Home Brewed: Australian literary classics at the Sulman

March, 2008

Current student Vilma Bader has been selected as a finalist in the Sulman Prize for her painting Home Brewed. The work is seemingly an encyclopedic display of Australian literary classics that explore the overwhelming impact of literature on our own contemporary culture. The litany of recognised authors and familiar titles is an installation consisting of 63 paintings of book covers in a uniform size. The paintings replicate life-size books, with the side of the canvas representing the ‘spine’ of the book and introducing a sculptural element to the work. The work also questions the nature of representation, similitude and simulacrum, while suggesting multiple narratives, a library, portraits of books or writers, a link between literature and art, politics and art, the past and the future, the personal and the universal and the strata of memories and time.

Vilma said “The work, for me, displays an almost funny and banal version of a portrait of the fiction of an Australian ‘identity.’ The books – stories like Australian landscape painting are an obvious fiction. It is the impossibility of the creation of a stringent identity either of a person or nation and the ‘openness’ of an identity argument.

The work took Vilma Bader three months to complete and is a continuation of work developed during the completion of her Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours degree at Sydney College of the Arts. Bader is currently completing her Masters of Visual Arts.

Home Brewed is currently on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from the 8th of March – 18th of May 2008 as part of the Archibald, Wynne & Sulman Prizes Exhibition.