WATTERS GALLERY NOTE: Works in the Watters Gallery Gallipoli exhibition marked WG. All others available via Watters Gallery though exhibited at other Australian and New Zealand venues (except p.24 courtesy Niagara Galleries, Melbourne)
109 Riley Street, East Sydney NSW 2010 Tel: (02) 9331 2556 Fax: (02) 9361 6871 www.wattersgallery.com info@wattersgallery.com Hours: 10am–5pm Tues & Sat, 10am–7pm Wed to Fri
EUAN MACLEOD Gallipoli 16 June – 4 July 2015 Opens: 6–8pm Wednesday 17 June 2015
An introduction to the work I don’t know the sands of Gallipoli. But I remember the mud of the Western Front. Pozieres Village and the heights beyond – a ridge as densely sown with ANZAC sacrifice as any other place on earth – Hell Fire Corner and the churned fields of Polygon Wood. Bullets, buttons and shards of bone underfoot. I was 21, a young officer trained in Australia and serving in the New Zealand Army. The battlefield I saw was filled with chalky-white headstones shoulder-to-shoulder, standing in gentle fields and rolling green hills, cloaked in faith and solitude. 25 years on and 16,000km away, I stood on a concrete floor in front of Figure Carrying Skeleton and felt the mood of the Somme once more. Figure Carrying Skeleton 2014 oil on polyester 120 x 84cm WG FRONT: Smoke screen 2014-15 oil on polyester 150 x 180cm WG
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Look just below the surface and there are shards of Euan’s memory half buried in the paint. Turkish women veiled in hijab, haggling and laughing over a contrasting pigment or missing tree on a plein air canvas. An antipodean father and son following in the footsteps of a great-grand-uncle who rests, beneath the same dust scuffed into the air as they search the gullies. A wounded Australian, arms draped about the shoulders of a Turk and immortalised in bronze above the Lone Pine cemetery. Go deeper still, and an exploration of conflict and duality is inevitable – there are two figures, two sides, past and present, parent and child. A sense of identity, and the outsider, is inextricably linked with the sense of place – soldiers in a foreign land, a painter as a tourist and a piece of Australia on a Turkish shore. Euan Macleod knows that place called Gallipoli. He walked the narrows of The Nek, the dusty rolling flat of Lone Pine and the ragged steep of Mule Gully. As he pushed his way through the “scrub that sat like a skeleton”, he forced himself not to touch a paint brush for two days, intent on absorbing the landscape and the sense of place. He strained to hear the faint echoes from amongst the hills, and see the shadows of the lives that spent themselves in this corner of the world. His Gallipoli is not a black and white memory fixed from faded photographs or schoolboy texts. It is a deeply personal intersection with the shared history of three nations.
Tourists below Sphinx 2014 oil on acrylic on polyester 84 x 120cm WG
Father and son, Plugge’s Plateau 2014 oil on polyester 38 x 51cm WG
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Study, Painting tourists 2014 oil on polyester 38 x 51cm WG
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul 28/4/14 oil on polyester 53 x 66cm WG
Mule Gully 2014 oil on polyester 84 x 100cm WG
Hillside, Kilitbahir 30/4/14 oil on polyester 53 x 66cm WG
Euan is like no other artist. His narrative is consistent yet wildly limitless, dramatic yet subtle. His images will leap from a moment to a memory, through to a symbolic dimension, changing canvas by canvas. His work can be appreciated in its simplest form – a snapshot of a foreign field – or seen as a complex tapestry, toughness and vulnerability interwoven with fragments of memory that draw down to a deeper statement about the human condition or the spiritual power of a shattered landscape.
So on the surface his Gallipoli is a specific time and place. Glimpses of Turkish cities are structured in thickness and light. The landscapes are neither the red desert dry of Australia, nor the dark plunging gullies or coastal blue of New Zealand. They have a new otherworldliness. Figures shift between those visiting the sacred ground and its permanent inhabitants, whose presence is infinitely more weighty. More soldierly. They are not defined by deeds, humour, fear or red raw violence, but by the universal nature of a soldier. Persistence, existence, faith and doubt.
