back issue

Art & Australia and ANZ Private Bank are pleased to present the work of Amanda Marburg, the fourth artist to be nominated for the ANZ Private Bank Emerging Artists Program.
 
Marburg's distinctive paintings are the end product of an extended process involving photography and model making. The process begins with the artist photographing images from film and television. The resulting snapshots are then used as a basis for building unique, handmade models from plasticine, a form of modelling clay normally associated with children. The models are themselves then photographed and the snapshots used as blueprints for Marburg's oil-on-linen paintings.
 
This process, which is characterised by an interchange between two- and three-dimensional forms, allows for a certain degree of chance and possibility in that Marburg is never entirely certain what her photographs will look like. In the style of the hobby photographer, her images are neither professionally staged nor digitally enhanced but are, rather, snapshots. When photographing her plasticine models, for example, Marburg makes use of peculiar cropping, distortion of scale and rudimentary, localised lighting - such as torches or candles - to produce the uncanny shadows and heightened colour and detail evident in her final paintings.
 
The journey Marburg takes in the production of her paintings is consequently a continual process of abstraction. This detachment from a depiction of the 'real' is accentuated in the paintings by a lack of surface texture, in contrast to the malleable plasticine models in which the artist's hand, even her fingerprints, are visible. However, the flatness that this lack of texture might convey is counteracted by the unsettling focus in each of the paintings, with some features of the composition thrown into sharp relief and others into shadow and haze, giving an awkward, otherworldly sense of space.
 
Marburg painted from photographs at art school, but did not begin working with plasticine until 2001. Her interest in photography is not based on its faithfulness to life, but rather its inability to perfectly capture reality. Accordingly, the photographs she has painted from have tended to be 'bad' or discarded snapshots, either out of focus, imperfectly cropped or under- or over-exposed.
 
Marburg's interest in plasticine was triggered by her desire to create a 'clay-mation' (an animated film made from clay) of a scene from the Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho (1960). However, rather than film the model, Marburg took still photographs instead. To her surprise she found the snapshots far more interesting than she had anticipated, and produced a series of paintings from them which she exhibited in a solo show, 'The Bomb', at TCB Art Inc., Melbourne, in 2001. This exhibition also included paintings based on photographs of other models inspired by the films Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and Grosse Point Blank (1997).
 
The painting featured on the back cover of this issue of Art & Australia is based on photographs of Giving the devil his due, a plasticine model Marburg made in 2004. This is the largest model the artist has made to date and, unlike her earlier models, which were smaller and unrelated, Giving the devil his due is a self-contained, miniature fantasy landscape. The model was inspired by the macabre paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and stills from Journey to the Centre of the Earth and is also, importantly, the first of Marburg's models to be exhibited as an artwork in its own right.
 
While many of the scenes portrayed in Marburg's painted vignettes of Giving the devil his due are unseemly - including depictions of a dead cow and a figure vomiting from the side of a bridge - they are painted in bright colour and with blurred edges, giving a lush, psychedelic effect. Again, Marburg employs the conventions of photography, rather than those of landscape painting, to portray a disturbing fairytale-like landscape.
 
Amanda Marburg was born in Melbourne in 1976 and graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1999. She has had solo exhibitions at Newcastle Region Art Gallery (2005); Rex Irwin Art Dealer in Sydney (2004; 2003; 2002); and TCB Art Inc. in Melbourne (2001).  Her work has also been shown in a number of group exhibitions, including, most recently, 'Depth of Field' at Shepparton Art Gallery, Victoria (2003).

Marburg has been a committee member of TCB Art Inc. (an artist run space in Melbourne) since 1999, and is also a member of DAMP (a collaborative art group based in Melbourne). Amanda Marburg lives and works in Melbourne and is represented by Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney.

Claire Armstrong