"I am both humbled and proud at the same time to be banging away on Paul's behalf. Humbled because it's great to see success, real and lasting success, come to a great Australian and proud to know that I am not alone in seeking a podium finish for one of this nation's great artistic minds." H.G. Nelson.
Screenprinting Godfather and iconic member of Sydney's left wing poster movement (plus 2004 Archibald Prize and 2005 Wynne and Sulman finalist) Paul Worstead is having his first major poster retrospective at the Tin Sheds Gallery at the University of Sydney, from May 28 - June 18 2005.
The exhibition will feature several iconic series, including the GET WET set of 5 posters that Paul produced in 1978 for the band Mental as Anything, to promote their debut album, and the GET SMART series which was created in the mid 70's to promote various inner city cultural events including the Redfern Settlement Dances. The series was only recently completed, with the addition of 'Larrabie' to the original group of 'Max', '99', 'Chief' and 'Zigfried'.
Individual posters to be shown also include those created for bands such as Sports, Surfside 6, Magnetics, Stephen Cummings and the independent record label Phantom Records, plus various posters commissioned by surf and streetwear label Mambo.
Paul's association with the silkscreen poster movement dates back to the early 70's and his involvement with a variety of environmentally and politically focussed collectives, including the Tin Sheds workshop and Settlement youth centre. With other young poster makers Paul created a 'wallpaper' that transformed black and grimy inner city walls into vibrant and confronting billboards for both bands and political and cultural events. That legacy continues to inspire not only the current crop of poster artists but other street artists as well.
Humour has always been a major part of Paul's work, along with a collection of music, political, surf and pop cultural references that include 60's TV stars, Chinese dictators, bongs, sprinklers, Australian politicians, confectionary and three legged dog(throwing up on a condom littered beach). His 2000 Olympic poster, They Also Win Who Fall Behind, featured a flock of winged thongs flying off toward an unseen finishing line, while leaving another thong fallen, exhausted on the ground. You can bet that S.O.C.O.G never saw that coming.
While all of the posters in this show have been 'exhibited' on walls and building site hordings, this will be the first time that many of them have appeared in a gallery.
Paul Worstead's posters and paintings can be found in many private collections and major Australian galleries, including the National Gallery in Canberra.
"Paul Worstead's pictures are utterly original and extremely good, but he is unfortunately one of the most criminally under appreciated artists practicing their craft in Australia today." Reg Mombassa, artist and musician.
"Paul is a 'community artist'. But it's a community made up not only of neighbourhoods like his own Chippo, but also of the back alleys (metaphorically speaking) and at least three industries of inner Sydney: the clothing industry, the pop music industry and the Higher Education industry. Paul invented an imagery for the place where these activities came together in the 1970s and 1980s. In his imagining of that place, the banal becomes surreal, detritus is delicate and even delicious." TIM ROWSE, Senior Fellow, Research School of Social Science, ANU.
"Paul Worstead was, we now know, the original stalking horse of post modernist poststructuralism. Nature triumphed over nuture; the Kerr gene dismissed us all." Bob Boughton, 'Mr Objectivity'.
"Paul Worstead is both a national treasure and the son we (Mambo) never had." Wayne Golding, Mambo art director. |
