Imants Tillers, On the Pathos of the Truth, 2015, acrylic, gouache on 24 canvas boards, No 96513 - 96536, 150 x 142.5 cm
IMANTS TILLERS is featured in the current issue of Vault Art Magazine.
In the article Louise Martin-Chew writes about the artist's cumulative project, the Book of Power, and ARC ONE co-director, Fran Clark, notes that, “Every painting is like a page, all paintings are numbered and part of certain chapters. He goes in and out of these chapters. Everything is connected."
On Tuesday 6 August at 6pm, The University of Melbourne will host the Melbourne premiere of Thrown Into the World, directed by Antra Cilinska.
This feature-length documentary offers unique insight into IMANTS TILLERS’ creative process and cross-cultural identity. The screening will be followed by a half hour discussion with Imants Tillers, chaired by Ian Mclean.
The film will screen at Federation Hall on the university’s Southbank campus. Places are filling up fast, so register your attendance today!
This Sunday 21 July at 4pm, Cinema Nova is screening It All Started With A Stale Sandwich, followed by a Q&A with its director and special guests.
The film is an insightful documentary celebrating the 50-year history of Kaldor Public Art Projects, from acclaimed film-maker Samantha Lang. Imants Tillers is one of the artists featured in the film. In it he reflects on his 1984 group show at P.S.1 Gallery in New York, An Australian Accent, as well as assisting Christo & Jeanne-Claude with their mammoth project wrapping Little Bay in 1969.
Still from the film Thrown Into The World.
Thrown into the World is a feature-length documentary on the life and work of IMANTS TILLERS. The film offers a unique insight into Tillers' creative process and cross-cultural identity.
Thrown into the World will be screened at Parliament House in Canberra at 2pm today, followed by a Q&A with with Imants and Justine Van Mourik, Director of the Parliament House Art Collection.
Watch the trailer here, and read more about the Canberra premiere here.
Imants Tillers, All hail Greg Inglis, 2019, synthetic polymer paint and gouache on 64 canvasboards, 242 x 242 cm overall.
IMANTS TILLERS is a finalist in the 2019 Archibald Prize with his portrait of rugby league legend Greg Inglis. Congratulations Imants!
”Many artists, writers, actors and other cultural workers secretly follow sport,” says Imants Tillers. “I was recently delighted to learn that Tracey Moffatt follows the South Sydney Rabbitohs (co-owned by Russell Crowe). I have also been a supporter since 1965, when as a 15-year-old I attended the legendary grand final between South Sydney and St George. To witness Greg Inglis in full flight, equipped with a fend that could stop a freight train, is to see poetry in motion. Thou majestic!
But there is far more to Greg Inglis than being an elite Indigenous athlete. He is a hero and role model to Indigenous communities all around Australia, and a community leader of enormous influence. His great act of grace is to engage with these communities. He teaches children and adolescents how to avoid drugs, alcohol and violence and how to adapt to the many other challenges that these disadvantaged children and adolescents face. Every human being is the greatest work of art ever created. He brings hope and a sense that anyone, despite everything, can be master of their own destiny. All hail Greg Inglis!”
MAJOR MONOGRAPH
IMANTS TILLERS: JOURNEY TO NOWHERE
Co-published by Power Publications, Sydney and the Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga, the major monograph 'Imants Tillers: Journey to Nowhere' was launched at the MCA on Wednesday 21 November and is now available in Australian bookshops.
The Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting with the Power Institute, the Australian premiere screening of the feature-length Imants Tillers documentary Thrown into the World, directed by Antra Cilinska of Juris Podnieks Studio, and the launch of the Imants Tillers’ new monograph, Journey to Nowhere.
The screening will be followed by a short Q&A with Professor Mark Ledbury and Imants Tillers.
5.45 – 8.30pm | 21 November 2018
Museum of Contemporary Art
*Please note that this event is sold out. Contact the MCA to go on the Waiting List.
Imants Tillers, Studio, Image Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art.
Imants Tillers, Fiction of Place, 2018, synthetic polymer paint, gouache on 132 canvas-boards nos. 106258- 106389, 279.4 x 426.72 cm.
ARC ONE is delighted to present Imants Tillers’ latest exhibition, Joy Knows No Mercy, across two locations: ARC ONE Gallery
(4 September – 6 October) and Sydney Contemporary (13 – 16 September).
