Andrew McQualter
A partial index
27 January - 3 March 2012
Andrew McQualter’s new solo exhibition explores the studio as a site where philosophical investigation takes place. The exhibition includes works on paper and objects as well a major wall painting titled A partial index. The painting depicts a fictional workspace in which several protagonists are engaged with planning a mysterious happening, or an exhibition, or an oddly dystopian city-state.
McQualter’s practice is predicated on the idea that making art is an act of seeing connections or relationships between things. In these new works, McQualter explores a more intuitive and poetic mode of practice, allowing images to sit together as they have presented themselves to the artist’s imagination, encouraging the viewer to actively engage with the work and the process of making meaning. Preoccupations that are familiar from McQualter’s practice, such as the repertoire of human gesture, representation of relationships, community, and the depiction of artistic process in its quotidian modes are presented in a manner that incorporates the artist’s growing interest in alternative representations of space and pre-modern forms of visual narrative.
Andrew McQualter is a Melbourne-based artist. Since 1995, McQualter has shown extensively in galleries and museums throughout Australia including Primavera, MCA; NEW03, ACCA; Wall Power, AGWA; Trans Versa, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago; Networks, Cells and Silos, Monash University Museum of Art; Since we last spoke, Margaret Lawrence Gallery VCA. His work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the University of Melbourne as well as private collections throughout Australia. During 2011, McQualter undertook an Australia Council Studio Residency with the Liverpool Biennial, and participated in the exhibition City Within the City at Artsonje in Seoul, South Korea. Elements of A partial index were developed and exhibited in this time and have been reconfigured for this exhibition.
