Allan Mitelman

Allan Mitelman is one of Australia’s foremost abstract artists who holds an important place in the history of abstraction in this country. Mitelman has drawn and made prints from the very beginning of his career and has continued to work in these media right through to the present day. He is equally accomplished as a painter, draughtsman and printmaker, and this exhibition is the first to comprehensively survey his distinguished oeuvre of works on paper.

The exhibition comprises some 120 works on paper that range from the most ephemeral and fugitive of images, to works that are dense and painterly. A group of small, informal works are exhibited in showcases, where their intimate scale and experimental nature is readily apparent. These works provide an interesting counterpoint to some of the more highly worked drawings, often on a scale comparable to paintings, that are exhibited on the gallery walls.

The prints and drawing media have provided Allan Mitelman with an extraordinary repertoire of techniques and processes that he manipulates to create the subtle, beautifully inflected and resonant surfaces of his works. Mitelman’s art is one that invites contemplation and the sensual enjoyment of the concrete materiality of the work itself. His works on paper, in all their inventiveness and rich variety, demand close scrutiny and always repay the viewer with visual pleasure and new insights into the act of looking.