Artists John Brack (1920–1999) and Noel McKenna (b. 1956) are two easily recognisable names in Australian art whose works show similar outlooks in their quiet observations of so-called ordinary Australian life.
Despite never being close artistic associates – born 36 years apart and belonging to different generations and milieus – the briefest look at their practice reveals common interests and some intriguing crossovers in style and technique.
Both artists have a knack for capturing everyday moments and presenting these slices-of-life as familiar yet slightly surreal scenes.
Both are also unafraid of applying vast expanses of empty space in their pictures – inviting viewers into lives imbued with emotional isolation and showing their somewhat distanced reading of the world.
Yet for all their commonalities, they have their own idiosyncrasies and distinct artistic signatures.
In bringing them together, the show’s curators – Director of Curatorial and Collection at the National Portrait Gallery Isobel Parker Philip and National Portrait Gallery curator Dr Emma Kindred – faced a challenge in ensuring poetic threads could be drawn between the two artists, while allowing each one ample space for their individual voices to surface.
In this regard, John Brack x Noel McKenna: A face in the mirror succeeds in the subtle, at times delightful, interactions it creates between these two artists’ works, which also affords deeper appreciation of both practitioners as important, yet differing figures in Australian art.
John Brack x Noel McKenna – quick links
Brack and McKenna’s quiet portraits of inner lives
In-line with the National Portrait Gallery’s focus on portraiture, the show opens with two striking portraits – one by Brack, the other by McKenna.
The two works are alike in style and form, and are placed side-by-side on an aubergine-coloured wall – which is a colour-choice that becomes a defining feature of the show, and that works well to present many pieces in their best light.
First, we see Brack’s small, enigmatic mid-century portrait of two anonymous typists – Two Typists (1955). Beside it is McKenna’s larger work Dr Joseph Brown with Two Typists (1996).
McKenna’s piece shows a bespectacled, bow-tied Joseph Brown which, is not only an interesting ‘painting within a painting’, but also a compelling window into the late 20th-century Australian art world.
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In capturing this Polish-born Australian art collector and gallerist beside Brack’s work (which was presumably hanging in Brown’s gallery at the time), Mckenna presents a striking dual homage honouring two different heroes of his artworld at the time.
But this obvious tribute-moment which opens the exhibition is the only time such a direct visual connection is drawn between the two artists in this show.
From here, its five different spaces, which present around 90 works drawn mostly from State Galleries and private collections, encourage more subtle yet sharp artistic links between the two artists which allow for nuanced readings of their work.
An early example appears in one of the exhibition’s first gallery spaces where Brack’s moody 1955 Self Portrait is placed in dialogue with Mckenna’s work Cat at mirror (2015) – a painting that portrays exactly what its title suggests (a small cat standing in a bathroom basin with its front paws on the mirror while looking bemusedly at its own reflection).
These pairings and arrangements are playful, yet also conceptually weighty in revealing both artists’ explorations of ideas of consciousness, the psyche, self-inquiry and free will.
These early works’ subtle references to pets and animals also foreshadow what’s to come later in the show, in galleries where animals feature more prominently and offer even greater insight into the artists’ lives and personalities.
Two artists surveying lives and landscapes
While its first galleries explore ideas of the human condition, the show’s middle and final galleries strike different tones and bring new energies to the fore.
A particularly interesting survey appears in a middle space dominated by Brack’s large painting The Hands and the Faces (1987).
This work (on loan from the NGV) was made late in Brack’s career (at age 67). It shows a bevvy of museum postcards arranged on a coffee table as if in a floral bouquet. The cards show faces of statues and figures from antiquity, and were painted from Brack’s own collection which he had picked up in museum gift-shops around the world.
Domestic in feel, the work also hints at a fondness for collecting, categorising and charting the seemingly ordinary ‘stuff’ Brack encountered in life, and his skill for making the minutiae more mysterious in his more complex (sometimes unsettling) scenes.
In parallel, McKenna’s ‘map’ works (which are often maps of Australia) offer whimsical, bigger picture overviews of his world view, and reveal his own inclinations towards categorising and charting his life in different ways.
It’s subtle thematic overlaps like these which surface frequently throughout this show, that give it depth and make for a rich visual experience.
By its end, it certainly feels like a masterstroke in design and vision, and a deeply-felt exploration of these two artists’ work.
Ultimately, it feels like the curators’ astute choices allow viewers (whether fans of Brack or McKenna or not) to enjoy fascinating windows into the artists’ lives and the lives of others around them, in ways that prompt reflection on Australian life and the ways it has changed (or hasn’t changed) over time.
For these reasons (among others) the show will no doubt see many return for second and third looks to commune with its selection of highly compelling works.
John Brack x Noel McKenna: A face in the mirror is at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra until Sunday 19 July.
