LUMINOSITY

OPENS SATURDAY 21st NOVEMBER
2 - 5 PM AT FOX JENSEN McCRORY AUCKLAND
VIEW EXHIBITION

Imi Knoebel, Anima Mundi 53 - 4 Ed.  2010 / 2019
hand-coloured acrylic on paper – 4 parts 46 x 36 cm each panel edition of 5 + 2 ap + 1

Jan Albers
Jane Bustin
Bill Culbert
Imi Knoebel
Hanns Kunitzberger
Tomislav Nikolic
Winston Roeth 

I like light, colour, luminosity. I like things full of colour and vibrant. - Oscar de la Renta

I’m with Oscar...and so too are each of the artists included in this exhibition. For each of them colour and luminosity are fundamental to their approach to material choices and their subsequent manipulations. Each depend on luminosity to act as an agent for colours’ delivery, or perhaps it’s the other way round - that colour is the broker for incandescence. Whatever the case, there is something about the collaboration between light and colour that excites these artists, something symbolic, something perceptual, perhaps even transcendent...

- Andrew Jensen, 2020

Bill Culbert, Strait (Manukau) 1, 2014 
plastic bottles, fluorescent tube, fittings 37.5 x 122 x 14.5 cm

E-@ART Art Is Hope Art Is Life

10 Artists online group show

Nicolò Baraggioli, Lawrence Carroll, Herbert Hamak, Joesph Heer, Frank Gerritz, Pep Llambias, Tomislav Nikolic, Winston Roeth, Günter Umberg, Santiago Villanueva

Art has the power to promote positive change in people

Virtual Opening Saturday 18th April

Instagram: @GALERIAXAVIERFIOL
Facebook: GALERIAXAVIERFIOL. ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO
Xavier Fiol Contemporary Art & Projects

FOX/JENSEN/McCRORY at Virtual, Auckland Art Fair

30 April - 17 May

JENSENGALLERY.COM

Auckland Art Fair

AMBACHER CONTEMPORARY at Postions Munich Art Fair

Booth #37: Alina Birkner, Mevlana Lipp, Mateusz Von Motz, Tomislav Nikolic

17 - 20 October

PERMAFROST

14 September - 13 October

Lawrence Carroll, Winston Roeth, Aida Tomescu, Jenny Topfer, Geoff Thornley, Hanns Kunitzberger, Boomoom, Tomislav Nikolic, Liat Yossifor, Callum Innes, Kemal Seyhan, Straun Teague

FOX/JENSEN GALLERY 

offsite:  68 - 70 Burrows Road, Alexandria, NSW, Australia,
10 - 4pm Thursday to Sunday or by appointment

Permafrost brings together artists from Europe, USA and Australasia. For the first time in Australia, the gallery will stage a major exhibition in a stunning private exhibition space in Alexandria, Sydney. And also for the first time we will present works by new gallery artists Lawrence Carroll (USA), Liat Yossifor (USA), Hanns Kunitzberger (AUT), Kemal Seyhan (TUR) and Boomoon (KOR), alongside young British painter Struan Teague and artists familiar to the gallery’s program, Aida Tomescu (AUS), Tomislav Nikolic (AUS), Winston Roeth (USA), Geoff Thornley (NZ), Callum Innes (UK) and Jenny Topfer (AUS).

Many of the works are major in scale and ambition and despite their highly individual characters, share a mysterious double life. Between the rigour and authenticity of their making all of these works are profoundly metaphorical. They both conceal and reveal aspects of their material life and making but each transcend the recent fashion for “process”. Their collective whole is far, far greater than the sum of their parts and each work demonstrates how painting, more than any medium continues to enfold vision and tactility with poetry.

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Australian born artist Lawrence Carroll. Lawrence sustained a major career on either side of the Atlantic having moved to America as a child and his work has been presented and collected by museums worldwide. Lawrence sadly passed away on May 21st this year.

FOX/JENSEN & FOX/JENSEN/McCRORY at Sydney Contemporary 2019

Both E21: Jan Albers, Matthew Allen, Erin Lawlor, Ceara Metlikovic, Tomislav Nikolic, Aida Tomescu, Liat Yossifor

12 - 15 September

Primordial Synthethic

Alina Birkner, Mateusz von Motz and Tomislav Nikolic

12 September to 23 December

opening 7pm, 11 September

Lothstrsse 78a

Munich, Germany

pay the prophets to justify your reasons

15 August

FOX/JENSEN/McCRORY

10 Putiki Street

Grey Lynn, Auckland, New Zealand

Fox Jensen McCrory is delighted to announce the exhibition of new works by Tomislav Nikolic. It will be the ninth solo exhibition held with the galleries.

This new group of works "pay the prophets to justify your reasons” continues Nikolic’s engagement with art historical exemplars. Most often his own works are heartfelt responses to artworks that move him especially. Reaching back as far as adolescence, Nikolic recalls the power of seeing paintings by Francis Bacon - the colour, the scale, and the confronting narratives offered him an experience that whilst public felt deeply personal, an involvement that couldn’t be had elsewhere, other than with painting.

There is a larger group of seven individual, discreet works, that respond less to the particularities of respective works but to the broader communicative power and symbolism that paintings have maintained for centuries as votive objects. In Kasmir Malevich’s 0-10 exhibition in 1915-16 the artist chose to place the seminal Black Square painting high in the corner of the room in the privileged position of the household icon painting. Elevated and transcendent, Malevich’s famous painting was immediately loaded with content and responsibility. These seven new works, each painted on wooden panels and fastened into their steel frames in a clear, prosaic way, celebrate colour and its emotive power more than religiosity. Like a medieval icon painting, the wood itself is ever so gently convex and will in time invite fissures to appear, most likely at the edges - its stubborn organic life still evident.

