Mark Schaller – Current Rips

Exhibition: 28 Feb – 15 March 2019

In many respects they seem several decades out of place. For one thing, Mark Schaller and Mick Turner work en plein air, actually trekking out, lugging their canvases and their paints with them, eschewing the studio and hazarding the wind and the sun and the inevitable sandflies in the process. Then there is the simple fact that they paint – an activity that seems almost quaint in the day and age of photoshop and installation and conceptualism. The late-19th-century Heidelberg School painterswould approve, the postmodernists would not.

There are other ways in which the duo stand out in the crowded art world of today. Neither are known as conformists, either stylistically or academically. Yet both have achieved substantial degrees of fame and success. Schaller was one of the founders, alongside the likes of David Larwill and Karen Hayman, of the renowned and unruly ROAR Galleries and his work resides in many of the major State galleries Australia-wide. Turner is even less conventional. While he has held successful exhibitions of his paintings throughout Australia and abroad, he is largely best known as one of the founders of such bands as the proto-punk Fungus Brains and the dynamic trio The Dirty Three.

Far From the Madding Crowd – Words by – Dr. Ashley Crawford