Double: Tony Clark + Joanne Ritson

This exhibition extends a collaborative proposition first explored in Tony Clark’sexhibition unsculpted at Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne in 2024-2025. In the first gallery space in that exhibition, Joanne Ritson translated a series ofspeculative ‘ideas for sculptures’ from Clark’s notebooks—sketches drawndecades earlier—into three-dimensional form, modelled in wax, and made totable-top scale. In the present exhibition the process folds back on itself: as Clark’s new paintings—all titled ‘Design for …’— take the forms realised by Ritson as their point of departure, and return them to the pictorial plane.

Trained as a painter, Ritson first started working with wax in sculptural form – low relief to begin with – in the mid-1990s. Her interest in the medium grew from an encounter with the historical craft of modelling anatomical forms in wax. In these current works, Ritson’s interpretation of the curves and inclines, hollows and protuberances of Clark’s organic abstraction lean towards bodily metaphoror analogy – in some instances more than others. Colour plays a role in this.

Clark’s response counters with a world of industrial processes and materials. In his paintings the sculptural protagonists rendered in black and white read almost as metallic figures/forms against kaleidoscopic colour fields structuredby the vintage printing primaries—cyan, magenta and yellow.

The gallery installation dictates separation of the two mediums: Ritson’sthree-dimensional works occupy plinths in the middle of the room, Clark’spaintings hang on the perimeter wall. Yet, sightlines are carefully calibrated soviewers can encounter both versions of a single subject in one view.

The exhibition proposes no ultimate end point (or end product), but rather acircuit of contingent interim states on rotation through different media: as image,object, and idea.

Dr Robyn McKenzie, Honorary Senior Lecturer, Centre for Heritage & Museum Studies, Australian National University, Canberra