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Gallery Gondwana @ Depot
Gallery, 2 Danks Street Waterloo
An exhibition of dynamic and exciting images, bashed and beaten from
desert distressed metal, car bonnets, doors and roof panels.
Gallery Gondwana takes great delight in announcing the forthcoming
exhibition Beating around the Bush. These new works by metal artist
Dan Murphy continue his construction of the deconstructed. Working
entirely with the found metal of abandoned cars, which the artist
drives deep into the remote bush of the territory to collect, these
works are both vibrant with the duco of the car’s former glory and
weathered with the journey of discovery and abandonment. Working
from his studio in the bush overlooking the west McDonnell Ranges,
each piece of metal is a story of colour, rust and incidental dings.
Discovering the nature of the metal and bringing forth an image of
outback landscape without compromising the beauty of the original
found object is a driving force for this adventurous artist.
Dan’s work has been largely collected since he started to work in
metal in the early nineties. Included in collections such as The Art
Gallery of South Australia and The Grand Circle Foundation, Boston,
USA, it is his inclusion in the Museum and Art Gallery of the
Northern Territory that most reflects the work and artistic
aesthetic of Dan Murphy. In 1994, while exhibiting alongside Rosalie
Gascoigne, in the 100% Tracey exhibition in Darwin, Murphy and
Gascoigne discovered a shared hope that as artists they could help
people recognise the beauty in everyday things they see around them.
The meeting and shared beliefs led to Gascoine’s admiration of
Murphy’s work and subsequent purchase which she donated to the
Museum and Art Gallery of The Northern Territory.
The work Murphy has created for Beating around the Bush maintains
this aesthetic of the found. Rust and areas void of the original
duco are delineated and emphasised by rows of puncture marks. The
white and blue of clay pans early morning, becomes an atlas to an
imagined world, ambiguous and interpretable as the artist brings the
desert to the city, ‘give them a bit of space’ as he would say.
Working with cars and scrap metal, Murphy understands the attraction
people have for the materials he uses. ‘Cars have all of these
dreams attached to them; they are in everyone’s psyche.’ And he is
right, the Datsun blue of a 1971, two door 510, or that particular
peacock green of an early BMW, the yellow and orange of the
seventies muscle cars, reformed and transformed into abstractions
the car lingers, as do the memories despite the rust of adventure.
Images retain the copyright of Dan Murphy and are to be credited
with Dan Murphy, recycled metal, courtesy of Dan Murphy and Gallery
Gondwana.
For further information, please do not hesitate to contact the
gallery on 02) 8399 3492 |
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