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In the dark depths, Euan tugs at the threads of myth and truth “it was barbaric and it was murder, I wonder if some of the truth of it has been buried in the myth” while behind him there is a canvas, two figures armed with shovels covering, uncovering, protecting or hiding something below the surface. Creating a comfort and connection with rich and ambiguous imagery is the brilliance of Euan Macleod. He allows us to relate to unknown places, times and emotions in terms of things we know. Buried in his dense, textured and sculptural work there are touchstones that help define where our own history intersects with the emotion of the work. In Euan’s own words “it’s about how we remember, what we remember and why we remember it. How we deal with the past and respond to the landscape” He would hope that in this series of work you discover your own layers, your own touchstones, and perhaps your own Gallipoli. Andrew Turley
Above Ari Burnu 2014 oil on acrylic on polyester 84 x 120cm WG
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Sentry (Skeleton) 2014 oil on acrylic on polyester 84 x 100cm WG
Going south, North Beach 2014 oil on polyester 84 x 100cm WG
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Coffin Hole 2014 oil on linen 84 x 120cm WG
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Istanbul 28/4/14 oil on polyester 53 x 66cm WG
Painting Tourists (Russell’s Top) 2014 oil on polyester 100 x 124cm WG
Dardanelles from Kilitbahir 30/4/14 oil on polyester 53 x 66cm WG
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The skeleton watch In the words of Ecclesiastes, a man ‘goeth to his long home’, but, with luck, in his own good time and in the place of his choosing. One hundred years after the ANZAC landings, human bones are still surfacing on the slopes and in the gullies of the Gallipoli Peninsula. Nowhere is the spectre of untimely, dislocated death more apparent than in this particular landscape. Continuing onwards at glacial speed, fragments of human bone descend towards the waters that link the Turkish peninsula with the distant, antipodean homelands of so many of its fatalities. In a photograph taken by Hubert Wilkins during a visit to the peninsula shortly after World War One, a mass of broken up skeletons cascades down a bank.i Not only could this be a scenario from Dante’s Inferno, it is also strangely reminiscent of the great New Zealand landscape, Mountain Stream, Otira Gorge (1893) by Petrus van der Velden.ii In Wilkins’ photograph, however, the cleansing, existential torrent of the Romantic artist has been replaced by a diabolical melange of shredded clothing, skulls and other human remains. While the landscape painter might have imagined divine light, inspiration and salvation beaming down from the mountains above, it was despair and death that came raining down during the ill-fated 1915 campaign. Imbued with both the historical weight of Wilkins’ photograph and a melding of Expressionism and Romanticism gleaned, in part, from van der Velden, Euan Macleod’s Gallipoli paintings offer a counter-movement to the aforementioned descent. The skeletons in many of his works have not only been disinterred, they are in a state of surfacing, as if from an oceanic depth; laid out, they face upwards; one knee raised, their bones are cushioned by the earth, in some cases raised upwards. It is as if we are witnessing a rebirth or reawakening. In the dark Gallipoli soil, the calcium phosphate of human bones glows with the light of long forgotten days. Hovering above these open graves, Macleod’s vertical figures—some of whom wield shovels or paintbrushes—carry their shadows inside as well as on the surface of their bodies. Compared with the brooding uncertainty of these spectres, there is something almost reassuring about Macleod’s skeletons. They have the light of day in them, as the standing,
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digging or wrestling figures seldom do. We are being reminded that it is the living who are haunted, who have to suffer this recurrent nightmare. The weight of mortality and the duties of mourning and remembering fall to the vertical inhabitants of this or any other landscape. The dead are free of it. Yet the exact significance of the skeletons in Macleod’s art is far from settled. In Coffin hole, we find a skeleton lodged in a shelf-like catacomb, reminiscent of the sleeping arrangements in trenches; On the Beach features a giant-scaled skeleton laid at the water’s edge like the remains of a whale or the skeletal framework of a shipwreck. In Macleod’s many depictions of trench or grave digging, the bones belong as much to the land as they do to the human body. In Above Ari Burnu, the earth is stripped back to reveal the human skeleton it contains. We are in the earth, as the earth is in us. So continues Macleod’s meditation upon untimely death and the time-keeping of human