As one of Australia’s most important living artists, Imants Tillers has been at the forefront of conceptual painting for over four decades. Since his first solo exhibition in 1973, he has forged a reputation as a rigorously intellectual and sophisticated artist with a singular visual language. Tillers juxtaposes layers of complex art historical, political, literary, personal, and philosophical references to create thought-provoking works that explore themes relevant to contemporary culture, identity, displacement, assimilation, and distance.
In Joy Knows No Mercy, Tillers employs his signature modular formations of small canvas-boards to form a series of profound and expansive tableaux. The monumental Fiction of Place (2018) is the centrepiece of the exhibition. It is the culmination of the artist’s Metafisica Australe series, an important chapter that explores the remarkable aesthetic connection between certain aspects
of contemporary Western Desert painting and European art. Tillers has based this large 132
panel work on Francesco Guardi’s Venetian scene, Bucentaur Departing for the Lido (c. 1775-80). However, what appears to be the sky is an appropriated section of Papunya Tula artist, Kenny Williams Tjampitjinpa’s, Kuniya Dreaming at Karriwarra (2004) which denotes a Western Desert landscape in Central Australia. Simultaneously, the interrelation of the colours and stylised zigzag patterning here evokes a de Chirico-esque rendering of water or a Post-Impressionist sky. As Tillers asserts, Fiction of Place “depicts the collision (or maybe the reconciliation) of the two worlds: the Aboriginal and the European.” This is a concept explored throughout much of his oeuvre.
The sources of Tillers’ imagery are significant. In Joy Knows No Mercy, Tillers references European artists and writers such as Guardi, de Chirico, Odilon Redon, Hilma af Klint, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Phillip Otto Runge. He has then juxtaposed these references against works by Australian and New Zealander artists such as Arthur Streeton, John Glover, Colin McCahon,
and Julian Daspher, acknowledging that distant, provincial cultures depend on imports from dominant cultures for much of their artistic inspiration and imagery. This layering of text and art references has become a powerful visual language for Tillers in his exploration of distance and issues of locality and identity, and constitutes a key feature of his practice, the ever unfolding Book of Power.
Imants Tillers has exhibited widely since the late 1960s, and has represented Australia at important international exhibitions, such as the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1975, Documenta 7 in 1982, and the 42nd Venice Biennale in 1986. Major solo surveys of Tillers’ work include Journey to Nowhere, Latvian Museum of Art, Riga (2018); Imants Tillers: works 1978–1988 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1988); Imants Tillers: 19301, at the National Art Gallery, Wellington (1989); Diaspora, National Art Museum, Riga, Latvia (1993); Diaspora in Context at the Pori Art Museum, Pori (1995); Towards In nity: Works by Imants Tillers, Museum of Contemporary Art (MARCO) in Monterrey, Mexico (1999); and in 2006 a major retrospective of his work, Imants Tillers: one world many visions, was held at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Tillers was the winner of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Wynne Prize for landscape painting for two consecutive years (2012-2013). He has received numerous awards and commissions, such as the Osaka Triennale Prize (Gold in 1993, Bronze in 1996, and Silver in 2001), and the inaugural Beijing International Art Biennale Prize for Excellence (2003).
Terry Smith’s lecture on contemporary painters focusing on IMANTS TILLERS is now online. The lecture at the Latvian National Museum of Art is part of Journey to Nowhere, a major solo exhibition of TILLERS works.
You can watch the full lecture here:
IMANTS TILLERS is included in the exhibition '20/20 Celebrating twenty years with twenty new portrait commissions' at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. '20/20' showcases the dynamic suite of new portraits commissioned to celebrate the National Portrait Gallery’s 20th year.
Imants Tillers has painted a portrait of one of Australia’s most prolific playwrights Louis Nowra.
The exhibition opens 20 October and continues until 10 February 2019.
Imants Tillers, 'Study of Louis Nowra', 2018, synthetic polymer paint and gouache on 64 canvas boards. Commissioned 2018.
IMANTS TILLERS' major solo exhibition Journey to Nowhere is opening tonight at the Latvian National Museum of Art.
The exhibition will continue until 30 September.
A review of the exhibition can be read here.
Imants Tillers, Installation, Journey to Nowhere, 2018.
Imants Tillers, Tomb, 1987, oil stick, gouache, synthetic polymer paint on 48 canvas boards, nos. 17665–17712, 229 x 203 cm.
A solo exhibition of IMANTS TILLERS' is currently on display at The University Gallery, Newcastle, NSW.
Curated by Olivia Sophia, the exhibition From the Studio presents 10 paintings drawn from Tillers' personal collection, spanning four decades of his practice.