A second suite of seven works is in fact one piece. Using Nikolic’s more familiar extravagant frames which are fully co-opted into the structure and composition and rainbow of colour, this group of works makes the dictum: "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” wildly evident. Subtle shifts in scale, together with audacious juxtapositions of colour and intensity gives this work a musical quality. More be-bop than symphonic, your eye moves back and forth along its length propelled by its chromatic pulse and whimsy in a kaleidoscopic approximation of Charlie Parker’s Ornithology.

Nikolic continues to evolve as one of the most compelling painters of his generation. His work has been collected all over the world, due to its ability to expand the communicative role that painting can have. Further than this Nikolic understands the historical, theoretical and symbolic responsibility that colour itself can shoulder.

Andrew Jensen, August 2019

EROS

Erich Fischl, Hayv Kahraman, Man Ray, Gideon Rubin, Jane Bustin, Frank Kenis, Tracey Snelling, Akio Robinson, Hoda Afshar, Tomislav Nikolic

11 July - 10 August

FOX/JENSEN/McCRORY

10 Putiki Street

Grey Lynn, Auckland, New Zealand

EROS

Erich Fischl, Hayv Kahraman, Man Ray, Gideon Rubin, Jane Bustin, Frank Kenis, Tracey Snelling, Akio Robinson, Hoda Afshar, Tomislav Nikolic

May - June

FOX/JENSEN GALLERY

Corner of Hampden Street and Cecil Lane

Paddington, Sydney, Australia

30 Aniversari - PART II

Maria Ignacia, Frank Gerritz, Melvin Martinez, Tomislav Nikolic, Sabire Susuz, Marta Pujades,

Cecilia Paredes, José Luis Puche and Joan Fontcuberta

18 May - 

Xavier Fiol Contemporary Art & Projects

Sante Juame 23A Palma Mallorca Spain

FOX/JENSEN/McCRORY at Auckland Art Fair

1 - 5 May

JENSENGALLERY.COM

Auckland Art Fair

Ruler, rete.

Daniel Boyd, Zac Langdon-Pole, Clare Milledge, Tomislav Nikolic, Gareth Sansom, Marian Tubbs

26th April - 12 May

STATION / BERLIN

Arndt Art Agency, Fasenstraße 28, 10719 Berlin, Germany

Ruler, rete takes it’s title from two elements of an instrument called an astrolabe, historically used by navigators and astronomers to identify and locate celestial bodies. An astrolabe consists of a round plate containing a two-dimensional projection of the Earth’s latitudinal lines, upon which rests another circular feature called the rete, which contains the locations of stars and planets. Over that, a straight ruler pivots around to line up with measurements that are marked along the edge of the plate.

The manner in which the ruler and rete function illustrates a notion common to the exhibiting artists: that of establishing means of understanding and interpreting profound source material of physical, historical or emotional realms. The combined polyphony of Gareth Sansom’s narrative paintings and Marian Tubbs’ innovative aluminium prints illustrate two artists grappling with the legacies of a modernist art historical vernacular and the contemporary proliferation of images via screen based media. Clare Milledge and Tomislav Nikolic offer more intimate explorations of shamanism and memory through painted glass panels and meditative colour field paintings: way-finding tools chartering alternative doctrines and emotive states. In the highly charged works of Daniel Boyd and Zac Langdon Pole, protean legacies of colonisation, routes of memory and simultaneous histories will play out via series of works bearing Boyd’s distinctive pointillist technique and Langdon-Pole’s poignantly altered objects. 

Designed to function as a series of visual conversations throughout the gallery spaces, Ruler, rete showcases six contemporary Australian and New Zealand artists working at the forefront of contemporary artistic enquiry. 

FOX/JENSEN & FOX/JENSEN/McCRORY at Art Basel Hong Kong 2024

26 - 30 March

 

Portrait Without a Face

10 September - 10 November

FOX/JENSEN/McCRORY

10 Putiki Street

Grey Lynn, Auckland, New Zealand

Portrait Without a Face brings together the works of twelve artists, ten of which would be normally described as “abstract" artists. Each of them, however, attend to the broader notion of portraiture with an intimacy and symbolism that makes their works redolent with character and force.

Imi Knoebel's famous Face paintings join works by Jan Albers, Tomislav Nikolic, Coen Young, Ceara Metlikovec, Günter Umberg, Winston Roeth, Helmut Federle, Geoff Thornley, Matthew Allen, Sam Harrison and Gary McMillan.

The exhibition includes both painting and sculpture and will run until the 10th of November 2018.

FOX/JENSEN & FOX/JENSEN/McCRORY at Sydney Contemporary 2018

Jan Albers, Matthew Allen, Sam Harrison, Ceara Metlikovec, Tomislav Nikolic, Aida Tomescu

13 - 16 September

vestiges of now

16 August - 15 September

JENSEN GALLERY

Corner of Hampden Street and Cecil Lane

Paddington, Sydney, Australia

Tomislav Nikolic’s exhibition, vestiges of now, marks the fifth variation of this major group of paintings, within one of the most idiosyncratic and compelling painting practices in Australia.

His approach to colour embraces the multifarious strands that are loosely entwined in the esoteric colour theory described in the Seven Rays. This ancient concept has held allure for many diverse mystical and philosophical traditions - from western culture, Hindu religious philosophy, the Byzantine -and has continued to be woven into the fabric of the 20^th century occult.

Nikolic’s subscription to the Seven Rays is less that of a disciple or even that of an advocate. Rather his investigations of colour don’t seek to sway the viewer’s acceptance of any belief system; they are driven by Nikolic’s own emotional acknowledgment of colours’ force and communicative capacities.

Nikolic also finds stimulus in artworks from history - having long been fond of the paintings of Camille Pissarro or more accurately, the manner in which Pissarro would return time and again to the same urban vista, albeit under different seasonal conditions. For this iteration it is the sites Pissarro chose – Avenue de Opera in Paris or the road to Versailles, that have simply provided a structural framework for his scrutiny of colour and light.

