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Fox Galleries is delighted to announce that we will be participating at the Affordable Art Fair Melbourne being held in the historic Royal Exhibition building from the 5th – 8th September, 2019.

Fox Galleries will be presenting a selection of artworks from established and emerging artists for collectors to consider.

More details about the fair will be announced in the coming month.

On behalf of Christine Johnson, Fox Galleries is proud to announce its collaboration with Monash University Faculty of Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Sciences. To be officially launched in April 2019, ‘Five Soldiers’, will honour graduates of the faculty who became casualties of World War I. Fox Galleries will produce a commemorative publication for Monash University, which will make them available for the families of the soldiers. It will feature images by Christine and essays by the highly regarded author Michael Shmith. Additionally, a series of limited edition etchings by Christine will be made, which will be placed into museum collections and exhibited at Fox Galleries in October, alongside new paintings by the artist.

We gratefully acknowledge Andrew McIntosh and Dean Bill Charman from the faculty who made this project a reality as well as Baldessin Press and Studio for their assistance in the production of the etchings and Ellikon Fine Printers for their support in the making of the publication.

Please let us know if you wish to express your interest in the ‘Five Soldiers’ publication and limited edition etchings.

Congratulations to Nigel Sense for being selected as a finalist in the 2018 Mosman Art Prize for his piece The Last Supper. Sense was also a finalist in 2017.

As stated on the Mosman Art Prize website, “Established in 1947, the Mosman Art Prize is Australia’s oldest and most prestigious local government art award. It was founded by the artist, architect and arts advocate, Alderman Allan Gamble, at a time when only a small handful of art prizes were in existence in Australia and the community had very little support and few opportunities to exhibit their work. As an acquisitive art award for painting, the winning artworks collected since 1947 form a splendid collection of modern and contemporary Australian art, reflecting all the developments in Australian art practice since 1947… The 2018 Mosman Art Prize will be judged by artist and former Mosman Art Prize winner Cressida Campbell.”

Nigel Sense is an Australian artist based in Sydney who draws inspiration from the American abstract expressionists and pop artists of the 1960s to make work that is neo social expressionist.

Sense has exhibited his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia and in Sri Lanka. In 2009 Sense was exhibited as part of the inaugural Colombo Art Biennale, and invited again in 2012. His award winning first Sydney solo exhibition titled I Work With Tools was held at Sheffer Gallery in September 2012.

Sense paints energetically in acrylic on canvas with bold, direct marks, describing his process as primal and instinctive. His overlaid imagery mimics his state of mind at the end of the working day. Instead of trying to clear his thoughts from the day’s experiences, he paints them—conversations, emails, phone calls, what his colleagues discuss over morning tea—everything goes down on the canvas.

Nigel Sense is a graduate of the University of Wollongong. His work is frequently selected for major awards, most recently the Black Swan Art Prize (Finalist, 2017), Mosman Art Prize (Finalist, 2017) and the Kilgour Art Prize (Finalist, 2017).

Congratulations to Esther Erlich for being selected as a finalist in the 2018 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (JADA) for her piece Hand in glove.

As stated on the Grafton Regional Gallery website, “The Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (JADA) has been the means by which the Grafton Regional Gallery has gathered a unique and impressive collection of contemporary Australian drawing. Since the establishment of the drawing acquisition prize in 1988 there has been over one hundred works acquired into the collection from leading, established and emerging artists.”

Esther Erlich is a Melbourne based artist celebrated for over three decades for her distinctive portraits. Expressive and alluring, Erlich’s figures demand attention from their viewers. Her provocatively beautiful faces are vivid apparitions above abstracted bodies that exist in no space or time.

Esther Erlich has had over 51 solo and 72 group exhibitions since 1983. She won the prestigious Doug Moran Portrait Prize (1998), the People’s Choice Award, Archibald Prize (2000) and has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize and the Portia Geach Memorial Award multiple times. She is represented in both public and private collections nationally and abroad, including the CAE Victoria, Performing Arts Museum, National Portrait Gallery, ALP Building A.C.T., and the National Library Canberra.

Congratulations to Robert Andrew for being selected for The National 2019: New Australian Art. His work will be shown at the Art Gallery NSW from 29 March – 21 July 2019 as part of the three venue exhibition featuring 65 emerging, mid-career and established Australian contemporary artists living across the country and abroad.

As the press release states:

A major collaborative venture, The National 2019 is the second edition of a six-year initiative presented in 2017, 2019 and 2021, exploring the latest ideas and forms in contemporary Australian art.

The 2019 exhibition is curated by AGNSW Curator of Photographs, Isobel Parker Philip; Carriageworks Senior Curator of Visual Arts, Daniel Mudie Cunningham; and MCA Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections and Exhibitions, Clothilde Bullen with MCA Curator, Anna Davis.

As in its first year, the exhibition showcases new and commissioned work by contemporary Australian artists encompassing a diverse range of media including painting, video, photography, sculpture, installation, drawing and performance.

The National 2019 will continue the project’s curatorial ambitions as a large-scale survey of contemporary Australian art in the form of three distinct exhibitions that explore overlapping themes including hierarchy and power, dystopic futures, and ritual and improvisation.

