Robert MacPHERSON

Australian 1937–

While Robert MacPherson first exhibited relatively late in life at the age of thirty-eight, from the moment of his inaugural exhibition his work displayed a deep and complex understanding of and interaction with the history of art. This manifested itself during the late 1970s in the artist’s interrogation of the act of painting. Works such as Untitled, 1977, engage both with the history and then-contemporary debates surrounding modern art (specifically the theories of American art critic Clement Greenberg) while simultaneously and quite literally deconstructing the physical act of painting. The process-oriented nature of the construction of the work—during this period the artist would set and then fulfil certain tasks in order to create a painting—also engages with minimal and conceptual art practice. By working in a serial format and deliberately denying an identifiable ‘signature’ style, MacPherson quite knowingly questions the authority of the artist and, by extension, his own practice.

The allure of colour is deliberately excluded from the six panels comprising the work in order to encourage a deeper concentration on the application of paint, the mark of the brush and the results of chance as embodied in the black drips on the surface of white canvas. MacPherson attempts to demystify the process of picture making in such works, tampering with the notion of the hallowed, complete and unique art object by breaking down the container of the canvas—irreverently unpicking it from its stretcher; playing, as a result, with the almost overwhelming belief in the preciousness of art. Fully cognisant of the way in which the art world functions, MacPherson’s intelligent analysis of painting in Untitled serves to not only question the nature of his own undertaking as an artist, but firmly insert him in the very dialogue that his work seeks to both unravel and expose.

Kelly A. Gellatly