Perhaps like Mark Rothko’s early paintings of the New York subway there is far less invested in the site itself than in the way that painting can offer a sensory immersion in colour and tone. This engagement with or captivation by colour and its emotional clout is at the heart of their shared concerns.

The paintings in vestiges of now also demonstrate the extraordinary degree to which Nikolic has advanced his approach to material, form and object. The completeness of his paintings, the involvement of each element, face, edge and frame indicates his desire for the work to have an integrated character in the same way that we might seek this for ourselves.

Despite this unified approach, the nature of Nikolic’s paintings can be diverse. One minute demure, the next bolshie and brooding, we can see how Nikolic’s paintings are always extending the range and affecting character that a painting can assume.

In recent years Tomislav Nikolic’s paintings have received major recognition here and abroad. The current Bulgari Art Award winner has enjoyed tremendous success with his works having been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Munich, Madrid and Palma de Majorca in recent months. Alongside these exhibitions Nikolic’s work has been presented with huge success at Art Basel Hong Kong since 2012 and of course in our Sydney and Auckland galleries.

Multiple works have entered the collections of the Art Gallery of NSW, National Gallery of Victoria, and Chartwell Trust Collection, held by the Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki as well as private collections around the world.

Fox Jensen is thrilled to present vestiges of now in Sydney. The artist will be present.
 

Shantih shantih shantih

16 June - 21 July

Jon Cattapan, Adam Lee, Sam Martin, Nell, Tomislav Nikolic, Michele Ussher and Jake Walker

STATION

9 Ellis Street, South Yarra

Melbourne Australia

Herbert Hamak & Tomislav Nikolic

DIÀLEG SENSE LÍMITS

7 June - 31 August

Xavier Fiol Contemporary Art & Projects

Sante Juame 23A Palma Mallorca Spain

Portrait Without a Face

2 June - July

FOX/JENSEN GALLERY

Corner of Hampden Street and Cecil Lane

Paddington, Sydney, Australia

Portrait Without a Face brings together the works of eleven artists, ten of which would be normally described as “abstract" artists. Each of them, however, attend to the broader notion of portraiture with an intimacy and symbolism that makes their works redolent with character and force.
Imi Knoebel's famous Face paintings join works by Jan Albers, Tomislav Nikolic, Coen Young, Ceara Metlikovec, Helmut Federle, Günter Umberg, Winston Roeth, Geoff Thornley, Matthew Allen and Sam Harrison. 

FOX/JENSEN/McCRORY at Auckland Art Fair

23 - 27 May

JENSENGALLERY.COM

Auckland Art Fair

FOX/JENSEN & FOX/JENSEN/McCRORY at Art Basel Hong Kong 2018

29 - 31 March

Other People Think: Auckland's Contemporary International Collection

10 March - 10 June 

Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tāmaki

Other People Think: Auckland’s Contemporary International Collection vividly reflects a turn towards the Asia Pacific region, including South America, which respects the changing demographics of New Zealand’s largest and most diverse city. Taking its title from a light work by Chilean artist, architect and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar, the exhibition considers the importance of shared understandings and empathy in a complex and shifting world.

The exhibition features work in a variety of media including painting, photography, video, kinetic sculpture and installation by artists Nalini Malani, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Taryn Simon, Howard Hodgkin, Mit Jai Inn, María Nepomuceno, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Claire Fontaine and more. 

Curated by Rhana Devenport, assisted by Julia Waite

COLOUR & FORM

Ron Adams, Sydney Ball , Angela Brennan , Belle Blau , Celia Gullett , Michael Johnson, Saskia Leek, Sean Meilak, Jonny Niesche, Tomislav Nikolic , John Peart , Madeleine Preston, Kate Rohde, Louise Tuckwell

1 March - 1April

Home@735

735 Bourke Street

Redfern, Sydney, Australia

Home@735 is pleased to announce our first exhibition Colour & Form as part of Art Month opening on Thursday 1st March. The exhibition runs from Thursday 1st March until Sunday 1st April.

All We Can't See: Illustrating the Nauru Files

2 - 10 February

An exhibition that sees over 30 leading Australian and International artists illustrate the stories unearthed in The Nauru Files, illuminating the human cost of Australia's offshore detention policies. 

The Yellow House Gallery, Potts Point

57 - 59 Macleay Street

Potts Point, Sydney, Australia

BLUE

Elisabeth Vary, Geoff Thornley, Günter Umberg, Erin Lawlor, Winston Roeth, Gary McMillian, Leigh Martin, Tomislav Nikolic 

FOX/JENSEN/McCRORY

10 Putiki Street

Grey Lynn, Auckland, New Zealand

“I want to die with my blue jeans on” Andy Warhol.

Blue has no dimensions; it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not... All colours arouse specific associative ideas... while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract. Yves Klein.

Surely too much has been written about the blues to add meaningfully to it. If ever there was a colour that enjoys a parallel life as an analogy for an emotional state, it is blue and yet the lyrics and riffs just keep on coming, even if Yves Klein hadn't heard them.

From Johnny Cash to Jim Morrison, Muddy Waters to New Order, Tom Waits to Crystal Gayle “blue” folds introspection and melancholy inside a blanket of ethereal.

The works in this exhibition don’t seek to leverage the same sentimental hook as the lyrics and riffs; rather they approach blue I suspect because of its mysterious body. Blue has the capacity to be deep and to be pale, to be heavy and to be light and yet it always remains blue. It doesn’t rescind its name and character like red who becomes pink and crimson, it doesn’t camouflage itself like green and become British Racing or olive.

Andrew Jensen, November 2017

vestiges of now

opening 25th November

XAVIER FIOL PROJECTS

C/Mallorca, 9.