Isobel Parker Philip said The National 2019 at AGNSW reveals how Australian artists are responding with subtlety and intensity to the times they live in, through artworks that are intricate, complex and often charged with a sense of precariousness.

“States of suspense and anticipation characterise the exhibition at AGNSW, as 24 artists navigate the boundary between chaos and control in work that is by turns political, poetic and personal,” Parker Philip said.

“Working with materials ranging from charred wood to many kilometres of yarn, the artists in the AGNSW exhibition explore and test conditions of gravity and suspension, impermanence and fragility,” Parker Philip added.

Robert Andrew uses practice-led research to investigate denied and forgotten personal and family histories, utilising open-sourced, programmable technologies and machinery to erode, expose substrates, build stories and create residue. These works manifest as visually scraped back and built up palimpsests that reference technology, natural materials and the ‘artefact’.

Fusing the old and the new, Andrew uses earth pigments, ochres, rocks and soil to build stories of relationship to land and culture and to mine historical, cultural, political and personal events that have been ignored, buried and distanced by the dominant paradigms of our western culture.

Andrew is an artist of mixed heritage, a decedent of the Yawuru people from the Broome area in the Kimberley, Western Australia, as well as of European and Filipino descent. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art and an Honours Degree in Fine Arts from Griffith University, where he is currently a post graduate candidate for a Doctorate in Visual Arts.

Andrew won the 40th Alice Prize in 2018 for his work White Wash Over The Burn (2017). His work is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria and has been exhibited as part of Moving Backwards into the Future (2015) and Colony: Frontier Wars (2017) at the Ian Potter Centre at the NGV, as well as Ars Electronica (2017) in Austria. He was commissioned to make Moving from the Binary for the Experimenta Make Sense International Triennial of Media Art. In 2017 Andrew had solos at the Museum of Brisbane and Metro Arts Brisbane.

Congratulations to Esther Erlich for being selected as a finalist in the Black Swan Prize for Portraiture 2018 for her painting Dignified. The painting was previously selected as a finalist in the Percival Portrait Painting Prize 2018.

As described in Art Guide Australia, “From over 500 entries, 40 finalists from across Australia have been chosen for the ‘2018 Black Swan Prize for Portraiture’, Western Australia’s premier art prize. Now in its twelfth year, the prize pool available to professional, emerging and young artists is over $70,000, making it the third richest prize in Australia after the Archibald and Moran competitions.”

Esther Erlich is a Melbourne based artist celebrated for over three decades for her distinctive portraits. Expressive and alluring, Erlich’s figures demand attention from their viewers. Her provocatively beautiful faces are vivid apparitions above abstracted bodies that exist in no space or time.

Esther Erlich has had over 51 solo and 72 group exhibitions since 1983. She won the prestigious Doug Moran Portrait Prize (1998), the People’s Choice Award, Archibald Prize (2000) and has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize and the Portia Geach Memorial Award multiple times. She is represented in both public and private collections nationally and abroad, including the CAE Victoria, Performing Arts Museum, National Portrait Gallery, ALP Building A.C.T., and the National Library Canberra.

Read the article below or on the Good Weekend.

Art: Esther Erlich

By John McDonald

Lives: Brighton East, Melbourne. Age: 62. Represented by: Fox Galleries, Melbourne; Frances Keevil Gallery, Sydney.

Her thing.

Dramatic female portraits and figure studies with expressionist overtones.

Our take.

Erlich is a dedicated painter of figures and portraits who inhabits that uneasy territory between mainstream and avant garde, which means she can produce likenesses which are both realistic and highly stylised. This tends to polarise audiences, as it did with Viennese artists such as Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, who are obvious influences. She also cites an admiration for the German modernist Jeanne Mammen.

Erlich has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize and the Portia Geach Memorial Award on numerous occasions. In 1998, Erlich won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize for a picture of long-distance runner Steve Moneghetti.

The Female Gaze, her show at Melbourne’s Fox Galleries, consists of paintings and large-scale drawings in which a diverse cast of women stare at us provocatively, as if daring viewers to look away. When Manet had his female subjects stare directly out of the canvas, they were generally assumed to be harlots. Erlich plays on this association in paintings such as Epic and Ladies , in which heavily made-up groups of women flaunt their sexual attractiveness in a most self-confident manner. It’s up to the viewer to decide whether this is meant to be alluring or confronting.

Can I afford it?

For $1650 you could pick up one of three small faces measuring 36cm x 36cm, listed in the catalogue as Untitled 1 , 2 and 3 . These acrylic paintings feature three young women peering from a saturated screen of red that reveals only a glimpse of eyes, nose and lips, and the occasional pearl earring.

The most expensive piece is Epic (137cm x 183cm), pictured, at $18,000. This seems eminently reasonable considering the artist worked on the painting for five years, and it is still well under Erlich’s record price of $30,000 (although her Doug Moran Portrait Prize winner was automatically acquired for the prize money of $100,000).

Where can I have a squiz?

Fox Galleries, 63 Wellington Streetreet, Collingwood, until July 14; foxgalleries.com.au.