Bayside Gallery, Brighton
31 August – 20 October 2024
The first survey of paintings sourced from public and private collections.
For a two week period from 18th-29th September the installation INFINICOPIA was exhibited in the adjoining town hall.
On Saturday 21 September Asher Bilu performed on his one string instrument, the stroviol, as a live soundscape to accompany the installation.
Curators: Joanna Bosse, Nicole Salvo
CURATORS’ INTRODUCTION
In 1970, art critic and artist James Gleeson wrote, Asked to name the most elegant and sophisticated of all our completely non-figurative artists, my choice would be Asher Bilu. Asked to pick the most serious and profound artist from the same category, my choice would still be Asher Bilu.i]
Asher Bilu is indeed a remarkable and unique figure in Australia’s recent history. During the last seven decades he has produced some of the most innovative and exploratory works of art that we have seen in this country. Bilu’s paintings, sculptures and installations comprise a body of work that is ambitious for its unconventional materials and new technical methods. His subject matter is similarly expansive, reflecting his fascination with light, cosmology, science and music, as well as a desire for sensation and beauty.
This is the first ever survey of Bilu’s work. It brings together works from only the first two decades of Bilu’s practice, a time when he was lauded by critics for pushing the materiality and subject matter of painting in a direction dramatically different from his Australian contemporaries. This tight focus gives audiences the rare opportunity to experience the seminal early works that positioned Bilu as a groundbreaking artist. Aside from how important these foundational works are to understanding the evolution of Bilu’s art-making, the decision to limit the curatorial focus to this period is a practical one, for Bilu is a hardworking and prolific artist who has produced a vast oeuvre—including pieces that are often enormous in scale.
The individual nature of Bilu’s approach is evidenced at the time by his pursuit of ideas and approaches beyond the frontier of established practice. At the outset he fabricated his own paints from beeswax and raw pigment and purchased materials from hardware stores instead of using traditional art supplies. He soon moved on to using resin with pigment and applying water and fire to achieve surface textures that he would then rework. His practice was in a state of constant flux, traversing a range of non-figurative idioms from lyrical to robust matter paintings and complex multilayered abstractions.
Always inventive, the transformative potential of pushing a medium or technique to its limit has been a key part of Bilu’s practice. One could argue that his work has consistently been engaged with a transference of sorts— the transformation of energy into matter and matter into energy—and his best works are those that seem to magically capture this alchemy at play.
From the onset Bilu was an outlier in Australia; his experience as an Israeli living in a kibbutz and serving in the army gave him a world view markedly different to others in the Melbourne arts community. Nonetheless, within two years of Bilu’s arrival in December 1956, he held his first solo exhibition in Melbourne which led to his second in 1960 at John Reed’s Museum of Modern Art of Australia. He received attention from the best critics of the time—Alan McCulloch, Patrick McCaughey, James Gleeson and Elwyn Lynn—who celebrated the complexity and otherworldly, metaphysical connotations of his work, acknowledging a unique and authentic vision.
Bilu quickly became enmeshed in the Melbourne art world with commissions and sales to important collectors supporting his career. A major endorsement was winning the prestigious Blake Prize for Religious Art in 1965 and the First Leasing Prize in 1970, which delivered much needed funds and opportunities to travel overseas. When Bilu exhibited his sculpture Sculptron I in 1967, it was celebrated as the first piece of electronic art in Australia.
While newspaper reviews were glowing, support from public galleries was not forthcoming. One can speculate that institutional directors and curators did not know what to make of Bilu’s hard-to-categorise work and experimental mediums.
These remarkable two decades of critical success culminated with an exhibition at leading contemporary gallery Realities in 1979. Immensely scaled paintings (including his first three-dimensional ‘sculpto-painting’ Spillout) were displayed with special lighting and accompanying music. It signalled a new direction that would eventuate in his first monumental walk-through installation Amaze in 1982.
Bilu went on to create hundreds of paintings using his unique combination of resin, pigments and casein, increasingly incorporating from the 1980s a new medium that presented more sculptural possibilities due to its self-supporting nature. During that period, he also collaborated with renowned filmmaker Paul Cox on several films, returning to work with the director again in 2004 and 2015 (the galactic 1978 work Centre of gravity included in the exhibition was an iconic feature in Cox’s award-winning film Man of flowers).
Immersive and experiential effects became increasingly important to Bilu in his desire to create works that acted on the heart and mind. In the last four decades he has produced 15 major large-scale installations, the most recent of which is Infinicopia (2017–18). As a special adjunct to the exhibition Asher Bilu: early works 1956–79 this work, in a new configuration, is presented for a short period in the Brighton Town Hall, adjacent to Bayside Gallery. Asher Bilu is one of Bayside’s most esteemed local artists, and it has been an honour to work with Asher and his wife Luba Bilu on this exhibition. We have enjoyed the many journeys of discovery—through conversations and the works themselves.
Joanna Bosse and Nicole Salvo, co-curators
[i] Gleeson, J, ‘World of Art: A sense of elegance’, The Sun-Herald, May 10, 1970, p. 109.
FIRST ROOM
(Photos: Mark Ashkanasy)
SECOND ROOM
(Photos: Mark Ashkanasy)
PAINTINGS
(Photos: Mark Ashkanasy)
INFINICOPIA
(Photos: Dianna Snape, Luba Bilu)
