Containment and Klaus Rinke

About a week ago I happened to be in the RMIT School of Art and Ceramics gallery. I wandered into the show, CONTAINMENT, not having any idea about the show or the artists.

As you see more and more exhibitions you grow to understand more and more what you like and what you don't. You also grow to understand what media you're drawn too and what you arn't. Ceramic sculpture has never really grabbed me. I can appreciate it, but it doesn't draw me in like photography or soft sculpture. Maybe that's because I'm not a ceramist, I've never really worked in clay. I don't really know, but whatever it is, I was dubious about finding anything I liked in this show.

I was wrong.

The first artwork I came across was Sally Cleary's series of 9 exquisite works of fired clay and found feathers on photographs. They capture perfectly the experience and feel of discovery of objects on the ground and in trees, presenting debris caught in branches, down drains and at the paths edge. They captured my attention for ages, they were so beautiful.

There was also Tina Lee's The Karens, which was the same 70s squat vase cast over and over and glazed different soft pastel colours, laid out in a tear drop shape on the floor pointing towards the viewer. The physiology of the mass produced is comforting to us because it's everywhere (from Lee's artist statement). The Karens embodied this really well. I wonder though, had I not have read the artist statement, whether i would have understood the comforting nature of this artwork or rather would I have viewed it as a statement of the blandness of mass produced repetition. Either way, there was a heartwarming 'waitingness' to the vases, as if they sat there patiently waiting for people to take them home and love them.


I also wandered over to RMIT gallery, and saw Klaus Rinke's recent drawings. Rinke is an German abstract artist, a leader of the avant-garde in Germany, says the press release. The exhibition is comprised of huge charcoal drawings that stretch from floor to ceiling. The charcoal is on rough, unfinished canvas and it's beautiful. I love being able to see the physical artistic process in the work. The works are, for the most part, huge organic shapes outlined with a thick black line and then shaded. Rinke has used a huge brush in parts, dragging through the pigment which marks the charcoal like pencil lines. And the very size of them (the smallest being 370x285cm) completely dwarfs you. But for all that, I'm still not sure what he's trying to say. I find abstract work more difficult to interpret than I do with ceramics, so it was a day of non-easy art all round. I find with abstract work that you need a path into the piece, a way into understanding. Often that can be the title of the work or the exhibition. But Rinke isn't always partial to helping in that regard.

Wandering around the gallery, trying to understand the work, I find one with a predominant dark shape that reminds me of a replica Queen Nefertiti bust my mother had when we were growing up. It's called She-Untouchable which is pretty cool, I figure that fits well with my connection to it. But across the room there are two that are very similar in shape to each other which are called The Curious One and Top-Heavy. The Curious One has a shape suggestion of an owl, with a circle where the eye should be, which helps with the overall owl feel. The Top Heavy title seems to refer only to the shape itself. I'm not sure why one is given such a suggestively descriptive title when the other is more shape related.

Papa-syndrome is suggestive of a child's head looking diagonally up to a totally abstract shape. Is it referencing the missing or distant father-figure that comes up time and time again? I'm not convinced this is it. The composition doesn't seem to lend itself to a father trying, and failing, to comprehend his child either. I stand in front of it for a couple of minutes trying to figure it out, but I just can't.

The largest piece is called My Egyptian Family, which is composed of two people shapes on the left and the rest is taken up with a huge and complicated shape that seems familiar but I just can't grasp what it is.

I leave having seen some beautiful art that I didn't fully understand.