history. ‘Because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets…’ The standing or labouring figures in Macleod’s paintings might be survivors, witnesses, mourners or simply passers-by. Consigned, for all time, to these hinterlands, humanity is left to contemplate itself in this mirror of churned and blasted earth. Eschewing historical reconstruction or elegiac memorialising, Macleod does not allow his subjects to recede into the past. In these tableaux, with their percolating, ever-active painterly ingredients, the present instant is constantly collapsing into history—and history, like an ebb tide, floods the present. Accompanying the endless Sisyphean ritual of exhumation, of burial and re-internment, of digging up and filling in, we listen for the sound of pick and shovel, the ticking of a clock. And we watch these skeletons—just as they watch us. And we learn from them. Sons and fathers in their warm pocket of earth. Gregory O’Brien
i The photograph appears in the catalogue, ‘Your friend the enemy; Gallipoli Centenary Exhibition’, p6 ii Van der Velden’s painting is reproduced in Euan Macleod—the painter in the painting, Sydney: Piper Press 2010, p62
On the beach 2014 oil on acrylic on linen 89 x 180cm
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Study, Digging in earth 2014 oil on polyester 38 x 51cm WG
Study, Scrum 2 Gallipoli 2014 oil on polyester 38 x 51cm WG
Study, Tourists below Sphinx 2014 oil on polyester 38 x 51cm WG
Study, Scrum 1 Gallipoli 29/10/14 oil on polyester 38 x 51cm WG Russell’s Top (without Stanley) 3/5/14 oil on polyester 53 x 66cm WG
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Dark figure, Russell’s Top 3/5/14 oil on polyester 53 x 66cm WG
Dark sky above Sphinx (North Beach) 5/5/14 oil on plywood 50 x 62cm WG
Study, No Man’s Land 1 (with smoke) 2014 oil on polyester 100 x 84cm WG
Clouds above Sphinx (North Beach) 5/5/14 oil on plywood 50 x 62cm WG
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Study, Clouds over Gallipoli 2014 oil on polyester 38 x 51cm WG
Study, Sentry Gallipoli 2014 oil on polyester 38 x 51cm WG
Study, Fire at night with oar 2014 oil on polyester 38 x 51cm WG
Study, Fire at night 1 29/10/14 oil on polyester 38 x 51cm WG
Study, Mule Gully, Gallipoli 2014 oil on polyester 38 x 51cm WG
Study, Going south, North Beach 2014 oil on polyester 38 x 51cm WG
Study, Figures across Sphinx 2014 acrylic on paper 27.7 x 58cm WG Study, Coffin hole, Gallipoli 7/14 oil on polyester 38 x 51cm WG
Gully below Russell’s Top 1/5/14 oil on polyester 53 x 66cm WG
Tourist at Russell’s Top 6/5/14 (diptych) oil on polyester 66 x 106cm WG
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Gallipoli, Anzac Cove clouds 1/6/13 acrylic on paper 38 x 58cm WG
Anzac Cove from Russell’s Top 31/5/13 acrylic on paper 38 x 58cm WG
Anzac Cove Sphinx 31/5/13 acrylic on paper 38 x 58cm WG
Steve painting at Ari Burnu 7/5/14 acrylic on paper 38 x 58cm WG
Two swimmers, Anzac Cove 31/5/13 acrylic on paper 38 x 58cm WG
Anzac Cove with Sphinx (from Russell’s Top) 31/5/13 acrylic on paper 38 x 58cm WG
Study, Father and Son Gallipoli 2014 acrylic on paper 30 x 42cm WG
Gallipoli study lying 2014 acrylic on paper 26 x 38cm WG
Gallipoli study sitting 2014 acrylic on paper 38 x 29cm WG
Gallipoli study standing 2014 acrylic on paper 29 x 38cm WG
Five 2014 acrylic on paper 38 x 58cm WG
Study, Fort 2014 acrylic on paper 30 x 42cm WG
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Anzac Cove couple 1/6/13 acrylic on paper 38 x 58cm WG Study, Carrying skeleton, Gallipoli 2014 oil on polyester 51 x 38cm WG
Study, Wrestle (red and black figures) 2014 oil on polyester 51 x 38cm WG
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Imbros from Russell’s Top 2014 oil on polyester 53 x 66cm WG
Orange wrestling figures 2014 oil on polyester 51 x 38cm WG
Study, Wrestle (dark left light right) 2014 acrylic on polyester 51 x 38cm WG
Study, Wrestle (lean to right) 2014 acrylic on polyester 51 x 38cm WG
Study, Wrestle (grey figures) 2014 acrylic on polyester 51 x 38cm WG
Sunset (Russell’s Top) 2014 oil on polyester 100 x 124cm
Wrestle (Dardanelles) 2014 acrylic on linen 120 x 84cm
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Study, No Man’s Land 2 2014 oil on polyester 84 x 100cm
Wrestle (Gallipoli Peninsula) 2014 oil on polyester 120 x 84cm
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Clouds over Gallipoli 2014 oil on acrylic on polyester 84 x 100cm
Fire at night 2014 oil on polyester 84 x 100cm
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Cross Sights 2014 oil on polyester 168 x 200cm
Scrum 2014 oil on acrylic on polyester 84 x 100cm
Canterbury diptych (with James) 5/5/14 oil on polyester 53 x 132cm
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Half Guy, Russell’s Top 2/5/14 oil on polyester 53 x 66cm
Ari Burnu from Russell’s Top 1/5/14 oil on polyester 53 x 66cm
Towards Anzac Cove from Russell’s Top 1/5/14 oil on polyester 53 x 66cm
Stanley, Russell’s Top 3/5/14 oil on polyester 53 x 66cm
