Tony Clark
A survey exhibition at Buxton Contemporary highlights Tony Clark’s decades long commitment to exploring sculpture, architecture and the representation of space through painting.
Image credit: Tony Clark, Putto 1, 2009, acrylic and fibre-tipped pen on canvas, 2 panels, 91 × 182 cm (overall), The Buxton Collection. Courtesy the artist, Murray White Room, Melbourne and STATION
In 1982, Tony Clark was invited by fellow artist John Nixon to present his first solo exhibition at Art Projects in Melbourne’s CBD. A forerunner to the contemporary artist-run space, Art Projects showed many significant artists emerging in that era, including Jenny Watson, Imants Tillers, Mike Parr, Peter Tyndall and Clark himself. For his eponymous debut exhibition, Clark presented a single work, Technical Manifesto of Town Planning (1982), comprising a series of small paintings on canvas board and photographs depicting classical structures in the landscape. The modest, impressionistic images of amphitheatres, temples and towers sat on a wooden picture rail, emphasising their architectural focus. Nixon’s observation at the time that Clark’s work “wasn’t really painting” continues to resonate with his practice, which now spans more than four decades.
The artist’s sustained engagement with sculpture and sculptural relief as subject matter for his paintings is the focus of an exhibition at Buxton Contemporary, until 1 June 2025. Curated by The University of Melbourne Art Museums Head Curator Jacqueline Doughty, Unsculpted brings together more than 100 works, from Technical Manifesto of Town Planning to examples of the artist’s Chinoiserie, Jasperware and Prix de Rome series’ to new works commissioned specifically for the exhibition.
One such work, Design for an Overdoor (Putto and Festoon) (2024), crowns the 3-metre-wide goods lift that dominates the south wall of Buxton’s cavernous second gallery space. In making a work for this location, Clark draws attention to a part of... Subscribe to read all articles in full
