Australian Galleries at Sydney Contemporary

Graeme Drendel makes his debut at Sydney Contemporary with a new body of work, Static and Silence. Many of the artist's works contain references to his formative years spent in the small town of Timberoo, south west of Ouyen, in Victoria's Mallee region. The predominant industry in the area is dryland agriculture, which can be a precarious existence for the farming communities established there.

Drendel eschews a nostalgic view of rural life and the vivid experiences associated with his youth, recreating the low horizon line and flat plains of monotonous landscape, unrelieved by either natural landmarks or signs of activity. The relative absence of vertical structures in the local environment of farm blocks is referenced in Monument 2, 2024, where a large water tank looms over a recently harvested paddock. “I sometimes just like to make a disjunctive break in the composition of a painting. I also have a tendency to take the ordinary as subject matter and make something of it. The tank is an example where a very prosaic utilitarian object is placed in a situation out of its normal context only, to my mind anyway, to take on an almost heroic presence, dare I say somewhat like a shrine to be worshipped perhaps!” he quips.

The Drendel landscape is replete with incongruity: lone objects preside over nondescript spaces and often seem like characters in their own right. “It’s very much to do with isolation, and perhaps a metaphor for a human absence, where purpose is questioned; is it destined to rust and eventually disintegrate into the soil?” he ponders. “Silos were the only high structure that existed in the Mallee that forecast the next small town or railway siding miles before you got there. Fancifully, I like to think that I grew up in the shadow of the silo, and in my childhood, I used to imagine them as being akin to Roman or Greek temples.”

A series of suitcases and other receptacles speak of obsolete household items that have become almost a sub-genre of still life, or perhaps the evidence of lived life. Constructed to last and stacked atop the linen press in the laundry of Drendel’s home, these hardy valises are the physical remnants of significant journeys. Most of the leather cases belonged to the parents of Drendel’s wife, Wendy Horsburgh. The couple immigrated from England in the early 1950s, met on board the ship, and married soon after arriving in Australia.

The Immigrant, 2024, tells something of that story; a case so weighty, even when empty, that it hardly seems conducive to ease of travel. Royal Navy Issue, 2024, documents the type of suitcase issued to sailors after World War II, including Horsburgh’s father. “In spite of their much smaller scale, I have depicted the cases quite starkly, so they take on a sense of monumentality and significance way beyond their intended utilitarian purpose,” Drendel explains. Often relegated as musty storage containers for other accumulated material, we cannot be parted from these moribund objects for emotive reasons we can’t adequately explain.

Drendel employs a certain stage-managed theatricality in his paintings where (mis)remembered scenarios and haphazard moments are populated by eccentric, pensive, and sometimes forlorn characters. “I’m attempting to create situations where there is a sense of social cohesion, or at least communication between the characters that I paint. Nonetheless, I tend to fall short as there always seems to be a distance between them, something of that notion of an intense feeling of aloneness even within the crowd,” he admits.

Some of the individuals in these paintings appear to be enduring isolation that is geographic and literal, or otherwise internalised—outcasts perhaps, but no one is out of place within the artist’s gaze. Drendel’s work privileges the unacknowledged; within these introspective scenes he elevates the commonplace, the unexceptional, and the merely mundane aspects of our daily lives to a position of quiet dignity. The deliberately “everyman” cast stumble their way to a sort of visual redemption under his sympathetic direction.

A group of assemblage and collage paintings demonstrates the interplay of chance and serendipity Drendel embraces within his work. An annual purge of preparatory works filling the drawers of his studio led to an unexpected development. “I was tearing up and binning a lot of small watercolours and gouache paintings when quite randomly I saw a few scattered pieces that suggested something else,” he relates. “That brought forth a lot of cutting up and rearranging of excised heads and figures into pretty random scenarios that I could then pull together by painting improvised landscapes or rooms around the roughly cut-out characters. The process was very spontaneous and the surfaces and cut-outs deliberately left quite rough.”

A major work, The Set, 2024, depicts a rumpled bed resting on a carpet in a somewhat bleak landscape. Drendel views this as, “a figurative painting, but without the figures. It would appear that the bed has been used either for the purpose of restless sleep or for sexual activity; the protagonists have for some reason exited the scene. The relatively good condition of the bed, sheets and multiple white pillows would seem to be at odds with the barren surroundings.” The smaller Leisure Activities, 1998-2024, finds another unmade bed perched at the sea front. “Subconsciously, I think perhaps I have often been attempting to bring some kind of softness, or a civil aspect, to what can be a pretty harsh landscape,” he reflects.

Another unplanned pairing of visual cues, Stations of the Cross, 1998-2024, echoes the larger painting The Queen B, 2023, featuring a deserted petrol station. “It’s interesting to me in that I was putting together fragmentary images from perhaps twenty years ago with much more recent things, and that many ‘characters’ in these new compositions referred directly to works that had been painted over that time period. There was a great sense of freedom and, I thought, a freshness in making these ‘new’ paintings out of what had been destined for oblivion,” Drendel observes.

Drendel also maintains a keen interest in the medium of portraiture; a contrast between the figure within a landscape that occurs in his wider oeuvre, and the figure as a psychological study. Twice a finalist in both the Archibald Prize and the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, Drendel was the winner of the latter competition in 2022. His small-scale portrait of fellow artist Lewis Miller was judged the most compelling; Miller was also a finalist that year with his portrait of a seated Drendel. “Generally, I only paint portraits of people that I know, although I have done a few commissions. I’m always very conscious of taking up people’s time, consequently I’ve learnt to paint fairly quickly, and typically I only take a single session of about two-to-three hours to get one done. It’s a pretty intense process, sitting just a meter apart, eyeballing one another usually, and just a little intimidating for both the sitter and the painter. Being so closely scrutinised is not for the faint hearted!” Drendel asserts.

This year Drendel’s portrait of his colleague Rick Amor, Portrait of Rick, 2024, is included in the Archibald and Wynne Prize Salon des Refusés. Drendel makes a repeat appearance in Miller’s Portrait of Graeme Drendel, II, 2024, in the same exhibition. “Friends Rick Amor and Lewis Miller, both fantastic portrait painters, are great company and we have painted and drawn one another on several occasions. Maybe we quietly enjoy the slightly competitive aspect of it, but particularly we value one another’s company and the great art world gossip we can share between us,” Drendel reveals. “The opportunity to look so intently at the subject and try for a good likeness, and perhaps something of the nature of the person, is marvellous; such a pleasure.”

This article was originally published in issue 68, Artist Profile

EXHIBITIONS
Sydney Contemporary
5 – 8 September 2024
Carriageworks, Sydney