrial and domestic ready-made materials to undertake intuitive explorations of colour, abstraction and space. Through open-ended processes, their works are informed by the very properties of the material they use, and offer the viewer a dynamic experience of the space within and beyond each object.

Anne-Marie May explores the limits of materials such acrylic, felt, and bronze, through research-based experimentation based in drawing, craft and industrial processes. Erwin Fabian collects and combines discarded industrial objects, ready-made remnants of agricultural machinery which have already been freed from their past use. In both artists’ practices we find a forfeiting of the artists’ pre-conceived outcomes in favour of process, where the material determines its manipulation by the artist’s hand. The acts of collection and research, forming and reforming, define these artists' practices.

Erwin Fabian was until recently Australia’s oldest practising sculptor – he sadly died in January 2020 during the development of this exhibition, at the age of 104. While it is unfortunate that he could not see it come to fruition, this exhibition brings the opportunity to celebrate and honour the remarkable life and work of this significant Australian sculptor.

His tenacity, kindness and creativity remained undiminished until the end.

Accompanying the exhibition, this publication includes essays by art historian Dr Jane Eckett and McClelland Curator Simon Lawrie. Jane’s essay ‘Erwin Fabian: the attitude of scrap’, details Fabian’s historical context as well as the significance of sustainability and humanity in his work. Complementing this in his essay ‘Anne-Marie May: Sensing Space’, Simon explores how process and material open new formal possibilities for May, and highlights her considered response to the architecture of McClelland’s gallery spaces.

McClelland wishes to thank the artists Erwin Fabian and Anne-Marie May, Emil Toonen, the Estate of Erwin Fabian, Australian Galleries, Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, and Murray White Room, Melbourne for their support and assistance with this project.

McClelland acknowledges with gratitude the vital contribution made by our sponsors, partners and patrons: Creative Victoria; Frankston City Council; Crown Resorts Foundation; Packer Family Foundation; Elisabeth Murdoch Sculpture Fund; The Hugh Williamson Foundation; Aidan Graham Trust; International Art Services; Plenary Group; Elgee Park; and Haymes Paint. Finally, I would like to thank the McClelland staff for their efforts in realising this exhibition, which serves as an exciting look at sculptural practice in Melbourne across generations.

Lisa Byrne Director

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Inside Out: Space and Process – Erwin Fabian and Anne-Marie May, installation view

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Inside Out: Space and Process – Erwin Fabian and Anne-Marie May, installation view

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Inside Out: Space and Process – Erwin Fabian and Anne-Marie May, installation view

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Inside Out: Space and Process – Erwin Fabian and Anne-Marie May, installation view

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Erwin Fabian | the attitude of scrap

The late Erwin Fabian’s sculpture arose from two distinctively twentieth-century impulses: to fossick for raw material among industrialised society’s detritus and to assemble and create anew. He was a collector of discarded machinery parts, steel offcuts salvaged from a metal scrapyard near his studio in North Melbourne, felled tree stumps and extruded plastic – each object prized for its particular formal properties rather than any associative quality. This was not the mindset of his father’s generation; the nineteenth-century artist may have built upon existing pictorial traditions but their materials were invariably envisaged as a tabula rasa. Even when re-using an old canvas, sheet of paper or previously carved block of stone, the material was worked upon in such a way as to bring it back to a neutral starting point from which the artist could proceed. Fabian made no such attempt to eradicate signs of his materials’ former lives; instead, they were respected for their fragmentary aesthetic even while being incorporated into a new order.

The origins of Fabian’s approach lie with those early twentieth-century assemblers, particularly Picasso and Gonzalez, who opened a rich new vein in sculpture. Their materials were acknowledged to have had a life prior to their existence as an artwork – whether as mattress springs, a kitchen colander, or a bicycle seat and handlebars, as in Picasso’s renowned Bull’s Head, 1942.1 Many of these early works, and those of the Surrealists and Dadaists that followed, hinged on metaphor and literary associations, deploying anarchic humour to set themselves at deliberate crosspurposes to more commercially viable pedestal sculpture.

