SHAUN GLADWELL Australian, B. 1972

Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney (label on the reverse)

Private collection

Working in performance, video and sculpture as well as painting, Shaun Gladwell critically engages personal history, memory and contemporary cultural phenomena in his art. He is now represented by Sherman Galleries in Sydney. Gladwell was awarded a Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship in 2001 and undertook a research fellowship at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Since then he has undertaken numerous residencies and commissions and exhibited widely in Australia and overseas.

The present paintings were first shown in Gladwell’s Compressions/Covers exhibition (showing with David Griggs) at Boutwell Draper Gallery in 2001. As reviewer Kit Messham-Muir wrote at the time, ‘Shaun Gladwell’s Compressions works are mostly oil on canvas reworkings of English academic portraits, compressing their subjects to a fraction of their original width. Their heads are painted into a black fade, effectively beheading their noble sitters. Alongside these, Gladwell includes a finely rendered oil painting of The Last Imperial Death Star, from George Lucas’s Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. The jarring disjunction between icons of real-world Imperial England and sci-fi can do no damage to the fictitious "Evil Empire", but shows the aggrandisement in the portraits of Gainsborough and Reynolds to be a similar "special effect" for the aristocracy’. ¹

1. Messham-Muir, K., ‘David Griggs and Shaun Gladwell at Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney’, Eyeline, issue #46, Spring 2001, pp. 49 - 50.