COMA is pleased to participate in Melbourne Art Fair 2022 and present a solo exhibition of new work by Jack Lanagan Dunbar at booth G1, on view through 17 February – 20 February, 2022.
The works shown here document the artist’s crawl back from the brink of abstraction. Here he continues his pursuit of the vignette. Symbols and images are reemerging in Jack Lanagan Dunbar’s practice. They provide handholds, grips for the audience. They are the result of many things converging; moments taken from sketchbooks, memories recorded as notes, research material and discoveries made on his journey through the burgeoning virtual arm of his practice. All these things were added to the cauldron and each work emerged from the bubbling mess a distinct conjuring all of its own.
Jack Lanagan Dunbar
A Gesture, 2022
acrylic on canvas, steel frames
180 x 150 cm / 70 7/8 x 59 1/16 inches
Someway off in the bush. Fragmented, stainedglass dragonfly wings. A spray of tiny frogs as you take a step. Deep blue yabbie caught in the torchlight at night. Shimmering water. Scrawls and paint markings from sketchbooks. In the bottom left an image of a fresco of a garden from The House of Ephebe at Pompeii.
Splashes and scratchings from sketchbooks. 23 (visible) green olives. These are unripe, cured in brine, from the Mediterranean. A square plater of order surrounded by chaos.
Jack Lanagan Dunbar
Olives, 2022
acrylic on canvas, steel frames
180 x 150 cm / 70 7/8 x 59 1/16 inches
Three oranges on a warped plate hovering above a computer rendering of a hacked and clawed at piece of digital clay. Instead, potentially, a triple-yoke egg with garnish (fried Sage?) albeit still astride a tortured, virtual relief carving…
Jack Lanagan Dunbar
Valencia, 2022
acrylic on canvas, steel frames
180 x 150 cm / 70 7/8 x 59 1/16 inches
Jack Lanagan Dunbar
Gatto, 2022
acrylic on canvas, steel frames
180 x 150 cm / 70 7/8 x 59 1/16 inches
Rendering of a virtual relief carving. A set of energetic exercises in mark making. Overlaid with a subtly smattering of paw prints. A cat most likely. In Zara’s garage studio next door the very same prints are memorialised in the concrete floor. When it was wet a small explorer entered from where the front double doors now stand and traced the perimeter of the slab; along the lefthand side up to the very end, across the back and down and out along the righthand side. If the garage were a ship; starboard, aft, port then forward.
I woke in the cool dark well before dawn. It wasn’t immediately clear what had woken me, then they came again, flashes of light on the horizon, illuminating the whole sky. No thunder, just light. Aliens documenting Earth? The sound of running water all around. Through the mosquito netting faint silhouettes of trees against the stars. More flashes off in the distance. Explosions too distant to hear? Air heavy with humidity. Cicadas droning. Crickets chirping.
A tillable flower pattern taken from a fabric used in a pair of light cotton shorts from Sri Lanka. The pattern in the painting is a silhouette of the original fabric print. It hovers over a hacked and gouged piece of simulated clay. The whole thing using a palette borrowed from the bush around Darwin, NT.
Jack Lanagan Dunbar
Sri Lankan Shorts, 2022
acrylic on canvas, steel frames
180 x 150 cm / 70 7/8 x 59 1/16 inches
A portrait of the sculpture of Apollo from the House of the Citharist in Pompeii. The god is duplicated. Copied and pasted. The god is floating in a steely blue-grey field, partially censored. Overwritten by blown-up black brushstrokes and crayon marks.
Jack Lanagan Dunbar
Apollo, 2022
acrylic on canvas, steel frames
180 x 150 cm / 70 7/8 x 59 1/16 inches
Jack Lanagan Dunbar’s (b. 1988) work spans many disciplines from photography through printing, sculpture, drawing, painting, sound and digital. His themes are eclectic though often explore the tension between materiality and time with an eye on history, whimsy, archaeology, the classical, Romantisicm, humour and tragedy.
Jack Lanagan Dunbar has shown extensively in Australia and abroad, held positions at the University of Technology, Sydney, and University of New South Wales, was the recipient of the 2019 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship and the 2016 Redlands Art Prize (emerging artist). He received funding from the Ian Potter Cultural Trust in 2019 to under- take a residency in the Canary Islands. Throughout 2020-2021 he lived and worked in Leipzig and Berlin, Germany. In mid-2022 he will undertake a residency at the Cité d’Arts, Paris.