First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 42 October-December 2009
Plasticine friends
Amanda Marburg’s world
is melancholic, somehow
poetic and strangely
medieval. She is a painter
of exquisite subtlety, writes
Ashley Crawford. Portrait
by Kirstin Gollings.
156
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 42 October-December 2009
“In the painting of
the flowers there’s
a pink ring in the
foreground. That was
my engagement ring.
Blair had the blue one.
They were made
from silver and Lego
and the two stuck
together.”
nce upon a time a girl sat in her room playing with her plasticine.
She would make little figures who would become parts of stories that
she’d heard or seen in movies and in her imagination they would
move and act out their wee adventures.
When the girl grew older she was given a camera and so she started
taking photos of her favourite subjects, her plasticine friends and the
strange and oddly coloured, landscapes they inhabited. In the dark she
would watch movies; Psycho, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Whatever Happened
to Baby Jane? She thought she could make clay-mation figures of the
characters and make them move. She could do what a lot of her friends were
doing and make videos.
As time went by the girl kept being told what a great painter she was.
More and more people wanted to own her paintings and more and more she
would use her photographs of her made-up friends and their strange worlds
to render them with paint on canvas
The girl was shy and surprised by how excited people got about her
paintings. Friends encouraged her to show them and eventually, in 2001, she
had an exhibition called The Bomb at the small artists run-space called TCB
Art Inc. in Melbourne. The genie had been let out of the bottle. A man with a
lot of experience arrived from Sydney and the girl had the first commercial
show of her paintings the next year at Rex Irwin. Since then there has been
no turning back.
Amanda Marburg was born in 1976 and studied painting at the Victorian
College of the Arts, finishing there in1999. Since her first show at Rex Irwin
Gallery she has held solo exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne almost every
year. The titles of Marburg’s exhibitions hint at some of the strange darkness
of her densely layered narratives; Misery & Gin, Giving the Devil his due, Mad Love
is Strange, The Other Side. The titles are both melancholic and romantic, dark
and poetic. Like the paintings themselves, there is a hint of humour within
the dark palimpsest of forms. More than anything, however, Marburg has
become renowned as a painter of exquisite subtlety – her mad plasticine
characters take on a formidable pathos.
For some years Marburg worked as an assistant to John Young, a wellknown Melbourne-based painter. A year or so ago, she announced that she
was going to attempt to live off her own painting and go it alone. Since that
O
This page: Amanda Marburg, Flowers, 2007. Oil on canvas,
44 x 55cm COURTESY: UPLANDS GALLERY, MELBOURNE.
Opposite page: Amanda Marburg, Marny, 2005. Oil on linen,
98 x 70cm. COURTESY: REX IRWIN ART DEALER, SYDNEY.
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 42 October-December 2009
time there have been major shifts in her work. Between the 2005 show with
Rex Irwin and her last show with Uplands Gallery this year she has focused
in on the specific subjects rather than a sense of noir-ish narrative and
intrigue that had typified her work beforehand.
The Uplands show, The Other Side, was in essence a suite of exquisite stilllifes. While still rendered in Marburg’s faux-naif style, from a distance they
were realistic indeed, but somehow imbued with a medieval aesthetic. At
times it was a cold feast, a lobster accompanied by detailed grapes or a fish,
flayed, where the lemon peel was blackened, the vented acids doing their
work while three Greek olives dried by the side, a hand-melded knobbly
knife recently discarded from its task. There was a flayed rabbit carcass,
stringy with white fatty tissue.
She was unafraid to tackle clichéd motifs; a human skull, its jawbone
placed to one side next to a candlestick to add the more obvious gothic
conceit. She painted dark flowers, that ultimate romantic signifier – the rose
– rendered in deep crimsons. Books were painted stacked, their pages
buckled with moisture, well-travelled by both land and sea.
While in the past her paintings were complex and threatrical, here they
were honed and minimalised. The sense of theatre remained, but so did a
more stringent sense of control. Marburg agrees that the shift has been
dramatic. “The images from 2005 were a lot more random,” she says. “They
were mainly just from films I had recently watched.”
The 2005 works at Rex Irwin were far more elaborate in narrative
sensibility than those that followed. Grave Digger would have been
hysterically funny were it not for an inherent sadness and desperation that
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Grave Digger would
have been hysterically
funny were it not for
an inherent sadness
and desperation that
the main figure
exuded.
This page: Amanda Marburg, Grave Digger, 2005. Oil on linen,
90 x 130cm. COURTESY: REX IRWIN ART DEALER, SYDNEY.
Opposite page: Amanda Marburg, Bird, 2007. Oil on canvas,
44 x 55cm. COURTESY: UPLANDS GALLERY, MELBOURNE.
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161
First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 42 October-December 2009
She was unafraid to tackle clichéd motifs; a human skull,
its jawbone placed to one side next to a candlestick to
add the more obvious gothic conceit.