Madrid, Spain

Tomislav Nikolic at Xavier Fiol

The paintings of Tomislav Nikolic situate themselves not at the frothy edge of contemporary cultures bow break, but rather they are part of a deeper, slower current that moves more closely to the sediment of history. There is much about the way that Nikolic chooses to present his paintings – their blend of orthodoxy and intelligent irreverence, their unlikely communion between colour theories and their emphatic assertion that colour itself continues to be the vehicle of emotional charge.

This emotional charge is not delivered courtesy of flamboyant gesture or indeed the rhetoric and weight that abstract expressionism sought painting to shoulder. There is a wilfully sanguine character to most all of Nikolic’s work. Optimism emerges from the existentialism of portraiture. For if Nikolic’s paintings conform to any convention, if they insinuate layers beyond those exquisitely caressed veils of pigment, it is character and within that character is a struggle to define individual nature.

The chromatic thesis that Nikolic touches on in this exhibition is the esoteric theory of the Seven Rays which has informed so many of his exhibitions over the last decade. His reliance on this proposition is not casual, but nor does it direct him forcefully. In the end the paintings assert their own character and requirements and are solved as a matter of aesthetics not theory.

One cannot address Nikolic’s paintings without mentioning the frames and their role in the object. His treatment of the frame has always been idiosyncratic. Where a painter like Howard Hodgkin took his brushstroke over the edge as if it weren’t there at all, Nikolic is acutely aware of the edge. It is at the flanks of the canvas that we can see evidence of the accumulated pigments that collectively form the substantial interior. Applied in finely mixed layers of pigment, the colour accumulates slowly and ultimately achieves the kind of density he seeks leaving the sides to reveal the systemic bleed of colour close to the space between linen and frame.

The last few years have been extraordinary for Tomislav Nikolic. This year he was awarded the 2017 Bvlgari Art Award in acknowledgement of how his practice has blossomed, becoming one of the very finest painters in Australia. Numerous works have been placed in the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales and in the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand.

Andrew Jensen, November 2017

how long must we live right before we don't even have to try

12 October - 11 November

FOX/JENSEN/McCRORY

10 Putiki Street

Grey Lynn, Auckland, New Zealand

FOX/JENSEN & FOX/JENSEN/McCRORY at Sydney Contemporary 2017

Aida Tomescu, Ceara Metlikovec, Jacqueline Humphries, Tomislav Nikolic, Winston Roeth

7 - 10 September

ROT

9 July - 12 August

Tomislav Nikolic, Aida Tomescu, Judith Wright, Winston Roeth, Imi Knoebel

FOX/JENSEN/McCRORY

10 Putiki Street

Grey Lynn, Auckland, New Zealand

Red sails in the sunset. Roses are red. If I don’t have red, I use blue. I’m a redhead, I’ll get away with this. Love is that little girl with red hair. Red hair, sir, in my opinion is dangerous. I became a Yankees fan for a few years. But now, I gotta say, I’m really rooting for the Red Sox. Red Hot Chilli Peppers. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood. I always liked red. It’s a picker-upper. Designers want me to dress like Spring, in billowing things, I don’t feel like Spring, I feel like a warm red Autumn. The white man has got the gold out of the land which belonged to the red man. I’ve always wanted to go to Switzerland to see what the army does with those wee red knives. I’ve got one question: What colour is the red phone? I ain’t a communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life. I will always have a part of Ferrari beside me: a part of my heart will always be red. You’d better believe that Putin sees that in Syria, Obama draws a red line and ignores the red line. Red is a benevolent dictatorship. I dyed my hair this crazy red to bid for attention. It has become my trademark and I’ve got to keep it this way.

Various, July 2017

Art Gallery of New South Wales announces Tomislav Nikolic as recipient of the BVLGARI ART AWARD 2017

The Anatomy Of Gesture

12 March - 15 April

Tomislav Nikolic, Aida Tomescu, Leigh Martin, Jenny Topfer, Jacqueline Humphries

FOX/JENSEN/McCRORY

10 Putiki Street

Grey Lynn, Auckland, New Zealand

“It's a rather rude gesture but at least it’s clear what you mean.” Katherine Hepburn

Gesture can be risky. At the very least it is a tainted term, one that gets bundled up with authorship and authenticity and from there it’s only a hop, skip and a jump to emotionality and the human condition. This psychological yoke that gesture wore throughout much of the modernist period would eventually become too much, especially after the sorbet being offered by minimalism.

This back and forth between the loaded and expressive and the cooler and considered is a repetitive “gesture” across art history. Each of these artists gives gesture a different loading and responsibility. For Tomescu gesture advocates and carries structure. It sets co-ordinates and allows material to contribute without the puritanism that Greenberg desired. The works included in this exhibition also involve collage – another process of structural gesture but also one of disruption.

In Tomislav Nikolic’s work, gesture is less apparent across the surface of the painting. Nikolic finesses pigments, coaxing his extraordinary chromatic density out of the slow accrual of layers. As modest as his gestures are, they, like the colours, accrue so that his paintings carry an accumulated evidence of his hand, something revealed particularly at the dissipating edges.

Leigh Martin has long sought to give gesture an analogous life - one that subjugates authorship in favour of processes that flirt with the mechanistic and the sonic. His new large paperworks however seems to present the membrane of a gesture. Less Lichtenstein, more David Reed, Martin is taking us inside the anatomy of the gesture. He gives us a kind of MRI scan of it…fine layer by fine layer.

In the beautiful paintings of Jenny Topfer we witness a wrestle with the competing desires to let gesture have its way and then to negate its potential rhetoric and direct it towards a more chaste poetry. A looping, almost calligraphic gesture underlays the denser soft greys and whites that form the body of the painting. These glimpses of colour emerge from beneath at the periphery – not unlike Nikolic. We become aware though that this coastal activity doesn’t just quicken the edge, it emboldens the centre.

