Reviews on Inside Out Upside Down Gallery Site
Archibald Prize 2009
Yet again the Archibald has created controversy, not because of the fine quality of the exhibits but rather because of the lack of any purpose in the portraits other than as entries to a prize competition.
The majority of the exhibits are quite poor. A number are technically flawed and will last only a short space of time. Compositionally the majority say nothing except that the mind of the artist is a lazy void and the only requirement is to place a rough likeness on the backing medium.
Size is perhaps the worst issue amongst this job lot of sameness. It can be said of all bar one of the paintings in the central hall of the exhibit that they are unsympathetic representations that are easily forgotten. More than one of my acquaintances has left the gallery without seeing the winner, due to its insipidness and the general lack of impact of the entire exhibition. To make sure I had a good view of the exhibition I visited twice and gathered notes on all the exhibited paintings.
This years novelty is to show elements of the working outline on the backing and only paint the figure. Something I remember my high school art teacher getting us to try, some forty years ago.
One or two of the exhibited paintings appear to attempt to take an offensive tone against a particular culture. It is fortunate that the selectors and artists are so poorly trained for the task of portraiture that they have hung images that are in western traditional portraiture terms an insult to the sitter as completely as the images that set out to deliberately insult.
Having seen this exhibition the Salon de Refuses and the Real Refusals exhibition I can only suggest that to make the Archibald Prize relevant to modern art it might be better to limit the size to 4 square meters and hang the exhibition two deep, thus enabling the public to see a far more diverse and representative collection of what is modern portraiture. This approach would at lest for a few years enable artists to stop having to produce what will be hung within the limits of the 40 or so that are currently put on public display out of over 600 submitted.
I would also suggest that the prize be awarded to the picture that has greatest popular acclaim rather than the limited views of a small group of unrepresentative persons. In short those that go to the exhibition do as they can do now and vote after seeing the exhibition, the winner being announced at the end of the exhibition.
author: Neil Miley