MICHAEL CALLAGHAN: 1967-2006 A SURVEY
3 March 2007 to 24 March 2007
The Tin Sheds Gallery is proud to present Michael Callaghan - A Survey 1967-2006 an exhibition of the work of
one of Australia’s most innovative and political graphic artists. This is the first comprehensive touring survey show of his work from a career spanning the years 1967-2006. Callaghan returns to the Tin Sheds ‘the scene of the crime’ where he first started to develop his radical practice in art and politics.
The exhibition displays the strength and inventiveness of Michael Callaghan’s work from his experiments with text - based works in the late 1960s and early 1970’s through to his political poster making within the collective of Earthworks in the late 1970’s and the workshop/studio of Redback Graphix in the 1980s and 1990’s to his more personal new works of recent years.
In 1997, during one of Callaghan's extended stays in hospital he began to make a series of intensely coloured bone paintings. The high-pitched flouro colour scheme that had launched Redback posters back in 1979 was now transfused into a set of skeletal remains. The monumental new series that came out these bone paintings,- Memento Mori and Flos Mortis, explore how an artist can represent or commemorate death when contemporary
media and televisual numbing make Guernica a weekly event.
This exploration of what in some contexts seems brutal or frightening is dealt with in an explosion of colour, effrontery and irony. Callaghan still responds with the same reflex of ‘thumbing his nose’ at the unyielding authority figure of ‘death’, and levity and pathos. These new works are challenging, subversive and courageous.
Exhibition Dates:
Tin Sheds Gallery, Faculty of Architecture, The University of Sydney: 3 - 24 March 2007 Wollongong City Gallery: 5 May - 24 June 2007
Location: Venue: Tin Sheds Gallery, Faculty of Architecture, The University of Sydney
Contact: Anita Lever
Phone: 9351 3115