The paintings of New York artist Jacqueline Humphries rub up against a heavy-duty gestural history. Humphries work seems to run a neither confirm nor deny policy about gesture itself though, one minute taking pigment on an expansive sweep only to disrupt and curtail it by peeling away shards or wiping the gesture away…with another gesture. This relentless process of breaking the surface denies gesture’s theatre and imagined authority and replaces it with a faster, leaner surface – a kind of bombast afterimage.

Andrew Jensen March 2017

JENSEN GALLERY at Art Basel Hong Kong 2017

23 - 25 March

Ambacher Contemporary at Art Paris Art Fair 2017

30 March - 2 April

Sylvie Arlaud, Luc+Karim Berchiche, Ernesto Cánovas, John Giorno, Tom Hackney, Frank Maier, Armin Mühsam,

Tomislav Nikolic, Inge Pries, Daniel Schüßler, Edwart Vignot

vestiges of now & transparent myths for the transcendent

25 February - 18 March

STATION

9 Ellis Street, South Yarra

Melbourne Australia

Saturn Returns

18 November - 10 December

Opening 6 - 9pm Friday 18 November

FORT DELTA

Capitol Arcade (Basement Level)
Shop 59 / 113 Swanston Street
Melbourne, Australia

Anna Varendorff, Anna White,  Danny Frommer, Gabriel Cole, Gervaise Netherway, Jessie Bullivant & Lou Hubbard, Karl Wiebke, Noriko Nakamura, Rafaella McDonald, Simon Gardam, Spencer Lai, TOmislav Nikolic, Ruby Brown

Opening performance by Bon Mott. 

This exhibition features artists who have made artworks during, in response to, and in-between transits of their Saturn Return; an astrological cycle that marks 30-year periods in an individual’s life. Widely considered as chapters when monumental life events occur, Saturn Returns are harbingers for endings, new beginnings, and rouse sobering realities.

Featuring Melbourne and Australia-based artists, the show will encompass a range of approaches and reinvigorated explorations of surrealism, formalism, abstraction, temporality and conceptual practices.

Karl Wiebke is represented by Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney. 
Lou Hubbard is represented by Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne.
Simon Gardam is represented by Fort Delta, Melbourne
Spencer Lai is represented by Fort Delta, Melbourne. 
Tomislav Nikolic is represented by Jensen Gallery, Sydney & Station, Melbourne.

HERE

Tomislav Nikolic

20 October - 26 November

JENSEN GALLERY

Corner of Hampden Street and Cecil Lane

Paddington, Sydney, Australia

In Tomislav Nikolic’s exhibition HERE, “colour is the fruit of life” (Guillaume Apollinaire).

Tomislav Nikolic’s new paintings demonstrate just how firmly he is in command of the chromatic lexicon he has developed. His approach is considered and celebratory - he is acutely aware of colours' capacity to exist as a body in and of itself and to carry deep emotional resonance. His nuanced adjustments of tone and depth have become increasingly fine as he patiently builds fields that offer an immersive experience that slow sensation and time, letting us feel colour as if it were a skin.

Nikolic’s practice has been hugely embraced by international collectors in recent years. There is a recognition that his practice is mindful of paintings history and carefully approaches the aspirations many have held for it to shoulder conceptual and philosophical weight. Though he is certain to not let it become weighed down by this burden, preferring to leave the work a little more open ended, less didactic, more intuitive.

There is also a recognition from these collectors that what Nikolic contributes to this history is proving to be singular and compelling. His painting helps to revitalise abstraction - away from the puritanism of “stylish” minimalism, avoiding the excesses of expressionist theatre. Nikolic paintings are certainly dramatic, but the series of judgements he makes about each and every aspect of the object he constructs, are deeply considered and lead to paintings of real substance and spirit.

In The awaiting conception of reality, (4,5,6,7) we see the largest work he has made to date operating as an expansive field of the richest mossy greens. It is verdant - almost as if the painting quietly exhaling oxygen. The internal edges show his familiar tidal record of the multiple strata that establish such density in the underpainting. Each radiating layer reveals a different colour that contributes to the atmosphere of the interior. Then at the flank the colour dissipates briefly before the intense claret coloured detail between the stretcher and the frame. It is along the axes of the zip that our eyes travel before falling back into the slow, enveloping interior. Despite its extravagant scale and intensity, this is a painting of quiet presence and subtlety.

We are delighted to present these four new paintings of Tomislav’s. It has been an extremely busy year for him exhibiting with us in Art Basel Hong Kong, then in Munich and now this current exhibition, with another planned for Madrid in 2017.

Andrew Jensen, October 2016

Ambacher Contemporary Paris

20 October 2016 - 21 February 2017

Inauguration de l´espace parisien

Liquidation Totale
Sylvie Arlaud, Sabrina Belouaar, Hugo Bonamin & Samuel Theis, Ernesto Cánovas & Gracjana Rejmer Cánovas, John Giorno, Thomas Draschan, Tom Hackney, La Fratrie (Luc & Karim Berchiche), Frank Maier, Otto Muehl, Armin Mühsam, Tomislav Nikolic, Inge Pries, Daniel Schüßler, Timothée Talard and Edwart Vignot.

21  - 25 October, 8:30am-10pm and by appointment
26 October 2016 - 21 February 2017 by appointment only

19, Passage du Ponceau 
119, Boulevard de Sébastopol
Marais/Sentier - 75002 Paris France

Ambacher Contemporary at YIA Art Fair, Paris

20 - 23 October

Ernesto Cánovas, Gracjana Rejmer-Cánovas and Tomislav Nikolic

Ambacher Contemporary

YIA ART FAIR #7 PARIS

SANDWICHES

10 September - 2 October

CARTEL ARTSPACE

 THE TALENT AGENCY IS PROUD TO PRESENT:  SANDWICHES

OPENING SATURDAY THE 10th of SEPTEMBER 6pm – Exhibition until the 2nd OCTOBER

At CARTEL: 2198/10-11 Soi Taweewattana (Narathiwas 22 / Sathu Pradit 15),Yannawa, Bangkok 10110

 Where to start on this extrapolation – do we start with the bread - the foundations – but what bread to use (hopefully not the sugar filled and doughy soft stuff), what meat to select? Or salad? .. Or is it down to the condiments. Perhaps this is the most foreign thing to exhibit here under this new found and extended nationhood. THE SANDWICH is truly at odds with its environment it has lost its position of a lunchtime staple in the East, the works in this exhibition might have resonance with past modernist fables but they do not have the honour of the Myth. The SANDWICH is left as an odd speculative entertainment for it doesn’t share the same linage with noodles to pasta.

