This month Charles Nodrum Gallery is marking its 30th year with the opening of a group exhibition, featuring the work of 30 living artists who currently exhibit with the gallery. Although secondary market sales and artist estates account for a large percentage of the gallery’s business, Charles Nodrum and his team are paying tribute to the sentient achievements of the gallery’s current contributors with this anniversary exhibition.
Over the past three decades, Nodrum has earned the reputation as one of Australia’s most influential dealers of local mid 20th-century and abstract art. His familiarity with this area of the market was initially gained through experience in galleries and auction houses from the 1970s, as well as his first-hand involvement in the market as a collector of such works.
When I asked Nodrum to expand on his choice of artists to exhibit at the gallery over the past 30 years, his response revealed an inherent passion for the business – “it’s pretty intuitive, like choosing your food or clothes, or what you decide to order in a restaurant”. He further emphasised the need for art dealers to be directly invested in such choices for their gallery – “if you can’t personally enthuse about your artists, then you may as well shut up shop”. Thirty years on, he continues to show artists whose work most fascinates him, to great effect.
The exhibition comprises a smattering of the artists Nodrum has worked with to the present-day, including the New Zealand-born, Australian-based painter George Johnson, with whom Nodrum has had the longest exhibition history of all the artists. Now in his 80s, Johnson continues to produce works indebted to the abstract and constructivist styles that influenced his early career, as seen in Quartet with Base (2009), currently on show.
Nodrum’s record as a collector and connoisseur is also displayed in the present exhibition, which includes a painting by the artist from whom he bought his first work, Jonas Balsaitis. While such geometrically-driven, abstract paintings are the primary focus of this exhibition and, indeed, of the gallery itself, a few pieces of figural painting are also included in the anniversary show, as well as two works of sculpture. The latter category includes a small-scale marble and granite portrait bust by Clive Murray-White, entitled v-i (2012). This petite, elegant sculpture contrasts with the artist’s best known marble work, the Alfred Felton Centenary Sculpture (2004), an enormous bust which stands in the National Gallery of Victoria premises on St Kilda Road commemorating 100 years of the Felton Bequest.
With its array of sharp lines, bright colours and optical intrigues, the new exhibition at Charles Nodrum Gallery celebrates the high regard held by both the gallery’s director and its contributing artists for the bold experimentations of abstract expressionism. The continued relevance and value of such works in a contemporary setting is also evidenced through the exhibition, as is the continuing and vital contribution of Charles Nodrum Gallery to the current art market.
Charles Nodrum Gallery’s 30th Anniversary Group Show runs from March 8 to March 29
Image
Ann Thomson, Calypso 2013. Oil on linen, 122 x 122 cm
