Faces & Threads
Free exhibition pairing George Alexander's painted dictator portraits on cardboard with Denis Mizzi's collage and photomontage works.
This is George Alexander's third show at The Shop Gallery in Glebe. This show Faces, started out after seeing a page of dictators, and other historical monsters, smiling. Happy fascists?! Stalin, Hitler, Bokassa, Mussolini etc all looking "as happy as the day is long". He decided to paint them onto old cardboard boxes. Then he added faces that were more benign - writers, artists etc, like Luis Bunüel, or Roland Barthes - to balance things out.
Better known as a writer, Alexander's books include The Book of the Dead (1985), Sparagmos (1989), Mortal Divide (1997), which won the NSW Premier's Award, and Slow Burn (2009). He has taught at art colleges and was a coordinator of contemporary art programsat Art Gallery of New South Wales for fourteen years.
Denis Mizzi's art is about life, death, love and authenticity. Humour too. No surprise that his very first solo show at the Mori gallery was called Endgame (1980). His work responds to the fire alarms of politics: ecocide, everyday fascism, refugees, cruelties of all kinds. Denis Mizzi has worked in a variety of media: concrete poetry, photography, mail art, video and countless collages and photomontages.
His day-job for years was working at the City Art Institute shop selling art materials. Memorable shows include the 1986 Remnants, First Draft, and Ground Zero, 1989, Tin Sheds, Sydney. He's developed his own recognizable aesthetic: the art brut textures - and fantastic colours: charcoal black, slate grey, platinum, infra-red. He has exhibited internationally.
This exhibition - Threads - tries to find its way through the labyrinth of images: landscapes, abstracts, figures, faces, etc. Here, self and other, inside and outside, policed space and free-space, swap places. "Subconscious interiors lost in conscious exteriors".
