Chris O’Doherty’s Australian Jesus among works donated to Art Gallery of NSW

Frank Watters invited curators from the Art Gallery of NSW to visit his apartment, saying they could choose whatever they liked.

Chris O'Doherty’s Transcendental Australian Jesus (1996). Picture: AGNSW

For nearly 50 years, Frank Watters lived in an apartment that was like a treasure trove. Every single wall was crammed floor to ceiling with his personal art collection. Even the toilet walls were covered with pictures — from down near your ankles, right up so high you had to crane your neck to have a look.

Watters’ apartment was on the top floor above an East Sydney gallery named after him. Run by Watters and his co-directors, Geoffrey and Alexandra Legge, since the 1960s, the gallery was a venerable Sydney ­institution, and its stable of artists included Tony Tuckson, Robert Klippel, James Gleeson, Ken Whisson, Vicki Varvaressos, Chris O’Doherty, Richard Larter and John Peart.

Last month, the Watters Gallery closed but earlier this year, Watters invited three senior curators from the Art Gallery of NSW to visit his apartment. He told them they could choose whatever they liked from his art collection, which he would then donate to the gallery. They chose 32 works.

Anne Ryan, the curator of Australian prints and drawings, was one of the curators who visited Watters’ apartment. “Frank was very generous in giving us these things,” she says, “but also super generous in inviting us to actually pick what we wanted from the walls.”

Ryan decided to select two works by Chris O’Doherty, aka Reg Mombassa, because “they are great” but also because of their personal connection with Watters. “When a work is connected to a particular collector, it has that added layer of meaning,” she explains. “I know that the relationship between the two men — the artist and the dealer — is a very personal one and one that goes back a long way, and there is a lot of affection I think between the two men, and so I thought it was a lovely thing to have. The great thing about Watters Gallery is that they stuck by their artists through thick and thin and that sense of loyalty and that close-knit, almost family-like relationship is not like a business transaction — it’s much deeper than that. These are works that Frank held for himself and that tells you something.”

At the AGNSW, Ryan shows me O’Doherty’s Transcendental Australian Jesus, on display along with a selection of other works that Watters donated. In this drawing, the Australian Jesus is dressed in a suit and clean shaven and has physical similarities with the Hindu god Vishnu. With his multi-limbs, the Aussie Jesus holds objects such as a football, a toaster sprouting a snake, and a circular saw. In the background are the classic ­Australian motifs of fibro houses and a ute.

The Australian Jesus has been a distinctive character in O’Doherty’s work since the mid-1990s. The artist has developed a very personal iconography from when he enrolled at the National Art School in Sydney to study painting. Moreover, besides his own art and producing images for the clothing label Mambo, he’s had an extremely successful career as a musician. While at art school in the 1970s, he formed the band Mental as Anything with fellow students.

Ryan says she is very fond of O’Doherty’s work because it feels very familiar. “This is a lovely intimate work, which I think is done with great affection towards these sacred things that we value as Australians,” she says. “You can see he has done the outlines in his usual style with the black lines and then coloured it in really beautifully, sensitively, with lots of shading and nuance.

“It’s very typical Reg Mombassa. There is a slight edge of satire and it is humorous and very local.

“I also love the irreverence of it and I
feel that it speaks to my experience I had growing up in Australia. I just think it is a lovely drawing and aren’t we lucky to have
it from Frank and what a wonderful act of generosity.”

Chris O’Doherty, Transcendental Australian Jesus, 1996.

Collection Art Gallery of New South Wales. Gift of Frank Watters 2018. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program. On display, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, until January 17.