Brett Whiteley

Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney
Private collection Adelaide; purchased from the above in 1987

Brett Whiteley: some recent works: 'Birds', 'The drought of 83', Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, 30 July-17 August 1983, (painted palm frond and plaster maquette, not in catalogue)
Brett Whiteley, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 12-28 July 1984 (another cast) cat. 8
Brett Whiteley: art and life, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 16 September-19 November 1995; Museum and Art Galleries of the Northern Territory, Darwin, 13 December 1995-28 January 1996; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 22 February-8 April 1996; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 9 May-16 June 1996; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2 July-26 August 1996; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 18 September-19 November 1996 (another cast)
Whiteley and the third dimension, Brett Whiteley Studio, 26 July 2008-15 March 2009 (another cast)
Birds, Brett Whiteley Studio, 5-19 July 1988 cat. 55 (another cast)

Barry Pearce (ed.), Brett Whiteley: art and life, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, pp. 200 (illus., plate 138), 234 (another cast)

This work is in good original condition, it would benefit from a light dust.
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Brett Whiteley made his public sculptural debut in 1968 at Bonython Galleries, Sydney. Proclaiming the exhibition to be 'absolutely, without reservation first-rate', critic Donald Brook also declared 'Brett Whiteley the sculptor is a new phenomenon: his affinities with anti-art, with dada and with surrealism are evident but the imagery is his own.'¹

Whiteley's decision to develop his artistic practice in three dimensions is hardly surprising; the artist had incorporated assemblage elements in his paintings from 1960.  Indeed the use of natural and synthetic objects - from sea shells (Opera House, 1971-1982, private collection) to plastic snakes (Glimpse of Eden, 1974, private collection) – was a hallmark of his painted landscapes, portraits and interiors. It is easy to see why Whiteley himself mused: 'Maybe I should devote two years to doing nothing else but courting and causing sculpture. I love it. I love moving around something and I love sculpture next to or in front of paintings - a kind of dialogue can bounce between a sculpture and a painting.'²   

Within the artist's protean output birds are a particularly favoured motif, representing for the artist 'the essential symbol of the song of creation.'³  Many paintings incorporate drawings, collages, feathers and even stuffed and mounted specimens: of hummingbirds and honeyeaters, lyrebirds and emus. In the vast, chaotic American Dream (1968-9, Art Gallery of Western Australia) there are half a dozen winged creatures, from a hummingbird to (naturally enough) an eagle, while three years later, in Alchemy (1972-3, Art Gallery of New South Wales), we find a lyrebird, a blue wren, even a Donald Duck. From quite early in Whiteley's career there are also individual birds, portraits or metaphors drawn from particular species, works such as Pink Heron (1970), Lyrebird (1971), and even a Butcher Bird with Baudelaire's Eyes (1972). In his 1983 Robin Gibson Gallery exhibition there were no fewer than eleven such paintings, natural creatures such as the owl and the brolga, as well as the more fantastical Kath-Wren and Coota-Mighta-Mundra Bird. 

The present work is one of a range of avian-themed sculptures, a restricted and rarely-offered group of works, which includes figures of herons, wrens and hummingbirds. There are even giant eggs on modernist totem pole plinths, sly homages to Constantin Brancusi. Many of these bird sculptures are developed from found objects: an owl made from a boot, for example. The present work is one of a number which incorporate natural, organic materials. Here, the long, swelling, pointed leaf of a palm frond suggests a beak; painted white and given (disturbingly human) eyes it metamorphoses into a pelican, its sweet and elegant curvature a three-dimensional analogue of Whiteley's celebrated calligraphic line.

1.  Donald Brook, " A Huge Talent", Sydney Morning Herald, 8 February 1968, p. 11
2.  Brett Whiteley, quoted in Whiteley and the third dimension (exhibition catalogue), Sydney: Brett Whiteley Studio, 2008
3.  Barry Pearce, Australian artists, Australian birds, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1989, p. 144