But it was the inherently sculptural properties of these found materials that came to be most appreciated in the work of the post-Second World War generation to which Fabian belongs. In the work of British sculptors such as Anthony Caro and Bruce McLean, Europeans such César, Ettore Colla and Jean Tinguely, North Americans Louise Nevelson, David Smith, Richard Stankiewicz and Mark di Suvero, Latin Americans such as the little known Feliza Bursztyn, and Australians such as Inge King, Robert Klippel and Lenton Parr, scrap was acknowledged to have its own aesthetic – one that was highly appropriate to the age. Fabian’s sculpture developed in tandem with the work of these sculptors but was only sporadically exhibited until the last two decades of his life, so the connections between his and his contemporaries’ work are lesser known. However, positioning him amid this trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific context is helpful in terms of acknowledging his place in the broader narrative of post-war modern and contemporary sculpture.

Fabian began sculpting around 196263 after happening upon some discarded farm implements in the bush outside Melbourne.2 Struck by the incongruity of broken wheels, hooks and twisted saws in the bush environment he gathered them up and, at home, composed them into sculptural arrangements.3 Shortly afterwards, at the suggestion of designer Gordon Andrews, he welded them into permanent assemblages and exhibited them at Paddington’s Hungry Horse Gallery in 1965. Yet Fabian’s appreciation of scrap metal and human detritus, as well as the contorted stumps of ringbarked trees, long preceded the sixties. It is clearly evident in a number of drawings and monotypes he produced while in internment in Hay, Orange and Tatura,

1940-41, and while stationed with the army at Tocumwal, 1942-43.4 Perhaps his Berlin youth and concomitant immersion in German Expressionism predisposed him to finding a sort of savage beauty in the brutality of broken objects.

A disposition towards the vertical is strongly apparent in Fabian’s work. This verticality inclines us to encounter them as living entities, or ‘vital presences’ to borrow a term Lenton Parr applied to his own work, even while any pretence of figuration is resolutely rejected.5 It is not a human or animal presence, but rather the paradoxical vitality of inanimate objects brought into unexpected formal relationships with one another. Nevertheless it entails a sort of anthropomorphic projection, as reflected in Fabian’s assertion, in one of his final interviews, that ‘every piece of scrap has its own attitude’.6 Perhaps it is this conviction that results in many of Fabian’s assemblages subtly mimicking elements of figurative sculpture. Spin 2010, along with two works in plastic from 2015, Largo and Erebus, adopt a contrapposto pose with their upper sections twisted and angled in balanced opposition to their lower parts.

Several other works from 2015, notably Foretold, Proverb and Shore, as well as one of the final sculptures, Split Vision 2019, comprise three vertically stacked ‘zones’ that inevitably read anthropomorphically as head, body and lower limbs. Moreover, Forerunner 2019 cannot escape comparison with the ancient Greek Venus de Milo – the sawn limb of the middle tree stump uncannily evocative of Venus’s lost right arm.

Nevertheless, the anthropomorphic analogies should not be carried too far.

Instead it is more productive to consider the formal properties of each work and

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its individual parts. Juxtaposition is key.

Shore sets up a relationship between elegantly drooping strips of steel, recalling the slit felt works of Robert Morris, and clusters of wiry steel rods that seem to bristle with an anti-gravitational energy all of their own. Epigram 2015 contrasts a horizontal expanse of crumpled steel with two narrow rods: one elegantly curved in a partial arabesque and the other more arbitrarily bent in half, drawing the eye back down and around the work. Lost Days 2015 bristles with soldierly rows of stubby spikes (produced by some unidentifiable industrial process), which look to have been tied into a huge upright knot and then balanced on the remains of a fractured disc. The contrast between the deeply tactile flattened spikes and the overall form of an upright bifurcated knot generates the work’s particular energy.

There is a sense of wonder at the perilous balancing act performed to assemble these vertical presences. We intuit the process of serious play in three dimensions, the suspended breath while the artist waits to see whether a certain weld will hold or whether the work will sag and collapse. Similarly, we marvel at the fact that this process of experimentation was shared for the last decade of Fabian’s life with studio assistant Emil Toonen; that an artist should find a way of translating their intuitive method of working with their hands into words is impressive at any age, let alone in their nineties. Fabian’s intimate familiarity with his materials, whether gathered in his car from a scrapyard decades earlier or lugged home in a suitcase from one of his regular visits abroad, meant that he could describe the size, shape and feel of the desired object, as well as its approximate whereabouts, enabling Toonen to locate it among the

pile of material filling the studio and place it into position.

While Erwin Fabian’s assemblages arose from a post-war appreciation of scrap’s savage beauty – its formal qualities and fragmentary aesthetic, and a respect for what Fabian called scrap’s ‘attitude’ – we can also see a clear connection with twenty-first century concerns with using recycled materials. Despite the weight and heft of his work, Fabian’s art left but the lightest of ecological footprints.