The Talent Agency and is pleased to announce the artists for its first instalment for 2016 at CARTEL, Bangkok. The Talent Agency has selected a wide range of international artists not for the obvious links but perhaps the tensions between things. Thus sandwiching and layering might be in the work or its in the presenting of possibilities of things connecting mixing meanings between locations, works and spaces. SANDWICHES with all the possible associated meanings – will be looking at construction/layers/materials and surfaces -the ingredients are all being pushed together rightly or wrongly. The bread is the walls of the gallery that combines various the works.

With special guests:

JOHN ASLANIDIS (AU) LUCIO AURI (DE) ARVID BOECKER (DE) MERRIC BRETTLE (AU) ANON CHAISANSOOK (TH) THE ESAN COHABITATION (TH) EDGAR DIEHL (DE) MATTHYS GERBER (SYD) BILLY GRUNER (AU) GILBERT HSIAO (USA) YANN LACROIX (FR) ALEXANDRE LAVET (FR) TOMISLAV NIKOLIC (AU) LUIS NOBRE (PT) BE TAKERNG PATTANOPAS (TH) GUNNA SCHMIDT (DE) NICOLA STAGLICH (DE) TILMAN (DE) NAPAT VATTANAKULJALAS (TH) WERNER WINDISCH (DE)

Service compris

Sylvie Arlaud, Ernesto Canovas, Thomas Draschen, Tom Hackney, Jan Holthoff, Brigit Jensen, Frank Maier, Otto Muehl, Armin Mühsam, Tomislav Nikolic, Inge Pries, Daniel Schüßler, Edwart Vignot, Christopher Winter, Andreas Zimmermann

16 September - 29 October

 & LEHR ZEITGENÖSSISCHE KUNST

Großbeerenstraße 16 - 10963

Berlin, Germany

STATION at Spring 1883 Art Fair

STEVE CARR, NELL, TOMISLAV NIKOLIC, ANDRE PIGUET

17 - 21st August

STATION

Spring 1883 

Ambacher Conteporary at Art Bodensee 16, Dornbirn Austria

FRANK MAIER, TOMISLAV NIKOLIC, ERNESTO CÁNOVAS, ARMIN MÜHSAM

7 July - 10 July

Ambacher Contemporary

Art Bodensee 16

CHROMOFFECTION

Tomislav Nikolic, Elisabeth Vary, Aidia Tomescu

June - July

FOX/JENSEN

10 Putiki Street
Grey Lynn, Auckland
New Zealand

Chromoffection is a happier, more manageable condition than that described by David Batchelor in his important text Chromophobia. Rather than suffering the allergy Batchelor suggests plagues Western society - the fear of colours corrupting agenda and superficiality, each of these artists don’t just have an affection for colour - they are conducting an open affair with it. Each are certain of colours capacity to deliver form, to offer an intuitive emotional charge to space and even to be a symbolic cultural framework. 

Where Nikolic, Tomescu and Vary differ from, say the more fundamental colourists is that they are equally committed to gesture, tone and structure, elements that work to break the monotheistic stupor in favour of a vigorous ecumenical celebration.

In Chromoffection, Elisabeth Vary serves as a link between the more divergent approaches of Nikolic and Tomescu. Vary’s carefully formed constructions offer her the chance to address multiple facets of her complex objects. Like chromatic icebergs that have breached the walls of the gallery, Vary’s forms resist the planar nature of the stretcher, preferring at least five surfaces to attend to. Though Nikolic’s treatment or implication of the frame into his compositions suggests he too is dissatisfied with having only one surface to paint. Colour leaks around every corner colonising the adjacent space. The frame is not a border signalling the end of the composition but simply a permeable border.

Aida Tomescu’s paintings explore colour just as determinedly as either Nikolic and Vary but the delivery of it differs wildly. American painter Winston Roeth suggests that he doesn’t choose colour, colour chooses him and in talking with Aida I very much get the sense that there is a vigorous wrestle between judgement or reflection and the buoyancy of material and gesture in every cadence of her work. These paintings celebrate paints unreliability, its boisterous character. Tomescu though holds this volatility just in check allowing the viewer to feel paints wilful behaviour and to smell colour in a visceral way.

The gallery is very pleased to present the works of these three terrific painters.

Andrew Jensen, June 2016

FOX/JENSEN at Auckland Art Fair

25 - 29 MAY

JENSENGALLERY.COM

Auckland Art Fair

vestiges of now

Tomislav Nikolic

13 May - 16 July

Opening May 12

Lothstrsse 78a
Munich, Germany

vestiges of now is a new group of paintings by Tomislav Nikolic that extend his very personal and innovative approach to colour, especially the way that he invites it to colonise, not just the canvas, but the frame, the support and even the wall. Most are modestly scaled and operate within a chromatic logic that is particular to each, but remains part of an overarching approach to colour that has been central to his practice for many years.

The genesis of much of Nikolic’s works begins with his own response to  artworks he admires but equally he draws on diverse thematic reference points beyond art history, including music, pop culture, spiritual philosophies on colour and colour association. It is colour theories, where mythology and symbolism substitute for science and truth that particularly fascinate him.

