Comedies and proverbs reveal the power of women’s laughter

[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 3, No. 1  14 April - 12 May 2008 ]

Images full of humour, humanity and a measure of humility showcase the work of an artist whose restrained cartoon style promotes an idiosyncratic system of ethics laced with satire.

The first substantial survey of artworks by Vivienne Shark LeWitt will open in May at the University of Melbourne’s Ian Potter Museum of Art, with more than 50 intimately scaled paintings traversing the artist’s career.

Vivienne Shark LeWitt: comedies & proverbs (3 May – 20 July) represents an unparalleled opportunity to consider this artist’s unique presence within contemporary Australian art.

The exhibition is part of an ongoing series of substantial surveys by the Potter which focus on an individual artist’s oeuvre with new work produced specifically by the artist.

Two new paintings have been created by Shark LeWitt for the exhibition. Other works have been drawn from more than 40 different collections.

Shark LeWitt’s deceptively winsome style captures the telling emotional moments of everyday life in a kind of anti-monumental freeze-frame.

Using simple pictorial languages, such as cartooning and illustration, she presents vignettes of emotional vulnerability, many of which speak of subtle gender politics and power plays.

With a mood akin to poet Sylvia Plath’s ‘landscape of chagrin’, the pieces are tempered by what Bulgarian feminist Julia Kristeva dubbed ‘the revolutionary power of women’s laughter’.

While the everyday has been the focus of Australian contemporary art for some years, no other artist approaches this theme with Shark LeWitt’s combination of visual understatement, technical finesse and poetic sensibility.

Addressing the everyday through literary allegory and acute observation, she establishes a sophisticated attention to the paradox at its heart, grasping the implications of everyday incidents without over-inflating them.

Represented are some of the key interests of artists of her generation, including the return to figuration, the development of personal symbols, the analysis of the impact of the mass media and popular culture on art, and the dissolution of boundaries between high and low culture.

Vivienne Shark LeWitt is represented in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, Parliament House (Canberra) and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York.

The Ian Potter Museum of Art is on the Swanston Street frontage of the University of Melbourne campus (near Elgin Street). Hours: Tuesday to Friday 10am to 5pm. Saturday and Sunday 12pm to 5pm. Admission is free.