Artist: Ken Whisson
Lives: Elizabeth Bay, Sydney
Age:90
Represented by:Niagara Galleries (Watters Gallery, Sydney)
His thing.Small to medium-size paintings and drawings, in which humans, animals and landscapes float in an abstract space.
Our take.Ken Whisson must be tired of hearing he’s a “artist’s artist”. This effectively means other artists adore your work while the buying public are mystified. It’s never been a real problem. Whisson is the least materialistic of beings, having made most of his life’s work on a kitchen table.
In 1977 Whisson moved to Italy and would remain there for over three decades – not for the art or the cusine, but for the politics, which has been a constant preoccupation. It’s only when Australia’s politics became as absurd as Italy’s that he decided to come home.
For a man of such pronounced political interests it’s remarkable that Whisson’s paintings remain so fixated on metaphysical things. He takes all the elements of everyday life and rearranges them in oblique compositions in which figures and faces are no more important than plants, animals and inanimate objects. He rejects all vestiges of “good technique” and all ‘rules’ of composition. In Whisson’s universe, God is an anarchist.
Whisson’s work has always been an acquired taste, but once the connection is made it becomes addictive. A 2012-13 retrospective at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art, revealed this irrascible, eccentric figure as one of Australia’s most original painters.
Can I afford it?Whisson has always been an affordable proposition but finally his prices have begun to rise. The most expensive oil painting in this show is Ducks, Human, Windows and Tree Branches (91cm by 122 cm) at $60,000. The cheapest pieces are a pencil drawing titled Innocence (33cm by 47.5cm); and two crayon drawings: Open Minds (40cm by 50cm) and A Cluster of Typical and Untypical Types (33cm by 38cm), at $2,000 each. The highest price ever paid for one of Whisson’s works is $84,000 at auction, which is a record begging to be broken.
Where can I have a squiz?
Niagara Galleries, 245 Punt Road, Richmond, Melbourne, 25 September – 20 October, 2018. niagaragalleries.com.au
Published in The Good Weekend, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October, 2018