Landscapes of light and colour
Posted: 01 Jul 2011 | By: Stephanie Radok
The story of modernism in South Australia is still being pieced together peripatetically by occasional books and exhibitions. While not urgent, it is a deep and complex story. Dorrit Black is an important part of that story, her painting of The Olive Plantation (1946) in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia is one of the most important known responses to the South Australian landscape, or at least that part of it near Adelaide.
Kathleen Sauerbier is much less well known than Black while one of Kathleen’s close friends Horace Trenerry is becoming a better-known voice as an artist talking about landscape in South Australia. A new book on his work was released by The Beagle Press in 2009 and was accompanied by an exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales of nineteen of his paintings. Trenerry wrote about “an endless freshness in landscape work”.
Sauerbier was one of the Australian modernist women painters able to travel, see art and study it in London while Trenerry was, through poverty (no grants in those days) mostly resident in Adelaide and forced to steal chickens from time to time. A very sociable man described by Lou Klepac in the Australian Dictionary of Biography as “generous, witty and charming … reckless, eccentric and temperamental”, he and Sauerbier painted together down the South Coast for several important years in the 1930s, influencing and inspiring one another. In 1998, the first Fleurieu Biennale included an exhibition, called A Fleurieu Heritage curated by Betty Snowdon, of the work of these two painters — Sauerbier and Trenerry — looking at the Fleurieu Peninsula, painting the sea and the cliffs, responding to the freedom of modern painting in a South Australian context.
Adelaide Central Gallery Manager Gloria Strzelecki (yes, she is related to the Strzelecki who named Mt Kosciuszko) wrote her Master’s thesis on the artwork of Kathleen Sauerbier and it is this research which has prompted the publishing by Wakefield Press of a book on Sauerbier’s life and art, and an accompanying exhibition at Carrick Hill curated by Strzelecki.
She says: “Sauerbier strove for a modern approach to her art and life and she believed that both were inextricably linked. Focusing on light, colour and form, her landscapes expressed the fluid poetry of nature, rather than a literal representation of it.”
In later years Sauerbier, living in Melbourne with her husband John Bryce, moved into fabric design and became a keen gardener (in the Edna Walling style) at their home in Donvale, Victoria.
Click to view image/s from this exhibition:
