GUNTER CHRISTMANN

Gunter - the artist, the Berliner, the bohemian - was a fixture of the surrounding streets and cafes and well-known to NAS students and the broader local community. A 50-year retrospective of his work presented by Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne in 2014, curated by Lesley Harding, was testament to his greatness as an artist and indicative of the extent, diversity and excellence of his life’s work. An 80-page exhibition catalogue was published to accompany the retrospective with essays by Simon Barney, Lesley Harding and Noela Yuill.

From the early 1970s, as an extension of or adjunct to painting, Christmann produced sound sculpture, which he named audio–plastik as well as a number of notable photographic-based works in the form of analogue slide carousels. Toward the end of his life, short digital videos incorporated a more explicit temporal dimension into his shuffle-boxes and float-tanks, simple devices for the creation of composition in painting.

Christmann developed his shuffle-box technique in the early 1970s and it was integral to his paintings of the time. It facilitated, within the given frame, the arrangement and rearrangement of debris picked-up from the streets around where he lived - the “ever-present, never-ending treasure, there underneath my feet.” That the universe offered up all that was needed for subject matter, arrangement and framing was fundamental to his approach to painting and was continuous with the idea that each canvas was its own complete and contained universe. This philosophy was most clearly expressed in his short text, ‘TERRA SUBPEDE (The Earth underfoot)’ (1980). He returned to this method of making paintings in the last ten years.

Christmann’s work is in the major state and public collections in Australia including extensive holdings in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (over sixty works). International collections include the Berlinische Gallerie, Berlin, H.R.M. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands’ Collection and the British Museum, London.