Funky Punky Buddha
[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 5, No. 7
12 October - 8 November 2009 ] By Silvia Dropulich
Tim Johnson’s art grapples with mind, heart and soul on a global scale.
Punk and Buddha are among eclectic influences informing the work of Sydney Artist Tim Johnson.
The exhibition Tim Johnson: painting ideas, opens next month at the Ian Potter Museum of Art and will feature more than 50 of his key works from 1970 to the present.
Since the late 1970s Buddhas, bodhisattvas, Aboriginal artists, Indigenous Americans, Tibetan monks, Vietnamese farmers, and Christian figures have featured in Johnson’s paintings.
“Tim Johnson’s art makes some complex, even baffling points,” says Dr Chris McAuliffe, Director of the Potter.
“He has a highly personal view of the spiritual equivalence between cultures from across the globe.
“This is a survey showing an Australian artist grappling with mind, heart and soul on a global scale.”
The survey also shows how an artist participates in cultural changes over a number of decades: there’s the countercultural 60s, the punk 70s, the postcolonial 80s and the globalised 90s.
Johnson began as a painter in the 1960s but soon turned to experimentation with sculpture, light performances and other media. By the mid-1970s he developed a form of conceptual painting looking beyond European and American art and influenced by travels through India, Nepal and South-East Asia.
Back in Australia an interest in music and involvement in the Punk scene further fuelled Johnson’s cultural eclecticism.
In 1980 he visited Central Australian Aboriginal artists at Papunya, an experience which resulted in his paintings of Aboriginal artists and collaborative works made with Papunya painters.
“Even though a large-scale exhibition surveying an artist’s career seems a logical thing to do, they’re not staged as often as you’d think,” says Dr McAuliffe.
“In the first instance, an exhibition surveying several decades of work by a living artist makes a simple point: major achievements in art require dedication, commitment and persistence.
“It’s a cliché that artists make us see the world in a new way but Tim Johnson goes further than this: he sees new worlds and discovers new ways of representing them.”
Tim Johnson: painting ideas will run at the Potter from 11 November until 14 February 2010. Curated by Wayne Tunnicliffe, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Julie Ewington, Queensland Art Gallery, the exhibition was previously shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and the Queensland Art Gallery.
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