AUSTRALIAN ART West Australiana –
- The Artist: Janis Nedela is a prominent Western Australian contemporary artist, curator, and former co-director of the influential Galerie Düsseldorf in Perth.
- The Theme: The book explores how Nedela maintained an energetic, highly disciplined, yet fundamentally playful creative practice. It highlights how an artist can thrive, subvert expectations, and avoid the stagnation or boredom that can sometimes characterize geographically isolated art scenes
- “This book will be about how and why an artist determined to have fun took the terms and conditions of art in Perth and used them to achieve a significant body of work. Another way to put this is that Nedâela has discovered how to continue to make art in Perth without becoming boring, a way, indeed to escape those very terms and conditions through wit and humour. This is a major achievement in itself. It is still usual to account for an artist’s career in terms of his development, influences and innovations in chronological order and then to fit his achievements into some kind of received overview of art during his lifetime. This will hardly do for Nedâela as it would require that the ‘isms’ that he first rejected at school be disinterred as part of the justification for his work. Instead the text will describe his achievement by writing around it, reading back towards it from individual works, events and exhibitions in the manner first suggested by the critic Max Raphael.”
“From the beginning books became malleable, physical objects for Nedela, capable of manipulation that relocated their presence and meaning in the culture far beyond their original purpose.”
First Edition. pp. 186 illusts (Large format. Over standard size.) #231026