Opening reception May 18, 6 to 8 PM
From May 17th through June 7th at the SoHo Gallery.

It has been exactly four decades since Robert Hughes wrote of the conflict in Australian art between the obsessive influence of Europe and a desire for independence. Nowadays, the best artists from that part of the world combine a sense of national identity with a quirky originality, judging by “Out From Down Under and Beyond: an Exhibition of Fine Art from Australia and New Zealand”, at Agora Gallery, 415 West Broadway, in Soho, from May 17 through June 7. (Reception: May 18, from 6 to 8 PM.)

How else to describe the dark, brooding rectangular abstractions, as well as the faux primitive figurative works, of the artist who prefers to be known as Cathryn Condon? Particularly intriguing among Condon's figure paintings is a work in which a wild-eyed woman with streaming hair and the dramatic presence of a shaman or witch holds aloft a lordly-looking owl in what appears to be a rough-hewn coffin.

Other artists, as well, combine primitive power with innate sophistication in the manner of Australia's old master Sidney Nolan. Patricia Van Den Nieuwenhuijzen, for example, depicts the stark beauty of the native landscape with simplified forms and vibrant colors, and also gives us a memorable painting of a pregnant nude that rivals the land itself for its unadorned fecundity.

And while Micheline Abrahamson­­ also known as “Mich”, was born in South Africa, she immigrated to Australia in 1988, and her oils and acrylics, with their shimmering colors and shape-shifting forms, convey an abstract sense of nature that transcends time and place.

New Zealand artist Helga Windle merges Symbolist imagery and Expressionist energy in her starkly simplified oils on canvas. With colors alternately somber and fiery, Windle conjures up mysterious figures, glowing moons, and shadowy mountains in compositions of unusual spiritual suggestiveness.

Form and color are reduced to their primal essences in the blunt gestural paintings of Amanda Mary Fraser. Human and animal figures take on the character of abstract archetypes in Fraser's strong canvases, which extend the tactile tradition of older Australian painters like Eric Smith and Frank Hodgkinson. Anna Crawley, on the other hand, creates chromatically evocative acrylic compositions in which sumptuous colors and semi-abstract shapes set off flowing rhythms that suggest figures, flowers, and a variety of other elusive subjects.

Other artists opt for more cosmopolitan subjects. Jan Rae, for example, evokes a romantic mood with couples dancing near the ocean under a full moon, painted in softly diffused hues. The painter who goes by the single name of Starr conveys a vigorous New Wave sensibility with comely nudes laid down in slashing strokes of sensual color, among other subjects that combine painterly panache with Pop attitude.

Pure abstraction also makes an auspicious showing in the work of three other artists: Working in mixed media on linen, Pam Karp layers patches of vibrant color in compositions that add a gestural vitality to the convention of the grid composition. Melanie Miller lays down succulent, richly glowing color fields that suggest landscape yet ultimately succeed by virtue of their abstract autonomy. John Weeronga Bartoo employs the “dot” technique traditional to Aboriginal “dreamtime” painting; yet the manner in which his work projects its unique aura in this exhibition demonstrates that the best exponents of that tradition should be recognized in the mainstream, rather than relegated to some quaint folkloric category.

Indeed, although their media profile has not been ubiquitous up to now, it is high time that we began to regard the art of Australia and New Zealand in general as important ingredients in the eclectic mix of contemporary painting. For, as the artists in this show demonstrate so handily, a good deal of dynamic painting has begun to emerge from “Down Under and Beyond”.

Click here to see the exhibition catalog