His was a path artists, keenly aware of their environmental responsibilities, have already since embarked upon and, it is to be hoped, will continue to follow into the future.

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Pablo Picasso, Tête de taureau, 1942, leather and metal saddle and handlebars, Musée national Picasso-Paris, MP330.

2 Fabian recalled the origins of his sculpture in Erwin Fabian, ‘Looking Back’, in Max und Erwin Fabian, Berlin – London - Melbourne, Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, 2000, p. 133, and ‘Interview with Erwin Fabian’, conducted by Leanne Santoro, 23 July 2015, Balnaves Foundation Australian Sculpture Archive Project, Art Gallery of New South Wales Archive, pp. 3, 5 of the transcript, URL: https:// www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/research/archives/ interviews/#fabian 3 Elwyn Lynn’s review of Fabian’s first exhibition provides an insight into the sorts of found objects employed in the early sculptures; Lynn, ‘The Centre Men’, The Australian, 16 October 1965, p. 12.

4 Stephen Coppel likewise noted this connection

Jane Eckett University of Melbourne 9 February 2020

between the monotypes and the later sculptures in his essay, ‘Erwin Fabian: The Sculptor’s Journey’, in Max und Erwin Fabian, Berlin – London - Melbourne, Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, 2000, p. 145. Works on paper illustrating this interest include Hay, 1941, black crayon, 34.0 x 44.7 cm, estate of the artist; Showerbath in camp, c. 1940-42, monotype, 39.0 x 51.0 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, acc.

1206-4; and Twisted tree stumps with gantries in background, c. 1942-43, monotype, 32.8 x 41.6 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, acc. 1997.61 (illustrated on pp. 152, 153 and 155 of the Berlin catalogue).

5 Geoffrey Edwards, Lenton Parr: Vital Presences, Roseville, NSW: Beagle Press, 1999.

6 ‘Interview with Erwin Fabian’, 23 July 2015, op. cit., p. 10 of the transcript.

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Erwin Fabian, Cipher, 2009

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Erwin Fabian, Epigram, 2015

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Erwin Fabian, Spin, 2010

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Erwin Fabian, Whim, 2015

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Erwin Fabian, Pilgrim, 2015

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Erwin Fabian, Tetrachord, 2015

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Erwin Fabian, Largo, 2015

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Erwin Fabian, Erebus, 2015

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Erwin Fabian, Foretold, 2015

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Erwin Fabian, Lost Days, 2015

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Erwin Fabian, Proverb, 2015

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Erwin Fabian, Shore, 2015

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Erwin Fabian, Vitrum Five, 2013

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Erwin Fabian, Vitrum Five, 2013

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Erwin Fabian, Bushphone, 2019

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Erwin Fabian, Forerunner, 2019

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Inside Out: Space and Process – Erwin Fabian and Anne-Marie May, installation view

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Inside Out: Space and Process – Erwin Fabian and Anne-Marie May, installation view

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Anne-Marie May, installation view

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Anne-Marie May, installation view

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Anne-Marie May | sensing space

In her recent work, Anne-Marie May employs a range of found and fabricated media to explore the poetic correlations between surface, substance and space.

Through research-based processes and intuitive experimentation, she negotiates the limits of materials including acrylic, bronze, paper and fabric, by refining open techniques such as laser cutting or heating and bending acrylic sheets. May’s studio practice is for her a provisional way of ‘forming’ objects, and her works are often only resolved as finished sculptures and installations at the last moment.

In the exhibition space, these objects enter a complex network of physical and perceptual relations by which they are broken down and reanimated by the viewer, or ‘unformed’. Here, a number of subtle and transitory effects, such as fluctuations in light, shifts in the viewer’s perspective, and the interplay between interior and exterior space combine.

May’s approach draws on the historical confluence of craft, design and architecture, particularly in the work of Bauhaus weavers Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl. As Briony Fer has noted, Albers established a link between the material structure of weaving, geometric design and architectural form, as ‘the meeting of pictorial abstraction, technology and architecture’ through vertical and horizontal systems.1 In 1965, Albers wrote of the artist’s interaction with material as a generative act, describing ‘the event of a thread’ as initiating open processes without defined beginnings or ends. The material itself engenders the possibility of action, equal to the artist’s agency. May’s work affords the opportunity to constantly reassess relations, and informs the nexus between drawing, material and process.

