Tom Nicholson : Cartoons for Joseph Selleny

Beschrijving

Tent. Drawings and correspondence, Brisbane, Institute of Modern Art, 00-00-2018. - Kunstenaarsboek van de Australische kunstenaar Tom Nicholson (Melbourne 1973). - Nicholson’s project brings together two narratives: the narratives of the work’s own making, using these Renaissance techniques; and the narratives surrounding the remarkable visit to Sydney Harbour by an Austrian frigate, the Novara, in 1858, a ship built in Venice’s Arsenale (amidst the revolution of 1848, during which it was taken by Manin and his fellow revolutionaries at the very outset of the anti-imperial uprising), and sponsored by the Austrian Archduke Maximilian (later puppet Emperor of Mexico), patron of the Novara as well as patron and friend of the Novara’s official artist, Joseph Selleny. In Nicholson’s work these two narratives — around the work’s own processes and evolution, and around the Novara and its stay on Sydney Harbour — pivot around the four versions of The Execution of Maximilian painted by the French artist Edouard Manet between 1867 and 1869. Nicholson has produced preparatory drawings for these four versions of Manet’s painting after the fact. These charcoal cartoons are perforated and pounced, partly un-making the drawings, and producing a vast abstracted wall drawing on to the wall of Extra City.