Jordan Marani 'EGGS'
Jordan Marani 'EGGS'
Jordan Marani, EGGS, 2016
68 pages, 28 x 21 cm, softcover
edition of 100
hand-numbered and signed by the artist
JORDAN MARANI 'EGGS'
Jordan Marani’s limited edition artist book EGGS is a selection of personal photography from the past five years, encompassing recurrent images of cats, eggs, puns, hard rubbish, family and deep-fried foodstuffs.
ABOUT JORDAN MARANI
Jordan Marani makes darkly humorous work involving personal narratives, cynical observations of the human condition and explorations of family, loss and the past. Through painting and sculpture employing bright colour, humour and word play, he explores the funny side of the dark side.
Marani makes art of of the everyday, reflecting his immediate surroundings and community. His work is drawn from such crude and everyday references as suburban life, popular culture, booze, football, the art world and family history. Early works used materials from scavenged, recycled and reclaimed rubbish, such as paintings on boards salvaged from skips, bottletops, and food packaging, and from basic and impoverished materials, such as cardboard and house paint. Recent works continue to utilise humble materials, such as bed sheets and handkerchiefs, alongside more formal and polished works on board and canvas. Marani blends lowbrow culture with high art, with an insistence on the value of the working class and crass.
Over the last 30 years Marani’s work has been littered with profanity drawn from the ugly vernacular of Australian politics and the pub. He started creating text and four-letter word paintings in the late 1980s, with a series of ‘Shit Paintings’, and has been exploring word play, profanity and the joys of four-letter words ever since. His multi-faceted practice includes figurative and narrative-driven paintings alongside ongoing series of text-paintings, installation and found-object sculptures.
From 2008-2011 Jordan was co-founder and director of Hell Gallery. His work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, the National Gallery of Victoria, NADA New York, the Spinnerei Leipzig, Shepparton Art Museum, Static Gallery Liverpool, Switchback Gallery, 200 Gertrude Street, Daine Singer, Neon Parc, Utopian Slumps, Ryan Renshaw, Ray Hughes Gallery, Powell Street Gallery and at ARIs including Death Be Kind, Inflight, Seventh, and West Space.
Recent projects include publication of his first book, EGGS, which launched at the National Gallery of Victoria (2016), solo exhibitions at Daine Singer (2016) and at Ararat Regional Art Museum (2016), a public artwork for the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2016), a residency at the Leipzig International Art Programme in Germany (2017) and group exhibitions in Leipzig and New York (2018). His work is held in the collections of the Yarra City Council, Moreland City Council, LIA Leipzig, and Ararat Regional Art Gallery.