Cover image of the review
Brook Andrew, Horizon, 2017, Linen, acrylic polymer paint, neon, ink, photographic plastic, pigment powder, and resin on dibond, 160x240cm. Image courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne.

Brook Andrew: The Language of Skulls


29 Sep 2018
Ten Cubed 18 Sep - 20 Dec 2018

It’s quite rare to encounter the work of an artist and feel like you have to re-ask yourself such basic questions as “What is an image?” and “What does an image do?” But these questions are addressed to us in Brook Andrew’s current show The Langauge of Skulls.

Located in Glen Iris, Ten Cubed takes its name from the mandated logic of the gallery’s collection: ten artists from Australia and New Zealand are being collected over ten years with a minimum of ten works per artist. Andrew enters as part of an extension—called Ten Cubed 2—of the original collecting project which aims to extend the collection to international artists. Just nine works are on display in this show, however, a number of which have been selected not from the collection, but from Tolarno Galleries, who represents Andrew in Melbourne.

Brook Andrew, The Language of Skulls, 2018, installation view, Ten Cubed.

The curation of the works—all screen-prints on canvas, with some collage elements—is striking. This is unsurprising given Andrew’s strongly self-curated survey show at the National Gallery of Victoria last year titled The Right to Offend is Sacred, which saw the artist take the ‘archival impulse’ that has been evident in his practice to new heights (and surely gave him the strong standing he needed to be selected as the curator of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, taking place in 2020).

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