In much of her work there is tension between a material’s everyday use – whether in domestic, professional or industrial spheres – and its status as an art object. Untitled 2004 consists of six-metre lengths of unravelled jersey fabric, which are suspended from the double-height ceiling of the McClelland Room for this exhibition. The fabric’s thread attenuates its vertical movement as it falls from ceiling to floor. By cutting between the strips of colour, May has unravelled the geometry contained in the fabric design, and as warp and weft are severed the tension resulting from the weaving process is released.

Unexpected haptic and optical experiences are encountered in May’s Scholar’s Stone series of 2017, and a suite of earlier untitled sculptures which derive from flat sheets of paper.

The artist’s transformation of these sheer planes, through creasing and crumpling them into dynamic spatial objects, unfolds their three-dimensional and textural possibilities. Fabricated in bronze, some are painted while others reveal a chemical patina arising from the process. These works enliven the viewer’s tactile sense and confound assumptions about their materiality.

While texture and substance are often prominent features in her sculptural practice, May’s process is firmly grounded in drawing. A single line drawn on a surface can indicate the edge of two separate forms, resulting in an ambiguous relationship between figure and ground. May sees in drawing ‘its potential as an event beginning with the process of a line tracing a shape.

When this line is transferred onto the acrylic, it initiates a process of activating

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the spatiality of a surface.’2 She describes this operation as ‘folding’, not simply in the sense of physically creasing and bending but as a ‘conceptual realignment of spatial limits’, by delineating a threshold in a continuous surface that, when extrapolated into three dimensions, distorts the viewer’s understanding of interior and exterior space. Rather than being dichotomous and in opposition, inside and outside become continuous and double.3 In works such as Drawing 010 (elasticity of living) 2019 and Drawing 995 (with the hope of eliminating boundaries) 2019, drawings have been transferred to computer-based architectural software, then laser cut into coloured translucent acrylic. Lines determine shapes, which take form according to the inherent properties of the material as the artist applies heat and force to bend and shape them. In this way, complex processes and patterns of action are initiated by the simple act of drawing. These acrylic works are linked to May’s earlier sculptures derived from paper by the process of folding – the flat plane is transformed through spatial contortion to become voluminous.

These scored, folded and punctured sheets of coloured acrylic form a siteresponsive installation in the French Gallery at McClelland, suspended in the space with coloured nautical rope draped throughout. Across the smooth surface of each, a nodal network of laser cut line-work and organic perforations suggests cartographic or biological systems. While small voids introduce negative space, which in turn becomes the positive space of the gallery, multiple connection points are established both within and beyond the work.

May’s enduring concern with spatial transformation extends beyond the work’s material to incorporate the architectural and experiential space of the gallery. In the installation at McClelland, she has worked productively with the constraints of the gallery’s built form, designed by Munro and Sargeant and constructed in 1971.

Informed by the work of Irish architect Eileen Gray, which united interior and architectural design, May has a keen sense of spatial relationships and the way her works interact and are interacted with by the viewer. The configuration of display is in many ways an extension of her practice – the exhibition space becomes a sensory frame for the experience of her works.

In her installation in the French Gallery, the plastic panes catch, reflect, and project light, and objects merge with the shadows they cast. Their translucence or transparency allows for a layering of colour and pattern as the viewer navigates the gallery space – differing optical sensations destabilise the fixed physical form of the work.

Both the material and its interpretation find balance in these works. Each is titled according to a sequential formula comprising the drawing, colour serial number, and poetic reference. May has worked with the standardised dimensions of the ready-made acrylic sheet, yet imbued it with a human scale in the space and a poetic dimension through the title. In this way May allows for a personal relation to abstract forms, one that heightens our impressions of material, space and process in our everyday experience of the world.

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Anni Albers, On Weaving, Studio Vista, London, 1974 (first published 1965).

2 Anne-Marie May, Making and Undoing / Forming and Unforming (unpublished doctoral dissertation or master’s thesis), Monash University, Department of Fine Art Faculty of Art Design and Architecture, 2019, p. 60.

3 As Deleuze has noted; ‘the duplicity of the fold is necessarily reproduced on both of the sides which it distinguishes and which sets into a mutual relation by distinguishing them: a scission in which each term sets off the other, a tension in which each fold is extended into the other.’ See Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Continuum, New York, 2006 (first published 1993), p. 34; italics in original.

