Lyndell Brown and Charles Green in 2024

Evening Star
23.11. - 21.12.2024

Request price list »

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green have worked as a one artist since 1989. Since then, all their art has always been made together. They have held more than 40 solo exhibitions and have been included in more than 50 curated exhibitions. Charles Green is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Melbourne and Lyndell Green is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. They live and work in regional Victoria.

In 2007, they were Australia’s Official War Artists, deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and from 2011 worked on follow-up collaborations with artist Jon Cattapan about the aftermath of Australia’s wars since Vietnam, which the three artists exhibited in Melbourne across two galleries in late 2014, accompanied by a book (Framing Conflict: Contemporary War and Aftermath, Macmillan, 2014). The new paintings at DMG are part of a project assisted by a grant from the Australian Research Council. Brown’s and Green’s works have been extensively written on and included in many museum surveys and are in the collections of most of Australia’s public art collections and institutions, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Australian War Memorial, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Art Gallery of West Australia, and the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, as well as many private collections in Australia and overseas.

They have shown that conflict shapes contemporary culture by uncovering and exploring the violence of globalization, inventing a postcolonial idea of cultural memory, as Stockholm Svenska Dagbladet (1998) wrote, “To work with double worlds, double vision” was very different to prevailing currents in art-making. Renowned novelist Alex Miller has explained that their contribution is to reimagine the Australian artist’s place in European culture. Peter Conrad, in the culmination of At Home in Australia (2003) writes of their art as “glimpses of Australia’s unconsciousness, and possibly previews of the society that is in the process of becoming.” Critic Dan Rule (2014) explains their paintings, “The lasting resonance of this work, which is rich in personal and historical references, is that of the sheer historical, social, spiritual, political and infrastructural complexity and repercussions of conflict on us all.”

Created by layering, modifying and copying found images, drawings and the documentary photographs they take in their fieldwork around the world, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green always select source material for its intuited visual charge and historical depths. During their deployment as Australia’s Official War Artists in 2007 in Afghanistan and Iraq, Brown and Green were intensely conscious of the tensions and the ethics of collecting, documenting and representing in conflict zones, as in Australia with its own layers of wars waged at home. The archive of art and the turbulence of history are worlds that connect in their cosmopolitan art, along with the concept of a post-national culture. This is why their quotation of found images are drawn from a rich archive of global visual history, for instance of the Apollo 11 moon landing gathered from NASA documentation, of meetings with other artists around the world, of family photographs, of grandparents at the Western Front, from the two artists’ repeated walks across remote valleys of the Grampians in western Victoria over many decades, to near-perfect copies of paintings in European art museums, for example Parmigianino’s Antea (1525), that have haunted them both.

The artists reorganise and sift both iconic and obscure expressions of human culture, and also their own Australian family histories that directly touched the edges of the panorama of world history, for instance during both World Wars. With no singular event in history to rest on, their powerful, constructed tableaux, first gathered into giant collages fixed across their studio walls and then made the basis of their paintings, mediate a history pinned in place in a panoramic perspective, both indexes of contemporary world-making and memory palaces. As they say, “we have always made paintings that show how the past survives into the present. The delineation of memory palaces filled with recollections from the artists’ lives in the paintings of their solo exhibition ‘Evening Star’ at Dominik Mersch Gallery are the 2024 bookend to the commission they received for the Australian Tapestry Workshop, Melbourne, to complete a large work, ‘Morning Star’ (2018) for the Sir John Monash Centre National Monument, Villers-Bretonneux, France, which opened in 2018, where, instead of depicting action, they evoked the affect of the anxious arrival of Australians, carrying intense, sensory recollections of Australian landscape all the way to the Front.