Alexandra Mowday, Andjana Pachkova, Matthew Gorgula, Richard Goodwin, Wendy Arnold
Cezanne, the forefather of modern art, painted Mont Saint-Victoire in southern France more than 60 times.
One hundred and fourteen years after his death artists still grapple with Cezanne’s radical visual thinking and reinterpretation of reality. Cezanne’s mountain, possibly the best known in the history of art, is both an enduring inspiration to artists and an anachronistic paradigm some seek to escape.
Alexandra Mowday, Andjana Pachkova, Matthew Gorgula, Richard Goodwin, and Wendy Arnold present Five Lone Goats on Cezanne's Mountain.
These five artists share a studio in Sydney’s Balmain. Different media, different styles … indeed with different goals in making art, yet each is still connected by Cezanne’s legacy.
For Pachkova, an emerging artist with an international background in law, Byron is critical to her practice. Both of her two large and soulful paintings were painted especially for this exhibition. They are about the Byron hinterland and the energy of the sea: ‘Surfing is just like working with a painting - it can go any way at any moment. That is the unpredictability of being in the water; the excitement, and a healthy dose of fear!’
Mowday’s elegant coloured Balsa wood wall-piece constructions evoke mountain forms and the sea.
Arnold, co-founder of the fashion label Studibaker Hawk, contributes frisson with her sensual figurative paintings.
However, Gorgula considers suspect the very act of producing art itself.
For Goodwin (renowned international artist,architect and professor of Fine Arts and Design at the UNSW), these five Sydney artists ‘are linked by nothing less than the end of the modernist dream.’