Diptych, On the road (below Sphinx) 2014 oil on polyester 100 x 248cm
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Dig, dig, dig 2014 oil on polyester 152 x 183cm
Selected Biography
Born Christchurch, New Zealand, 1956 SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2015 Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Sydney 2015 ‘14, ‘12, ‘10, ‘08, ‘05, ‘03, ‘01, ‘97, ‘95, ‘93, ‘91, ‘89, ‘87, ‘85, ‘83, ’82 Watters Gallery, Sydney 2015, ‘13, ‘12, ‘10, ‘07, ‘05, ‘03, ‘01, ‘97, ‘95, ‘93, ‘90, ‘89, ‘87, ‘86, ’84 Bowen Galleries, Wellington NZ 2013, ‘11, ‘09, ‘06, ‘04, ‘02, ‘00, ‘98, ‘96, ‘94, ‘92, ‘90 Niagara Galleries, Melbourne 2012, ‘11, ‘10, ‘09, ‘08, ‘06, ‘02, ‘01, ‘98, ‘96, ‘94, ‘92, ‘90, ‘87 Victor Mace Fine Art Gallery, Brisbane QLD 2009, ‘06, ‘04, ‘02, ‘00, ‘98, ‘96, ‘94, ‘92, ‘90, ‘87, ‘85 Brooke/Gifford Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand 2014 The Painter in the Painting, Tauranga Art Gallery, NZ travelling to 5 venues in NZ 2014-2016 2011 Surface Tension, SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney – touring until 2016 various galleries Australia and NZ Surface Tension: the art of Euan Macleod 1991 – 2009, Tweed River Art Gallery, NSW; Orange Regional Gallery, NSW; Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, VIC; Newcastle Region Art Gallery; University of QLD Art Museum; 2010 S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney Euan Macleod Portraits, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, NSW 2008 Prints and Paintings by Euan Macleod, Tweed River Art Gallery, NSW 2005 Euan Macleod – Newcastle Revisited: Work since 1998, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, NSW 2002 Napoleon Reef – Paintings by Euan Macleod, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, NSW 2000 Euan Macleod – Painting 1981-1999, University of the Sunshine Coast Library Gallery, QLD; 1998 Newcastle Region Art Gallery, NSW Euan Macleod - Painting 1984 - 2000, Cairns Regional Gallery, Qld 1992 Drawings, New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale, NSW SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2015 Your Friend the Enemy, SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney; ANU Drill Hall Gallery, ACT; Goulburn, NSW and other venues Australia and NZ 2014 Five Decades Watters Gallery, SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney 2013 Personal Space: Contemporary Australian and Chinese Prints, Shenzhen, China 2012 Not the way home, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney - also touring: Orange Regional Gallery, NSW; New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale NSW and Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, NSW 2012, 2008, 2006 Art of Music 2012, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney 2011 Lana & Chang Mai University Art Centre, Thailand Together in Harmony for 50 years, Korean Foundation Cultural Centre, Seoul Australian Painting: Shonah Tresscott + Euan Macleod, LIA Spinnerei, Leipzig, Germany 2006 Art Interchange - The Exchange Exhibition of Korean and Australian Art Colleges, Hongik University, Korea 2005 Art Paris, Carousel du Louvre, Paris 2005, 2004, 2001, 2000, 1997 Salon des Refuses, S.H Ervin Gallery, Sydney 2000 An Affair to Remember, Artspace, Singapore Uncommon Worlds, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 1999 Salon Grande des Jeunes d’Ajourd Hui, (Arts d’Australie- Stephane Jacob), Espace Eiffel-Branley, Paris, France 1994 The Baillieu Myer Collection of the 80’s, Museum of Modern Art, Heide, VIC 1993 Seoul International Drawing Exhibition ‘93, Seoul Fine Art Centre, Korea 1992 Margaret Stewart Endowment Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 1991 Figurative Focus, Tamworth City Art Gallery, NSW
SELECTED COLLECTIONS All Australian State and National Galleries, most regional galleries and many university galleries Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, USA Canterbury University, NZ Centre for Contemporary Art, Hamilton, NZ Lincoln University, Christchurch, NZ Saatchi and Saatchi, Wellington, NZ Sargent Gallery, Whanganui, NZ Victoria University, Wellington, NZ Macquarie Bank AMP Allen Allen & Hemsley Parliament House Western Mining Australian Film Commission SELECTED AWARDS 2011 Winner, The King’s School Art Prize 2009, 2000 Winner, Gallipoli Art Prize and Tattersall’s Landscape Prize 2009 Winner, Tattersall’s Art Prize 2008 Winner, NSW Parliament Plein Air Painting Prize 2008, 2003, 1998 Finalist, The Wynne Prize, AGNSW 2007 Finalist, National Artists’ Self Portrait Prize 2006 Winner, Blake Prize; Finalist, Fleurieu Peninsula Art Prize 2003 Finalist, High Court Centenary Art Prize 2001 Winner, The Sulman Prize, AGNSW 2000, 1998 Finalist, Sulman Prize, AGNSW 1999 Winner, The Archibald Prize, AGNSW SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 2010 Gregory O’Brien, Euan Macleod: the Painter in the Painting, Piper Press, Sydney 2009 Elizabeth Caughey, Contemporary New Zealand Art 5, Bateman