Tony Clark

About the work

The paintings I have done with the collective title of Buehnenbilder (literally ‘stage pictures’) are mainly composed of a pair of sections from my Myriorama series within a painted architectural frame. This particular painting shows an assemblage of elements from the Canberra cityscape imagined as a theatrical backdrop design. The City Square, the Henry Moore sculpture at the National Library and Lake Burley Griffin all have a personal resonance for me as a Canberra-born, intermittent resident. At the same time, the painting as a whole takes the form of a less subjective project, a design for something rather than a thing in itself. The asymmetry of my notional design is a nod to the custom of design drawings in earlier centuries presenting to the client two similar but different designs to choose from, and the colour scheme of my landscape imagery uses the 18th century ‘sketching colours’ of sepia and indigo.

Presented in partnership with Canberra Art Biennial. CMAG on the Square is supported by John Hindmarsh AM

About the artist

Tony Clark was born in Canberra in 1954, and lived in Europe until 1976 when he returned to Australia. In 1999 he began living for part of the year in Syracuse, Sicily.

In 1985 he began his continuing Sections from Clark’s Myriorama project. Paintings from the series have been exhibited widely including at Documenta 9 in Kassel, Germany.

His portrait of the poet Peter Porter was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.

Clark’s work has been reproduced on the covers of records by The Fabulous Marquises, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and the Danish band Kellermensch, and on the back cover of the Reader’s Digest.