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Anne-Marie May, Scholar Stone #3, 2017

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Anne-Marie May, Scholar Stone #1, 2017

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Anne-Marie May, Residue (model #3), 2017

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Anne-Marie May, Residue (model #8), 2017

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Anne-Marie May, Residue (model #1), 2017

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Anne-Marie May, Residue (model #4), 2017

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Anne-Marie May, Untitled, 2013

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Anne-Marie May, Untitled, 2016

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left: Anne-Marie May, Scholar Stone #2, 2017

right: Anne-Marie May, Untitled maquette, 2016

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Anne-Marie May, Drawing 010 (elasticity of living), 2019

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Anne-Marie May, CAD drawing for Drawing 010 (elasticity of living), 2019

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Anne-Marie May, Untitled, 2004-2006; detail

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List of works

Works are listed chronologically, with all measurements in centimetres to the first decimal point, height x width x depth. All works copyright and collection of the artists, except where noted otherwise.

ERWIN FABIAN

Kainos 1996 aluminium 85.0 x 72.0 x 53.0 cm

Shore 2015 steel 225.0 x 98.0 x 77.0 cm

Begin 2008 steel 43.0 x 31.0 x 61.0 cm

Tetrachord 2015 plastic 88.0 x 53.0 x 34.0 cm

Cipher 2009 steel 47.0 x 30.0 x 30.0 cm

Largo 2015 plastic 140.0 x 36.0 x 30.0 cm

Spin 2010 steel 82.0 x 64.0 x 53.0 cm

Erebus 2015 plastic 94.0 x 58.0 x 48.0 cm

Vitrum Five 2013 steel and silvered glass 157.0 x 129.0 x 80.0 cm

Pilgrim 2015 plastic 61.0 x 18.0 x 33.0 cm Private collection, Sydney

Split Vision 2019 steel 127.0 x 102.0 x 55.0 cm

Lost Days 2015 steel 136.0 x 60.0 x 44.0 cm Whim 2015 steel 112.0 x 48.0 x 25.0 cm Epigram 2015 steel 116.0 x 68.0 x 60.0 cm

Foretold 2015 steel 276.0 x 138.0 x 86.0 cm Proverb 2015 steel 212.0 x 142.0 x 121.0 cm

Forerunner 2019 wood 124.0 x 50.0 x 36.0 cm Bushphone 2019 wood 98.0 x 40.0 x 45.0 cm

All works courtesy the Estate of Erwin Fabian, Australian Galleries, and Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney

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ANNE-MARIE MAY

Untitled 2004-2006 knitted jersey, wool dimensions variable Untitled 2013 bronze cast from paper maquette 35.0 x 40.0 x 30.0 cm Private collection Untitled maquette 2016 thermally formed acrylic 42.0 x 61.0 x 30.0 cm Untitled 2016 patinated bronze cast from paper maquette 17.5 x 30.0 x 18.5 cm Private collection, Melbourne Scholar Stone #1 2017 patinated bronze from paper maquette 67.0 x 48.0 x 38.0 cm Scholar Stone #2 2017 patinated bronze from paper maquette 31.5 x 58.0 x 33.0 cm Scholar Stone #3 2017 patinated bronze from paper maquette 23.0 x 19.0 x 17.0 cm Residue (model #1) 2017 patinated bronze cast from paper maquette 35.0 x 14.5 x 31.0 cm

Residue (model #3) 2017 patinated bronze cast from paper maquette 80.0 x 14.0 x 10.0 cm Residue (model #5) 2017 patinated bronze cast from paper maquette 32.5 x 16.0 x 12.0 cm Residue (model #8) 2017 patinated bronze cast from paper maquette 40.5 x 21.0 x 14.0 cm Drawing 531 (for Eileen Gray) 2019 thermally formed acrylic, nautical rope individually shaped from sheet size 180.0 x 120.0 cm Drawing 212 (no more walls) 2019 thermally formed acrylic, nautical rope individually shaped from sheet size 180.0 x 120.0 cm Drawing 010 (elasticity of living) 2019 thermally formed acrylic, nautical rope individually shaped from sheet size 180.0 x 120.0 cm Drawing 992 (extramundane) 2019 thermally formed acrylic individually shaped from sheet size 180.0 x 120.0 cm

Drawing 995 (with the hope of eliminating boundaries) 2019 thermally formed acrylic, nautical rope individually shaped from sheet size 180.0 x 120.0 cm Drawing 000 (There are subtle but important differences in the dissolution of form) 2020 thermally formed acrylic, nautical rope individually shaped from sheet size 180.0 x 120.0 cm Drawing 373 (flexible and unfolding) 2020 thermally formed acrylic, nautical rope individually shaped from sheet size 180.0 x 120.0 cm

All works courtesy the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne

Artist biographies

ERWIN FABIAN

ANNE-MARIE MAY

Erwin Fabian was born in Berlin in 1915, the son of renowned painter Max Fabian, and trained at the School of Art and Craft in Berlin. He arrived in Australia in 1940 on the infamous HMT Dunera after being interned in London during the Second World War. Having joined the Australian Army after his internment at Hay, Orange and Tatura, Fabian later returned to London where he worked as a graphic designer and lecturer at the London School of printing. He settled in Melbourne in 1962, where he continued to make work until his death in January 2020 at the age of 104.