The connection to other artworks is often a conflation of aesthetic and emotional responses that feel strong and direct at inception but this inevitably alters as the particularities and requirements of each piece he makes becomes evident. What begins then as a conceptual conversation acts primarily as an aesthetic springboard from which the new paintings can launch.

It is the case that many of the artworks he admires, the philosophical positions he investigates are European. Indeed his own family heritage is European - and yet he is working almost as far away from this imagined centre as is possible. His family’s migration from Croatia to Australia was doubtless driven by optimism and ambition. For Nikolic getting back to Europe demands a different mode of orienteering.

The liberty that distance can afford allows Nikolic's paintings to more easily resist convenient categories. They jostle with the restraint of much minimal abstraction, preferring to celebrate colours’ wilfulness and physicality rather than illustrate its character. Colour is combined in unorthodox ways and the decisions that he takes about where the boundaries of the painting reside, negate the traditional notion of a fixed picture plane in favour of an object that exists in the round. The architecture of the frames are emphatic elements in the paintings' overall structure and are co-opted into the field of the painting rather than being an arbitrary boundary indicating the paintings' closure

Nikolic’s capacity to make work that is both elegant and rebellious, sensitive and wild is extraordinary. Often the paintings feel like portraits, some modest, some grand - their personality captured in every chromatic adjustment and structural decision. 

Nikolic’s work has been widely collected in Australasia, Asia and more recently in Europe. Major works, both paintings and sculpture, have been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria and more recently by the Chartwell Trust in Auckland. 

Andrew Jensen, February 2016

JENSEN GALLERY at Art Basel Hong Kong 2016

24 - 26 March

The Authority Of Death

Eric Fischl, Spencer Finch, Günter Umberg, Helmut Federle, Gabriel De La Mora, James Casebere, Coen Young, Jude Rae, Winston Roeth, Tomislav Nikolic, Bruce Nauman

March 2016

FOX/JENSEN

10 Putiki Street

Grey Lynn, Auckland

New Zealand

The title for the exhibtion The Authority of Death comes from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's famous novel Love in the Time of Cholera first published in 1985

The line in the novel describes a character entering a dark room where there was barely enough light to see. But despite this diminished visbility, the atmosphere was such that he could register "the authority of death". This registration depends on a sensate awarness that is felt as much as seen.

What is required to recognize the authority of death? Has the disruption around image and meaning in mass media, become so great that our capacity or indeed desire to see and feel in low light been sacrificed?

The largely unspoken treaty we have with life remains mostly occulded from our consciousness and yet we have never been surrounded by mor egraphic, overlit images of death. We are overloaded and underwhelmed by them at the same momement. 

I believe the works in this exhibition resist contemporary cultures insatiable appetite for spectacle, preferring instead to speak quietly to more poetic notions of time and transition, impermanence and loss. In selecting these works I wanted to substitute clamour for whisper, spectacle for modesty.

Andrew Jensen 2015

PRIDE: CERTAINLY VERY MERRY

2 February - 5 March

TIM MELVILLE GALLERY

4 Winchester Street

Newtown, Auckland

New Zealand

The exhibition Certainly Very Merry takes its title from the answer given by cult 1970s television chefs Peter Hudson and David Halls to an interviewer’s point-blank question “Are you gay?”

Hudson and Halls’ unique brand of camp, slapstick, booze-soaked humour and questionable cooking beamed into New Zealand’s living rooms at a time when homophobia was rampant and homosexuality was illegal. The 1969 Stonewall Riots were still recent, the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Bill would not occur until 1986 … and Hudson and Halls were in the closet with the door wide open.

Pride Festivals all over the world – including ours in Auckland - are celebrations of the distance our communities have come in terms of our diversity and creativity as well as our cultural and political power.

Certainly Very Merry  is a creative, diverse, joyful cross-section of work by GLBT visual artists practising in Aotearoa New Zealand today.

Chiara Corbelletto, Russ Flatt, Tanu Gago, George Hajian, Gavin Hurley, Lonnie Hutchinson, Cruz Jimenz, Richard Maloy, Judy Millar, Tomislav Nikolic, Shannon Novak, Richard Orjis, Reuben Paterson, Gui Taccetti, Imogen Taylor, Jack Tolove

http://aucklandpridefestival.org.nz

PINK

Nikolic, Roeth, Humphries, Martin, Ruff

8 December - 20 February

JENSEN GALLERY

Corner of Hampden Street and Cecil Lane

Paddington, Sydney

Australia

There are a handful of colours that exceed their role as adjectives and nouns….blue, black, grey, red or green for example. These colours carry a life beyond their more modest roles as chromatic definitions. Pink is without question one of these…to be politically pink is to carry the stain of socialism….yet were we in the "pink of health” this would be desirable. Of course the pink triangle has traveled from its harmful repercussions in Nazi Germany to being a defiant symbol of LGBT liberation.
 
Then there is the gender specificity that still seems deeply embedded in fashion and the stereotyping attached to sentiments such as Jayne Mansfield’s quote that “a woman should be pink and cuddly for a man”. Mylie Cyrus, whom I never imagined quoting, said "pink is an attitude” – though she may have got her vowels muddled and meant “punk is an attitude”, for which I would agree. Regardless, it seems that as Christian Dior believed "...pink will prevail”. Not only does ‘pink’ have this curious diversity of implications, Diana Vreeland said that “pink is the navy blue of India,” so it has divergent cultural specificity too. 
 
No colour seems to carry the diversity of insinuation that pink does…it can be both perky and tragic, insipid and deeply sensuous. In the hand of Winston Roeth pink is a provocative, relentless sensation. It swells then cools, held steady by a deep border. Roeth’s paintings have a fundamentally decorous character, however in Tomislav Nikolic’s work pink is deliciously irreverent. Nikolic’s regular challenge to the confinement “taste” imposes seems at its most bolshie when he uses pink. It may be the interior of the most subtlety atmospheric field, or it may be the extravagant treatment of the painting’s frame. The fact that Tomislav can make pink meditative at one moment, and insubordinate the next shows the colour’s extraordinary character.
 
