Guy Benfield / Preview Thursday 13 March, 6-8pm

Maria Cruz / Preview Thursday 14 February, 6-8pm

Kaliman Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Maria Cruz.

Cruz’s referential combination of words, collage and colour culminate in emotive and often witty outcomes. She sources her text from billboards, personality tests, advertising materials from the Philippines and Yoko Ono’s song titles. These textual fragments occupy spaces that suggest natural forms such as lakes, rock formations, waterfalls, foliage and the sky. Cruz has often cited the influence of the Romantic period and in this most recent body of work notions of the sublime, the abyss and other transcendental representations of nature are clearly visible.

Adam Cullen / Preview Thursday 29 November 6-8pm

Kaliman Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of Adam Cullen’s new paintings.

Adam Cullen is a vibrant, consistently provocative artist who manifests a perfect mix of relentless honesty and a punk audacity to create in your face art which forces a re-examination of society. He comically addresses culturally prevalent issues of national and gendered identify, in particular those of racial intolerance, sexism, bigotry and hypocrisy.

The artist, who controversially won the Archibald Prize in 2000 with his portrait of David Wenham, has been described as 'too young to be an old master, too old to be an enfant terrible’. By grotesquely exploiting, torturing and sodomizing whores, losers, bloodied animals, public figures and other such monsters, Cullen creates scenes reminiscent of comic strips, porn magazines and 1950s beach movies turned horribly wrong. Thus his carefully planned pieces are characteristically garish, their sharp features shocking and simultaneously threatening a reassessment of the status quo.

They are the stuff of nightmares, yet they engage with us on a familiar, non-pretentious level, drawing for its subject matter on everyday worlds (more commonly promulgated through TV) such as the rodeo, the outback, or the dark alleys of urban wastelands. In his rejection of the contemporary trend to aestheticise art, Cullen cites European masterpieces whose central themes reflect the darkness of human history, war, rape and torture.

Sally Smart / Preview Thursday 1 November 6-8pm

Kaliman Gallery is pleased to announce “The Exquisite Pirate”, a new exhibition by Sally Smart.

Sally Smart is one of the most significant contemporary Australian artists today, widely known for her large scale cut-out wall collages. Educated by the feminist discourses surrounding psychoanalytic theory, and informed by the anti-art movements of Dada and Surrealism. Smart’s installations explore identity politics, feminism, psychology, literature, Australian culture and corporeality.

Smart’s work places a practical and theoretical emphasis on the installation space, on mutable forms and methodologies of deconstruction and reconstruction. Her use of materials is integral to the conceptual unfolding of her work: the process of cutting, collage, photo-montage, staining, sewing and stitching – and their association with women’s practices – are refined and reassessed in the context of each installation.

“The Exquisite Pirate develops my ideas about the woman pirate as a metaphor for personal and social identity, cultural hybridity and immigration. The project initiated from a simple question – “were there any women pirates?” A google search revealed there were. Parallel to this was the seemingly huge growth in popular culture imagery connected to pirates and continuous reference of the word itself in the media as relating to cyberspace activities. In contemporary and historical Australia the boat and ship have loomed large around immigration issues and for me have become expressive, powerful images for postcolonial discourses.”

Sally Smart has maintained a significant presence within Australian contemporary art since the early nineties. She is represented in numerous public, private and corporate collections both within Australia and overseas, and has recently exhibited in New York, Miami, Costa Rica, London and throughout Australia.

The Kingpins / Preview Thursday 4 October 6-8pm

The Kingpins latest exhibition, ‘Great Undead’ explores an imaginary space between life and death. In collaboration with Indian Bollywood painters they have manufactured their own Australian epic landscape series, the subject of which is Azaria Chamberlain. The Kingpins remix history, Azaria survived. In parallel possibilities she exists as a 27 year old woman, ‘Queen of the Outback’ a heroine amongst Australian flora and fauna.

To produce the paintings the Kingpins travelled to India to work with Bollywood cinema and sign painters, Muthu Arts and Kumar Arts of Pondicherry. This collaboration allowed the Kingpins to explore a history of cinematic advertising, famous for its hyper-real palette and incredible technical skill. The resulting pastiche is a mesmerising combination. Mothered by dingoes and fathered by popular culture, Azaria Chamberlain appears before us as a fantasy woman, legendary figure of the Australian outback in full-blown Bollywood colour.