Griffith Regional Art Gallery’s first major exhibition for 2024 is a comprehensive retrospective of a Wagga-based artist whose life in art consists of surreal interrogations of the myths and realities of the Australian landscape.
Errol Fielder’s paintings are surreal “theatre sets” of both real and imagined events. This body of work from 2014 to 2023 is particularly pertinent to Griffith and inland Australia in its themes addressing flood, climate change and mythologies of regional landscape.
Errol Fielder: Retrospective will open on Friday 19 January 2024 at 6pm. Patrons can enjoy light refreshments with complimentary bubbles from Dee Vine Estate.
Exhibition Curator, art historian Dr Neill Overton, says “As an artist, Fielder does not occupy a convenient ‘ism’, although I tend to refer to it as ‘rural surrealism’, in its inventive narrative scenarios, and drawn images melding personal biography with larger psychologies of the regional landscape of The Rock Hill and the Murrumbidgee River.”
“When we view Errol Fielder’s paintings we enter into his visual discussion with these assembled phantoms of history, literature and art, and with McCubbin and Drysdale; in his continuing assertion of and a questioning of the jagged rock scape of The Rock Hill – scantly occupied, removed from time, dissolving in heat haze, imposing itself both on that thin barbed wire line of the horizon and on our modernity.”
According to Dr Overton, “Fielder’s paintings emerge like sleepwalkers; there is nothing literal about them, they are poetic excursions into place.”
Griffith Gallery Coordinator, Ray Wholohan, said Fielder has been an important part of the Riverina art scene for over 40 years.
“He has a considered focus on regionality and landscape tropes of inland Australia, and its issues of the river in flood, land use, and how we are inevitably informed by where we live. I have always admired his narrative skill as a painter,” he said.
To quote the artist Errol Fielder, who spoke of Australian painting as often being “Drama set in front of an inert background”. Fielder went on to say “The landscape appears to be inert – does it do anything, or do we change in relation to it? We live and play out our lives in the shadow of monoliths and boundaries – between The Rock Hill and the river.”
Errol Fielder: Retrospective will run from Friday 19 January until Sunday 3 March 2024. Gallery hours are Wednesday to Sunday – 10am-5pm and weekends -11am-2pm.
A floor talk with Dr Neill Overton will be offered on Saturday 10 February 2024 at 11am providing an overview of Errol Fielder’s approaches to rural surrealism, and discussing works within the exhibition. Entry to the opening event and floor talk are free and all are welcome to attend.
