Lot 35

Overall good condition. Individual tiles bear surface imperfections, small losses and dust build up. Previous display solutions has resulted in multiple adhesive stickers applied and some removed taking away the surface (all verso and not affecting the painting). Work is unframed.


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With Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

Born in Australia to Latvian refugees, Imants Tillers grew up in Australia as part of the great post-war European diaspora. His family experienced displacement in a new foreign land, removed from their cultural history. Since the 1970's, Tillers has explored this isolation and displacement through his artwork, critiquing 20th century Australian art as well as the Western world in the process. Tillers, therefore, is an extremely significant figure in discussions of postmodernism and appropriation in Australian art.
His works, most often landscapes, are comprised of numerous individual canvas boards that, when placed together, form a progressive visual poetry. Tillers appropriates imagery and phrases related to notions of identity and place and brings them together in an often confusing and disjointed manner - much like the experiences of the artist and his family. The result is a convergence of ideas with multiple references that are drawn from art, history, literature, politics, society and his own personal history. His works instigate an important dialogue that was as relevant in the 1950s as it is today.
Painted in blue around the edge of Tillers' works are words by the pioneering poet Stéphane Mallarmé, whom Tillers has cited in almost every work he has made since the late 1990s: 'a throw of the dice will never abolish chance'. It refers to chance happenings but also to Mallarmé's experimentations with typography in visual presentation. For Tillers, his artworks are as much word poems as paintings.

Olivia Fuller, Head of Art