Allan Mitelman: works on paper 1967- 2004
 
30 October 2004 to 16 January 2005
Art Gallery of New South Wales

Allan Mitelman: works on paper 1967-2004 surveys three decades of Allan Mitelman's work from the late 1960s to the present. The exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of his varied repertoire of drawings, prints and paintings. It features some 120 works, ranging from large-scale to the size of postage stamps.

Mitelman is one of Australia's foremost abstract artists. Drawing on the rich traditions Western art, Mitelman has forged a distinctive style that is at once playful, serious and sensual.

Elizabeth Cross, curator of the exhibition, says: "There are not so many painters working in Australia today who bring to bear in their art a knowledge and love of painting which embraces Chardin and Delacroix, Degas and Seurat, Matisse and Picasso, Klee and Morandi � So to each of his viewers, Mitelman's art holds open the possibility of touching that tradition - of remembering in some subliminal sense the touch of paintings which have gone before.

"Much of Mitelman's work from the past two decades can be seen as a palimpsest on which the imprint of a century and more of art can be traced, on which fragments of observable phenomena are registered and in which the echoes of an equivocal spirit are heard, both his own and that of our richly endowed and troubled age."

Terence Maloon, Curator of Special Exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, says, "This is an exhibition that is long overdue. It is surely the finest, or one of the finest bodies of works on paper by an Australian artist. He's a real enchanter."

A book by the same title accompanies the exhibition with essays by Elizabeth Cross and Terence Maloon.

Exhibition Floortalk - Free 
Thursday 13 January 2005, 3pm
Terence Maloon, Curator Special Exhibitions
 

IMAGE: Allan Mitelman Untitled 1973. Collection of the artist