Venue Type: Museum / Public Gallery
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Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize
The 2018 Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize was today awarded to Melbourne-based artist Gail Hastings and Sydney-based emerging artist Adrian McDonald. Celebrating its 22nd year, the Prize is among Australia’s best-known art awards, spanning all mediums and offering a total of $36,000 in prize money. Hastings was awarded the established artist category ($25,000) for colour circle: four colour scheme for a room (2018) and McDonald was awarded the emerging artist category ($10,000) for Approximating a Circle (2018).
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9 X 5 NOW Exhibition: ART150
9 X 5 NOW, at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, 16–25 June, showcases generations of practicing artists who have studied or taught at the National Gallery School or VCA Art. The most experienced artist represented attended the National Gallery School in the 1940s, and the youngest completed studies at the Victorian College of the Arts just one year ago.
The exhibition title and concept references the famous 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition held at the Buxton Rooms, Swanston Street Melbourne in 1889. All seven artists in that exhibition, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin, Charles Conder, C. Douglas Richardson, R.E. Falls and Herbert Daly, were National Gallery School alumni. McCubbin was also a staff member and Louis Abrahams, also a former student, supplied the 9 x 5 inch cedar cigar box lids on which the works were painted.
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Direct Democracy
Exhibition curatorial
by Geraldine Barlow
As Individuals we are capable, but so much more so when we act together. The collective body is a complex mechanism: a layering of systems, societies, generations, inheritances and innovations. Groups of human beings have developed numerous models to identify with each other, work together, build societies and exercise power. Democracy is just one of these; with a long history of development. […] How can we actively revitalise, rebuild and own this collective body? What is the place of democracy in the process and what opportunities are there for the development of existing and jew democratic mechanisms?
Direct Democracy explores these questions through the work of nineteen contemporary artists and artist collectives. […]
Gail Hastings offers an abstracted map of the ayes (yellow), the nos (in red) and a space in between in white, in her 2012 work Space holder for a yellow, white and red space. What is the purpose of this space in between? Hastings maps out a sculptural volume for each side of the proposition […] As Hastings’ work states, ‘Until such time as the debate is resumed, the before-mentioned space will remain on hold’.
Excerpt from Geraldine Barlow, ‘Direct Democracy’, in Geraldine Barlow (ed.), exhibition catalogue, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2013, p. 91, 98-98.
A review
by Suzanne Fraser
The modern development of a “good form of government”, as articulated by John Stuart Mill in the sixteenth century, finds contemporary articulation in an infinitely fascinating sculpture by Gail Hastings entitled Space holder for a yellow, white and red space (2012). Here the mechanisms of voting, competition, representation, and bureaucracy are lent an elegant and quietly humorous disposition that contorts the understanding of the viewer through ambiguity and metanarrative.
Excerpt from Suzanne Fraser, web review, Melbourne, 28/05/2013.
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![Less is More: Minimal and Post-Minimal Art in Australia [withdrawal]](https://gailhastings.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Less-is-More-page-91.jpg)
Less is More: Minimal and Post-Minimal Art in Australia [withdrawal]
01/09/2012 withdrawal of ABC art: red cube from the exhibition upon receiving the exhibition’s catalogue and reading the curatorial premise for the work’s inclusion, where I gave reasons for the withdrawal that include:
[The curatorial essay mentions] my art (with reference to Floor plan: Empty, except) within the context of Robert Morris’ essay. Not only is this misrepresentative of the place from which my art stems, but I hadn’t even read his notes on Sculpture at that time! Not until some years later.
The text in my art is not narrative. It does not tell a story about Jack and Jill running over a hill that exists externally to the sculptuation it is in. If it were narrative, it would not read the way it does, often stilted, chopped, awkward, blocky, non eventful, monotonous, etc. […] The text is not a bad nor a good story — it’s not a story at all. It functions as a spatial aspect of the sculptuation, that’s all. So people walk away disappointed with my art, with the conclusion I’m a bad writer. But the text has nothing to do with being a writer.
Gail Hastings, excerpts from email to the curator, 31 August 2012
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![Notes towards contemporary post-minimalism [withdrawal]](https://gailhastings.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/NOTES-TOWARDS-CONTEMPORARY-POST-MINIMALISM.png)
Notes towards contemporary post-minimalism [withdrawal]
Several ideas stemming from Minimalism, though controversial in the 1960s, are now widely accepted as part of the landscape of contemporary art: for example, the artwork can be fabricated by someone other than the artist; it can comprise modules or units used singularly or repeated, and its governing concept is more important than any craft or technical skills. Minimal artists dispensed with plinths, frames and other distancing devices, thereby activating real space with their works and more directly addressing the viewer. Heide curator Sue Cramer talks with artists Janet Burchill, Gail Hastings, John Nixon and Kathy Temin about the reworking of Minimalism within contemporary art today. The evening will begin with a film viewing, wine and cheese.