The exhibition continues until 26 May, 2018.
Imants Tillers. The Journey To Nowhere, 2017. Acrylic, gouache on 90 canvas boards, 228.5 × 355cm.
IMANTS TILLERS has been interviewed by Art Territory, in the lead up to the artist's retrospective Ceļojums uz nekurieni / Journey to Nowhere. The exhibition opens in July this year, at the Latvian National Museum of Art, Latvia.
In discussing the show, Imants explains:
"My exhibition, indeed one could say my work, is all about “belonging” and “not belonging” – about relationships between a “fatherland” and its diaspora. In many ways, this is almost the universal leitmotif of the 20th century. Much of the contemporary world, at least what is called “the new world”, is populated by the descendants of refugees and immigrants, most notably Australia..."
The article can be read here.
Imants Tillers, Warped Coast - Nature Speaks:FY, 2017, acrylic, gouache on 16 canvas boards, 101 x 142cm.
Imants Tillers, Journey to Nowhere, 2017, synthetic polymer paint, gouache on 90, canvasboards nos. 98522 – 98611, 228.5 × 355cm
Imants Tillers: Journey to Nowhere
Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga
6 July - 30 September 2018
IMANTS TILLERS has been invited to present a major retrospective exhibition of his work at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, to coincide with the centenary of Latvian independence in 1918.
Curated by Elita Ansone, Journey to Nowhere will be the most comprehensive survey of Tillers' work to-date. Ansone has selected 70 works spanning more than four decades from the 1970s to the present, many of which will be borrowed from private and public collections in Australia and New Zealand.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a feature-length documentary directed by Antra Cilinska, as well a monograph jointly published by the Latvian National Museum of Art and Power Publications at the University of Sydney. Scholarly essays will be contributed by Ian McLean, Graham Coulter-Smith, Elita Ansone, Imants Tillers and Mark Ledbury.
More information, including details of public programs, will be available from the Latvian National Museum of Art in the coming months.
Image: Michael Nelson Jagamara and Imants Tillers unveiling The Messenger at Parliament House, Canberra. Photographs: DPS/Auspic.
IMANTS TILLERS' collaborative works with Michael Nelson Jagamara, for the exhibition Meeting Place, are currently showing at Parliament House. The exhibition continues through to 12 November 2017.
An article about the exhibition features on Artshub here.
Imants Tillers and Michael Nelson Jagamara unveiling The Messenger at Parliament House, Canberra. Photographs: DPS/Auspic.
IMANTS TILLERS and Michael Nelson Jagamara's newest collaborative painting, The Messenger, has been unveiled at Parliament House, Canberra, by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tony Smith. This significant painting is the third and latest major work to be acquired for the Parliament House Collection in recent years.
An exhibition of works by the two artists was officially opened at the same time - Meeting Place - Michael Nelson Jagamara & Imants Tillers at Parliament House includes collaborative and individual works from the 1980s to present. On view until 12 November 2017.
IN THE PRESS:
"Powerful message from Imants Tillers and Michael Nelson Jagamara", Sydney Morning Herald, 18 August 2017
"Unique ‘Messenger’ artwork unveiled", Canberra CityNews, 17 August 2017
IMANTS TILLERS has been interviewed for an article in Art Guide about the upcoming exhibition Fred Williams in the You Yangs at the Geelong Gallery. In the article, TILLERS discusses the influence of Williams in his work and Australian landscape painting.
You can read the full article here.
Imants Tillers, At the Beggining, 2013, acrylic, gouache on 54 canvas boards, 229 x 213 cm
Imants Tillers, Breakfast Epiphany (with 9 panels by Michael Nelson Jagamara), 2014, synthetic polymer paint, gouache on 54 canvas boards, 228.6 x 213.4 cm
IMANTS TILLERS will be opening next week the exhibition Meeting Place - Michael Nelson Jagamara & Imants Tillers at the Parliament House in Canberra. The show will include collaborative and individual works from the 1980's until present.
The collaboration between TILLERS and Jagamara began in 2001, sending canvas boards backwards and forwards between their studios in Papunya NT and Cooma NSW to create significant large scale works.
The exhibition will be open from 17 August - 12 November.
For more information, click here.
An article about the exhibition opening by Helen Musa in Canberra CityNews can be read here.
IMANTS TILLERS has published an article, Metafisica Australe, in the latest issue of Art + Australia.
To read the article visit the publication's website here.