Spring1883 Art Fair by Rex Butler

• Rex Butler

It’s poignant looking through the beautiful hardback catalogue of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s 2006 Juan Davila retrospective.

There on page sixty-one is a big colour photo of his dealer Kalli Rolfe’s space at the 2000 Melbourne Art Fair in the vast cathedral-like space of the old Exhibition Building. It’s Davila’s show Love’s Progress, featuring two huge lushly painted McCubbin piss-takes, Lost (1999) and Bush Burial (2000).

Then across pages 204 and 205 there for a 2003 show at 45 Downstairs, also put on by his dealer, is the spectacular installation Panorama of Santiago, Chile (1973–2003), an enormous circular frieze like Monet’s waterlilies depicting a group of people looking off a bridge that crosses a river, held above a series of brilliant conceptual riffs on Courbet’s infamous close-up of his Irish lover Joanna Heffernan’s genitals, The Origin of the World (1866).

Now some twenty years have passed, and we have twenty acrylics on paper, 105 by 75 cms, in a small hotel room in the Windsor Hotel on Spring Street as part of Spring1883.