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Art from a Hundred Years 1909–2009: Highlights of the Daimler Art Collection
The third presentation of the Daimler Art Collection in South Germany (following the extensive survey at ZKM Karlsruhe 2003 and at the Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen 2004) at Museum Prediger Schwäbisch Gmünd concentrates on Highlights from the Collection with around 100 works spanning nearly 10 decades – from Adolf Hölzel, the main teacher in the area of South West German classical movements, through to young New York sculptor Vincent Szarek; from classical Modernism through to international contemporary art; from painting and drawing via photography to Installation and Video Art. [… ] Contemporary international art is represented in our exhibition with famous names as well as with young upcoming artists. Their work most often can be read as a continuation of abstract-minimal positions. Artists forming part of Classical Modernism and the avant-gardes of the 1960s/70s—like Josef Albers, Daniel Buren, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Richard Artschwager or Robert Ryman—are positioned beside leading contemporary artists as John M Armleder, Sylvie Fleury, Gail Hastings, Kirsten Mosher, Simone Westerwinter or Andrea Zittel.
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To make a work of timeless art: MCA Primavera Acquisitions
The decision to acquire the work of Primavera artists began in 1993, the first purchase being a suite of works by Gail Hastings, an artist included in the inaugural Primavera exhibition.
Everyone wants to be close to ‘the wheel of history’, to be remembered, to occupy a place within the wider schema of recent art history; and yet, it is only with the benefit of hindsight that the relative importance of an artist’s work can be determined. The exhibition aims to reflect this tendency by taking its title from one of Gail Hastings’ ‘sculptural situations’ being exhibited here for the first time.
Isabel Finch and Clare Lewis, ‘To make a work of timeless art’, in To make a work of timeless art: MCA Primavera Acquisitions, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2008, p.2.
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Sculptural Situations: Gail Hastings
Perth born Hastings is a singular artist distinguished by the extraordinary focus of her practice. … Consistently describing her work as ‘a space made for others’ Hastings creates what she calls ‘invisible architectures’ that invite the viewer to enter a dialogue with what they observe. … As ‘the artist’ Hastings eschews a central position in her work in order to vacate this space for the viewer. … she has invited PICA’s Director Amy Barrett-Lennard and Curator Melissa Keys to contribute a collection of novels to this iteration of her work, further disorienting and de-stabilising the impulse to search for authorial essential meaning.
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Kunst Nach Kunst / Art After Art
Simple geometric patterns with a coloration [of] clearly defined contours characterize Gail Hastings’ work. The proximity to Minimal Art is unmistakable [as] a conceptual interface of her works. … The title, “To complete a work of contemporary art” (1997), already indicates a direct reference to an apparently ‘unfinished’ contemporary art. This reference must be formally seen as playing with geometric arrangements that can be categorised somewhere between those of LeWitt and those of Hastings. The viewer might feel as if he or she were asked to complete the individual parts or fragments, which Minimal Art, for example, has left behind, so as to form a whole.
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mission: untitled (blue)
It used to be said of experimental art that it didn’t really need an audience to view it…. Experimentation for its own sake was to be sufficient … Of course this was before — or despite — some people reckoning that the value of art was actually something produced in the exchange between artists and audience, in between the work being made and being received. So, they argued, there really isn’t a work until that happens, since the work of art is that happening. … Gail Hastings’ work frames similar questions … or really, as she says it ‘sets a scene’ — for generating a kind of self-consciousness about looking at art …
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art idea no. 8,582,048
Hastings takes up artistic idioms and presentational forms of conceptual art and charges them sensually. She combines conceptual strategies with the language and aesthetics of action-related, factual texts … and stages these through the employment of a markedly material aesthetics. Her art opens up a dialogue on the origins, significance and function of ‘works’ and hands over the responsibility for the open ‘product’ of reflection and action to the viewer.
For her most recent work … [t]wo square white seats, formally referring to the classical works of Minimal Art, are positioned so that viewers see each other through the missing centre of the object. … One of the patterns is repeated in an accompanying photocopy as the fabric of a dress worn by the artist Varvara Stepanova, a protagonist of the Russian avant-garde whose textile designs, typographical sketches and spatial constructions were among the pioneering achievements of her time.
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art idea no. 8,582,048
Hastings takes up artistic idioms and presentational forms of conceptual art and charges them sensually. She combines conceptual strategies with the language and aesthetics of action-related, factual texts … and stages these through the employment of a markedly material aesthetics. Her art opens up a dialogue on the origins, significance and function of ‘works’ and hands over the responsibility for the open ‘product’ of reflection and action to the viewer.
For her most recent work … [t]wo square white seats, formally referring to the classical works of Minimal Art, are positioned so that viewers see each other through the missing centre of the object. … One of the patterns is repeated in an accompanying photocopy as the fabric of a dress worn by the artist Varvara Stepanova, a protagonist of the Russian avant-garde whose textile designs, typographical sketches and spatial constructions were among the pioneering achievements of her time.
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Moët & Chandon Australian Art Foundation Touring Exhibition 1998
Moët & Chandon Australian Art Foundation : touring exhibition 1998
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Moët & Chandon Australian Art Foundation Touring Exhibition 1998
Moët & Chandon Australian Art Foundation : touring exhibition 1998
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Moët & Chandon Australian Art Foundation Touring Exhibition 1998
Moët & Chandon Australian Art Foundation : touring exhibition 1998
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Moët & Chandon Australian Art Foundation Touring Exhibition 1998
Moët & Chandon Australian Art Foundation : touring exhibition 1998
