Most, if not all, art galleries specialise in something, some aspect that differentiates them from their many peers, especially in such a gloriously art-rich city as Melbourne. Few do it as loudly, adamantly, consistently and professionally as Brunswick’s surrealist gallery Beinart.
It should be noted that this kind of art isn’t for everyone. Steadfast fans of realist art will find little joy within Beinart’s walls, but lovers of all things strange and twisted will relish the three exhibitions currently on show.
The first of four rooms is dedicated to Japanese artist Akishi Ueda, whose sculptures blur and mesh beautiful and grotesque, placid and dynamic, human and animal, reality and subconsciousness. Made of clay, and coated in resin and acrylic paint, his sculptures have elements of the familiar, such as limbs, eyes, claws, horns, teeth – a face here, a whale there – but they are pieces of an unfamiliar whole. His use of strong colours, along with a variety of textures, makes each piece an image to decipher.
Ueda’s work is an appropriate introduction to the group exhibition filling the next two rooms, Creatures: Art Toys & Sculptures. This is a showcase of nearly 80 pieces by dozens of artists from all over the world, and the diversity is eye-popping; in fact the only things tying them together are surrealistic imaginations and very high levels of professionalism.
For instance, Emilio Garcia’s black, glistening brain frog lying splat on a plinth, Pickled Circus’ zombie rabbit contemplating its existence, Melissa Sue Stanley’s unidentifiable little beast sitting there and knitting, while Ben’s Beasts’ octopus-headed tyrannosaur splays its tentacles in the second room. So many more could be singled out, such as Tokyo Jesus’ work The Box (Catacomb) or Kim Slate’s Cheshire cat in Printemps.
The final room shows Mark Seabrook’s latest artistic offering, My Little Workhorse, a parody of the My Little Pony toy, TV and film franchise. Seabrook’s oil paintings, predominantly monochrome, are photorealistic images of time periods such as 1800s America and Medieval England, but with My Little Pony toys replacing actual horses. The show is a one-trick pony (pun intended), but it’s a good trick, and the quality of the artworks is characteristically as slick as any in his catalogue. Being in black and white gives the show a documentary feel, a quietly absurd photojournalistic exploration of human’s history with My Little Ponies.
Read: Exhibition review: Stitchin’ Stories: Blak & Threadly, Birrarung Building, Federation Square
Seabrook’s art is a bit of an odd one out, being somewhat of a calm after the storm following the relentless visual and conceptual bombardment of Ueda’s art and the Creatures exhibition. But perhaps that’s just what the curators intended, to give viewers’ senses a rest for a while.
If this sounds like your kind of art, then off to Brunswick you go.
Akishi Ueda: Memory of Landscape, Creatures: Art Toys & Sculptures, Mark Seabrook: My Little Workhorse will be exhibited at Beinart Gallery until 20 April 2025.
Free entry.