Above: Amanda Marburg, Skull, 2007. Oil on canvas,
44 x 55cm. COURTESY: UPLANDS GALLERY, MELBOURNE.
162
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Above right: Amanda Marburg, Books, 2007. Oil on canvas,
44 x 55cm. COURTESY: UPLANDS GALLERY, MELBOURNE.
the main figure exuded. Man, telephone, plume of smoke broiled the innocence of
Pinochio with the noir of Raymond Chandler via the staged melancholia of Tom
Waits. And, despite its deliberate crudeness, Owl summed up the powerful
iconographic threat of that all-too-gothic bird.
Inherently more formal, the seven paintings in The Other Side in 2007 all
strangely constituted one story – almost like a slice out of someone’s life, albeit
a rather arcane and hermetic one. But Marburg knew what she wanted and in
many respects The Other Side constitutes the most personal and cathartic work
she has created to date. In numerous ways the show was a homage to Marburg’s
former fiancée, the artist Blair Trethowan who, suffering deep depression, took
his own life in early 2006.
“The Uplands show was more focused,” says Marburg. “For once I knew what I
wanted to do. In a way it had a lot to do with Blair. In the painting of the flowers
there’s a pink ring in the foreground. That was my engagement ring. Blair had
the blue one. They were made from silver and Lego and the two stuck together.”
The inherent melancholia of such an impetus was balanced, perhaps not
surprisingly when one looks at the work, by the fact that she had also immersed
herself in the phantasmagoria of the world of Harry Potter. The sadness and the
inescapable fantasy of these works was impossible to ignore.
In many ways Marburg’s more recent work has powerful elements of selfportraiture. “In a way I guess they do,” she says. “This is the first time I think I’ve
really put myself into the work. Usually I just find images that I like at that
particular time.”
In the past Marburg has used quite specific stories or movies as sources. “It’s
usually about what I’m watching, reading or listening to. My next show with Rex
in December is based on a short story called Lobster by Guillaume Lecasble. It’s
about a lobster and a lady who fall in love … As I usually model from film stills
or photos, this will be the first time I have to make stuff up. Luckily it’s quite a
visual little novel…”
When many of her peers have turned to process-based work such as video,
performance and photography, Marburg, while having some involvement in the
performance group Damp, has ended up concentrating on paint on canvas.
While she has experimented with all forms of media, when asked what drives
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 42 October-December 2009
“As well as being
directly related to
Western films, [it]
was also about
drinking, playing
poker and music.”
her back to paint her answer is immediate and to the point: “I love painting!”
Marburg’s strange and laborious process remains much as it has since she
first investigated the potential of clay-mation. “The process has been pretty
much the same for the last six years,” she says. “It’s the only way I know how to
get the result I want,” she says somewhat disingenuously. “I’m not real good at
making things up.”
But to say that there is a vigorous imagination at work here would be an
understatement. In many ways Marburg is a throwback to the romantic
voyeurism of the painter, taking as inspiration the shimmery light cast through
wine bottles in her favourite bar, Hell’s Kitchen, which is tucked into a small
space in inner-city Melbourne. She’s truly old-fashioned in the sense of a beertoting, card-wrangling character straight out of a Gothic-Western. She goes so
far as to enter into poker games in Las Vegas, taking in the dark, tense faces
around the table like a stressed succor.
As she says, her true inspirations are “the other dudes in the studio and
my fellow drinkers at Hells.” She relished a group exhibition called Hell Needs
This Town... a curated show from last year based on Charles Swickard’s 1916
schlock Western film Hell’s Hinges, in which the main character proclaims that
“Hell needs this town, and it’s goin’ back, and goin’ damn quick!” as he burns
down the town.
“As well as being directly related to Western films, [it] was also about
drinking, playing poker and music. There was a painting of Russ [the
bartender] from Hells’ behind the bar, and one of Henry Wagons (a country
singer friend who I was playing poker with every week) and myself playing
cards. I was going to do a bit of a Vegas series, but the still-lifes seemed
more appropriate at the time.”
But wherever she takes us, from a card game rendered through the misty
prism of a scotch glass through to a witch’s coven, Marburg is going to come
up with surprises. Her quirky aesthetic is balanced by her sheer skill with the
brush. The hints of melancholia are buoyed by untarnished cheekiness and a
wicked humour. If there is sadness, there is also irreverence and ribald hints of
anarchy. Like following the rabbit down the hole, there are entire worlds yet to
flow from beneath her brush to seduce her hapless viewers.
I
Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney is showing work by Amanda Marburg from
4 to 22 December 2007.
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This page: Amanda Marburg,This is what death looks like, 2006.
Oil on canvas, 90 x 130cm. COURTESY: THE ARTIST.
Opposite page: Amanda Marburg, Man, telephone, plume of
smoke, 2005. Oil on linen, 84 x 60cm. COURTESY: REX IRWIN ART
DEALER, SYDNEY.
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