I finally had some time to spend a few hours wandering around, and photographing in, the CBD last week. The CBD is rapidly changing from when I used to live there.
The few hours of photographic drifting was between seeing the Marek brothers exhibition --- Dušan and Voitre Marek: Surrealists at sea -- at the South Australian Art Gallery and receiving the 1st AstraZeneca vaccination at my GP clinic. The Morrison Federal Govt has been very slack in acquiring and rolling out the vaccine, and my GP clinic has only been receiving very limited doses per week. Sadly, exaggerated claims, spin and outright lies have covered over the stuff up re the vaccine supply and roll out.
Back to the exhibition. There was a deep resistance to the foreign, the European, and modernism in postwar Adelaide and the migrant artists in the European diaspora were consigned to obscurity. They represent by-ways, irrelevancies, alternative pathways – all leading to dead ends in the central narrative of Australian art history. For instance, Sasha Grishin's recent Australian Art: A History does not mention the Marek brothers, despite their influence on the early paintings of Jeffrey Smart.
The Surrealist at Sea exhibition finally recovers, and recognizes, some of the forgotten modernism in Adelaide after the 1945. An example of this forgetting is Patrick McCaughey's recent Strange Country: Why Australia Painting Matters, which ignores Surrealism in Australia, and doesn't mention the Marek brothers. McCaughey's text is both Melbourne-centric and ignores how some modernists, such as the Marek brothers worked across several artistic mediums and not just in the medium of painting. In the Marek brothers case it was painting, sculpture, prints, film, photography and jewellery.