Art Guide

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Sept/Oct 2010

Bringing the outside in > NSW
May Lane is a very short street in Sydney’s inner west Read More

Cream of the crop > NSW
The Museum of Contemporary Art becomes a hive of activity in preparation for Primavera, Read More

Drawing NOW > VIC
A single black bullet is drawn starkly upon a plain white ground. Read More

Melbourne Art Fair 2010 > VIC
No one could accuse Melbourne Art Fair organisers of treading too lightly. Read More

Social capital
Craig Walsh’s Digital Odyssey is epic Read More

To fair, or not too fair > VIC
Never before has alternative culture been so mainstream. Read More

Weird scenes inside the Art Museum
There’s a scene in the brilliant recent Australian film Animal Kingdom Read More

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Irene Hanenbergh

By Megan Backhouse

Feral cats, wolves' eyes, a blur of movement – you can read all manner of things into Irene Hanenbergh's feathery supernatural explosions. They are built up in ghostly wisps of turquoise but, in other works, she does treacherous planes of icy blue. Nature is everywhere, though nothing is truly natural. This is an idealised world that keeps its distance from the landscape as we know it.

We get no sense of scale from these oil paintings that look thick and textured but are, in fact, deceptively spare and ever-so flatly applied, nor from the pieces worked up (stroke by stroke) on a computer and then custom printed onto aluminium sheets. The ink drawings, too, might conjure up tiny, rocky caves or – just as conceivably - an entire planet.

Hanenbergh cites a diverse array of reference points from fantasy, tattoo and folk art to Byzantine icon painting, the work of the 19th Century German romantic painter Casper David Friedrich and Iranian contemporary art.

Irene Hanenbergh, Wolga Marina, 2005, zundprint on aluminum, 60 x 40 cm, edition of 3

"I am always a bit careful with that," she qualifies. "Because it's as if I am saying there's low and high art but that's not a division I like to make. I just believe there is a cross-over of influences that can be very interesting."

One element that she doesn't think has particularly influenced her work is place, and, on that, she would be qualified to tell. Born in The Netherlands in 1966, she studied fine arts (painting and sculpture) for five years before being awarded a scholarship to study printmaking at the Athens School of Fine Arts. She stayed in Athens for eight years, during which time she also completed a post-graduate program at London's Royal College of Art.
She settled in Australia after meeting her partner, Melbourne-based artist Tony Garifalakis, and she has now been here for 10 years (and is also studying again, this time a Master of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts).

"I don't think it's really the place that influences you or how you work. I think its more about developing the work constantly," she says. "It's how you look forwards and how you look backwards and get new ideas. Sometimes I finish a piece, and, when I look at it a couple of years later, I think, I did something similar 10 years ago. Someone else might not see it. It can change from the outside, but inside stays the same really."

Hanenbergh has got both old and new works propped up around her Nicholas Building studio – fantastical, mountainous, Nordic-looking scenes painted in Greece and some of the more abstracted turquoise prints on aluminium that she showed at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces in May. There are finished paintings, prints and black ink drawings ready for her exhibition at Neon Parc, and an unfinished painting on a small easel. She's drawn on the walls (often a feature in her exhibitions as well) and she has print-outs of her computer paintings all over the floor.

Irene Hanenbergh, Supernature - Deeper, 2003, zund print on aluminium, 60 x 80 cmHanenbergh says she 'needs' to have the work –finished and unfinished - all around her. She spends every day here, reading and working, looking at things, moving pictures around, seeing them in different combinations.

When Hannah Mathews and Robert Cook saw her studio, they wanted to transplant one whole crammed wall of it into a group exhibition they are curating for the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) later this year. While Hanenbergh isn't interested in transporting an entire studio environment into a gallery space ("I think that's been way too over-done"), she likes this idea of doing something more 'elaborate' for the Perth show, with photocopies and an assortment of pieces like on the studio wall in question.

Her exhibition at Neon Parc, will, however, be more restrained. "It will be quite controlled, I don't want to go overboard," she says. "You have a picture in your head of what you want in a particular body of works, and, I might then do some line drawings on the (gallery) wall. But these are the works and I don't want to add something or change them."

Megan Backhouse is a Melbourne-based journalist who has been writing about the visual arts for more than 10 years.