Christopher Allen’s 10 Australian artists of the past 50 years

AS The Australian celebrates 50 years, our art critic Christopher Allen has named his 10 artists of the era. Do you agree with his choices?

18/09/2009 WEEKEND: Art - Painting "Latin America Grand Final" by Aust artist John Brack. Artwork on show at The John Brack retrospective art exhibtion at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

AS The Australian celebrates its 50th anniversary, our art critic Christopher Allen has named his 10 artists of the era. Below, he explains his rationale.

INTERACTIVE: Allen on Australian art over the past 50 years, plus top 10 gallery

RICK AMOR

The most prominent living exponent of a tradition of painting rooted in tradition but contemporary in mood and expression; Amor reminds us that tradition is essentially a matter of

adaptation and reinterpretation, never simply of repetition.

JOHN BRACK

Brilliant although sometimes eccentric, Brack was the most intellectual of the Antipodeans; his pictures are memorable, sometimes quintessentially of their time but stubbornly independent of the violent and changeable art fashions of his time.

CRESSIDA CAMPBELL

Campbell shows how beauty and significance can be found in the most humble of subjects, simply by attentiveness to the world and care in the crafting of the image, in her case through an elaborate and personal adaptation of Japanese ukiyoe technique.

IAN FAIRWEATHER

At a time when abstraction was generally dominant in painting, Fairweather held on to the suggestive power of the figurative, but teased it into a quasi-abstract language of patterning that

evoked the layering of memory and association — a reflection of the endless return and reinterpretation of experience within the mind of the reclusive painter.

BILL HENSON

Henson is one of the few contemporary photographers, or indeed artists in any medium, who evokes a complex imaginary world, like that of a novelist, replete with echoes from the art,

literature and even music of the past, alive with poignant notes of sadness and at times the edge and danger of transgression.

MIKE PARR

Parr was one of Australia’s most significant avant-garde artists in the last age of the avant-garde, the most memorable exponent of performance and conceptual art; since then he has had the patience to master new skills and has produced outstanding, introspective drawings and etchings.

GWYN HANSEN PIGOTT

Gwyn Hansen Pigott was one of Australia’s finest potters; her still life assemblages make a slightly eclectic reference to the paintings of Morandi, but the ceramic forms themselves speak

of the complete harmony of mind and hand in the potter’s craft.

JEFFREY SMART

Smart was exemplary in his pursuit of a distinct vocation, initially against all the headwinds of contemporary fashion; he created and elaborated a subtle painterly world, poised between aesthetic detachment and a critical but never ideological vision of the modern urban world.

IMANTS TILLERS

Tillers always seemed the most interesting of the postmodern artists in Australia, and time has only confirmed this: as with other artists, the secret lies in the marriage of a rich repertoire of

ideas and allusions with the technical ability to produce subtle and evocative painted images.

FRED WILLIAMS

Williams is, after Drysdale, the landscape painter who has most significantly contributed to the contemporary vision of Australian nature: a combination of intimacy and distance contribute to a sense of the land as patchy, discontinuous and somehow resistant to conventional perspectival views.

Do you agree with Allen’s choices? Have your say at our interactive feature