Artist: Halinka Orszulok
Lives: Jamberoo, NSW
Age:40
Represented by:Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney (no Melbourne representation)
Her thing.Easel-sized paintings in a photorealist style, featuring eerie, nocturnal landscapes.
Our take.Halinka Orszulok hunts by night, tracking down her motifs with a camera. When she finds an image with the right degree of mystery and suggestiveness, she’ll spend months transforming it into a painting, usually in oils. She prefers scenes that are not readily identifiable – ambiguous settings that could exist anywhere in the world.
Orszulok aims for that quality the Germans call unheimlichkeit– which may be crudely translated as ‘the uncanny’ or ‘the unhomely’. She enjoys how the most unassuming sights may be transformed by darkness, or by darkness pierced with a shaft of light. In Report Illegal Dumping we are looking at nothing more than a pile of rubbish and a wall covered in graffiti, but Orszulok’s use of shadows gives the picture a gothic dimension. In a work such as Night in the Anthropocene, a stand of trees is almost brutally illuminated by two strong light sources within the painting.
Orszulok’s images conceal as much as they reveal, asking us to fill in the gaps from our own imaginations. She seeks a hidden dimension in scenes we might simply ignore when encountered in the light of day.
Can I afford it?Orszulok’s paintings come in three basic sizes, and her prices are structured in an equally simple manner. Her smallest works, at 52cm by 75cm, are $2,400; the next level up, at 75cm by 105cm, are $3,600. The most expensive, at 100cm by 150cm, are $4,800, which is also her record.
In this exhibition the cheapest works are Passing Through, Local Industry and In the Wild, at $3,600. The most expensive are Night in the Anthropocene, Report Illegal Dumping and Disused Yard, at $4,800. “We want to sell them,” says her dealer, Jason Martin. Given the artist’s rising profile, and the boost she has received from winning the 2018 Glover Prize for landscape, that selling point should soon be climbing.
Where can I have a squiz?
Flinders Street Gallery, 61 Flinders Street, Surry Hills Sydney, 10- 27 October, 2019. flindersstreetgallery.com
Published in The Good Weekend, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 October, 2018