Leigh Martin and Jacqueline Humphries both use magenta pigments amidst a flurry of shimmery iridescence. Both seem determined to increase the visual speed of the painting - their works glisten with their leaner, uncertain viscosity. Martin’s colours flip and invert, appearing to have one character and then substituting another. What these chromatic inversions allow is for us to see the finest undulations and marks - to read a little of the tooth of the linen, to sense something of the process and the material. Colour is insinuated into their work perhaps more so than being the subject of their work.  But in a cocktail of process and materiality, it is an irresistible ingredient.
 
In Thomas Ruff’s Nude, we find our way back to Mylie Cyrus. Pants down, Ruff’s images plays an ironically coy game of revealing and denial. His now famous series of pornographic images are indeed both pink and punk. Ruff manages to lure us into a 'rose' trap, one that relies on our voyeurism and desire. Some viewers feign disgust at being presented with a “blush" of pink on such a scale and in public but in the end Ruff’s images settle into an aesthetic zone that is curiously akin to Roeth’s. The pink swells and attracts but is held carefully in check by a formality and restraint that is sort of “navy blue”….
 
Andrew Jensen, December 2015

The Authority Of Death

Eric Fischl, Spencer Finch, Günter Umberg, Helmut Federle, Gabriel De La Mora, James Casebere, Coen Young, Jude Rae, Winston Roeth, Tomislav Nikolic, Bruce Nauman, Richard Barnes

8 October - 21 November

JENSEN GALLERY

Corner of Hampden Street and Cecil Lane

Paddington, Sydney

Australia

vestiges of now

Tomislav Nikolic

22 October - 21 November

FOX/JENSEN

10 Putiki Street

Grey Lynn, Auckland

New Zealand

Vestiges of Now is a new group of paintings by Tomislav Nikolic that extend his very personal and innovative approach to colour and especially the way that he invites it to colonise the canvas, the frame, the support and even the wall.

The genesis of most all of Nikolic’s works begins with his own response to other artworks he admires. The association diminishes as the particularities of each piece become evident but it is this conceptual conversation that he invites with other art that often provides the initial impetus.

What is clear though is that Nikolic’s work is utterly and magnificently idiosyncratic. Colour is combined in unorthodox ways and the decisions that he takes about where the boundaries of the painting reside, negate the traditional notion of a fixed picture plane in favour of an object that exists in the round.

Thus Nikolic's paintings resist convenient categories. They jostle with the restraint of much minimal abstraction, preferring to celebrate colours’ wilfulness and physicality rather than illustrate its character. His capacity to make work that is both both elegant and bolshie, sensitive and wild is extraordinary. Often the paintings feel like portraits, some modest, some grand - their personality captured in every chromatic adjustment and structural decision. 

In Vestiges of Now Nikolic again presents a group seven paintings. Most are modestly scaled and operate within a chromatic logic that is particular to each, but part of an overarching approach to colour that has been central to his practice for many years.

Nikolic’s work has been widely collected in Australasia. Major works, both paintings and sculpture, have been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria and more recently by the Chartwell Trust in Auckland. The response to his work at Art Basel Hong Kong in recent years has been nothing shot of extraordinary with works going into multiple collections in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Philipines, Korea and Switzerland.

Andrew Jensen, October 2015

JENSEN & FOX/JENSEN at Sydney Contemporary 2015

Jacqueline Humphries, Günter Umberg, Tomislav Nikolic, Jude Rae

10 - 13 September

CURRENT

Jude Rae, Bill Cullbert, Tomislav Nikolic, Jim Spears

9 July - 9 August

FOX/JENSEN

10 Putiki Street

Grey Lynn, Auckland

New Zealand

C6H1005(V)

NIKOLIC, SANDBACK, ROETH, KATZ, FISCHL, KNOEBEL, RAW, HARRISON, VARY, WRIGHT, MARTIN, SARMENTO, COOTE

22 May - 27 June

JENSEN GALLERY

Corner of Hampden Street and Cecil Lane

Paddington, Sydney

Australia

A&B

Gary Hill, Ceal Floyer, Roxy Paine, Teo Gonzalez, James Casebere, Tomislav Nikolic

15 April - 9 May

GALLERY IHN

73 Cheongwadae-ro

Jongno-gu, Seoul

Korea

Painting "Well" After Formalism: Nikolic, Roeth, Rae, Thornley

21 March - 21 April

FOX/JENSEN

10 Putiki Street

Grey Lynn, Auckland

New Zealand

JENSEN GALLERY at Art Basel Hong Kong 2015

13 - 17 March

The Kaleidoscopic Turn

From the NGV Collection

20 March 2015 - 23 August 2015

NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne

Continuing the NGV’s representation of current tendencies in contemporary art, The Kaleidoscopic Turn brings together works by artists working with colour, light, sound, movement and space. Drawn from the NGV’s collection and featuring a number of recent acquisitions, The Kaleidoscopic Turnresonates with references to various artistic legacies of the 20th century from Op art to colourfield painting, offering a range of multi-sensory experiences including immersive installations, kinetic sculptures, video art, works on paper and painting in its diverse and expanded forms.

By an endeavour to understand: A & D

TOMISLAV NIKOLIC

from October 2

JENSEN GALLERY

Corner of Hampden Street and Cecil Lane

Paddington, Sydney

Australia

Acid/Gothic

Curated by Nick Garner

A MOP projects exhibition hosted by Galerie pompom

20 August - 14 September 2014

Gallerie pompom

2/39 Abercrombie Street

Chippendale, Sydney

Australia

Developed with Das Superpaper Issue 32, September 2014
Curated/Produced by Nick Garner, Das Platforms

Gary Carsley, Pia van Gelder, Tracey Moffatt, Sarah Mosc