Following his first Australian exhibition at Hungry Horse Gallery, Sydney in 1965, Fabian exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Migration and the Refugee: The Art of Erwin Fabian, Tatura Museum, Tatura, 2019; Recent Sculpture, Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, 2019 and Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 2015; Recent Sculpture and Earlier Monotypes, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 2011; A Survey 1977–2004, McClelland Gallery+Sculpture Park, Langwarrin, 2006; and Max und Erwin Fabian: Berlin-London-Melbourne, Stadtmuseum, Berlin (Ephraim Palais), 2000.

Major collections holding Fabian’s work include Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Australian War Memorial, Canberra; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; British Museum, London; Jüdisches Museum, Berlin; Stadtmuseum Berlin (Ephraim Palais); and McClelland Gallery+Sculpture Park, Langwarrin.

Fabian’s work was referenced by art historian Ernst Gombrich in his seminal text, Art and Illusion, published in 1960.

Anne-Marie May was born in 1965 in Melbourne, where she currently lives and works. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Victoria College, Prahran in 1987, and recently completed her PhD at the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at Monash University. While a student in the late 1980s, she worked for Melbourne fashion designer Mejia, establishing a long-standing interest in textiles and design. May first exhibited in 1988, and was a member of the influential Melbourne artist-run space Store 5 in the early 1990s. Since then she has exhibited regularly in solo and group exhibitions in Australia and internationally.

Selected solo exhibitions include a large scale installation titled Hook Me Up (synaesthesia) at the Melbourne Recital Centre 2018; Murray White Room, Melbourne 2017; Ten Cubed, Melbourne 2015; Murray White Room, Melbourne, 2013, 2011; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2004; and her work was included in Every Brilliant Eye: Australian Art of the 1990s, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2017; The Kaleidoscopic Turn, National Gallery of Victoria, 2015; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria 2013-14; Less is More: Minimal and Post-Minimal Art in Australia at Heide in 2012; 2006 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: 21st Century Modern, Art Gallery of South Australia.

May’s work is held in major public and private collections including National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland and Artbank, Sydney.

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Acknowledgements

Contributors

McClelland would like to thank foremost the artists Erwin Fabian and Anne-Marie May, as well as the following individuals whose support and assistance with this exhibition is greatly appreciated: Emil Toonen, Peter Rosman, Renato Colangelo, Andrew Bretherton, Dr Jane Eckett, Stuart Purves AM, Caroline Purves, Jess Pedevski, Robin Gibson, Carl Lykert, and Murray White. Special thanks are also due to the Estate of Erwin Fabian, Australian Galleries, Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, Murray White Room, Melbourne. Thank you to Sue Cramer, Curator, Heide Museum of Modern Art, for officially opening the exhibition at McClelland, and to McClelland’s dedicated team of staff and volunteers.

Dr Jane Eckett is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching associate in art history at the University of Melbourne whose research focuses on modernist sculpture and émigré legacies. Her PhD from 2017 examined the European origins of the Centre Five group of sculptors, and in 2018 Jane was appointed the Ursula Hoff Fellow at the Ian Potter Museum of Art and National Gallery of Victoria. Her recent publications include chapters in Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond, MUP and Power Publications, 2019; Australia Modern, Thames and Hudson, 2019; and Melbourne Modern: European art and design at RMIT since 1945, RMIT Gallery, 2019.

McClelland gratefully acknowledges the ongoing assistance and generous contribution of our sponsors, partners, donors and patrons: Creative Victoria; Frankston City Council; Crown Resorts Foundation; Packer Family Foundation; Elisabeth Murdoch Sculpture Fund; The Hugh Williamson Foundation; Aidan Graham Trust; International Art Services; Plenary Group; Elgee Park; Haymes Paint; and Red Hill Brewery.

Simon Lawrie is Curator at McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery.