Eastlink Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Transposing the Common II duo exhibition. This exhibition features Australian Parliament Art Prize 09 winner Rodney Pople and Chinese artist Zhao Qin.

Rodney Pople

The Venus Suite

Rodney Pople’s photo-based paintings blend discordant images from Western art and contemporary culture to create juxtapositions not only between painting and photography, but between historic and everyday modern cultures. Iconic paintings by the likes of Bellini and Titian, are merged with imagery gathered from a variety of contemporary sources including current affairs, nature magazines and porn. In the finished work, an edgy balance between chaos and control evokes the underlying anxious mood of today’s society.

Most of the paintings in The Venus Suite exhibition at Eastlink Gallery were researched in Venice, earlier this year, and are based on the artist’s own photographs of palace and church interiors. There is a sense of theatre in Pople’s work, fostered by his early film studies, that is also a characteristic of Venice itself. The contradictions inherent to that city – between reality and fiction, power and vulnerability – are also central to the works here. Nature and culture – sex and religion – are seamlessly fused in visual montages linking society’s dreams, fears and desires through the centuries.

Our appreciation of historic cultures is influenced by personal experience and perception, by the big and small things that define our place in the world. Foremost among these are religion and sex, which have since the birth of Christianity been intertwined, outwardly denying common ground though inwardly bound by enslavement and temptation. In its citing of altarpiece paintings by Titian and other Western art masters, Pople’s work is a timely reminder that art that speaks of its times must embrace both the sublime and the salacious.

Born in in 1952, Rodney Pople received a Diploma of Fine Arts (Photography) from the Tasmanian School of Art before undertaking postgraduate studies in sculpture at the Slade School of Art in London and the New York Studio School . He has been exhibiting annually since 1978 and has recently won the Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, 2008) and the Parliament Art Prize ( Sydney , 2009). His work is held in state galleries, the National Gallery of and prominent private collections, including those of Russell Crowe and Spike Jonze.

Zhao Qin has weaved through a variety of forms of expression throughout his artistic career. He has been a rock star, a performance artist, a cartoonist, and now a painter. He paints enormous apocalyptic landscapes. These paintings are people less, dark, and hazy, as if after a terrible war, or possibly just the sight of an abandoned factory, an all too common sight in contemporary China. Zhao Qin makes the difference between a future dystopia and contemporary China frighteningly indistinct. Zhao Qin was born in 1967 in Xuzhou, Jiangsu. He has been living and working in Nanjing since attending the art department of the Nanjing Arts Institute.