Artist Profile Magazine
A Compendium of Riches by Ashley Crawford. Photographed by Simon Strong
The art world and the art of the tattoo have long held each other at a wary distance. While they often share an adherence to certain formulas, and both suffer from cliched notions of ‘what is art?’ where they most often differ is in terms of media. Not ink, which can and does apply to both, but in the medium to which it is applied, which in tattoo art is, of course, that infinitely tricky canvas of the human epidermis.
Tattooing as a fine art has a history as long as human culture itself, from the ritualistic, such as that of the Maori, to the narrative, seen with the Yakuza. In the Western world, the tattoo is often relegated to the realm of the decorative. An exception in Australia to this has been artist and tattooist eX de Medici who also works on paper. A ‘collector’ of Medici’s work once offered her flayed skin to the National Gallery of Australia upon her demise, no doubt to the dismay of the gallery’s curators.
In an attempt to cross the existing divide between the art and tattoo worlds, the founders of the hyper-influential tattoo studio The Melbourne Compendium, Kris Sunkee and Samuel Nugent, have joined forces with gallerist Elle Zoltak to establish the Compendium Gallery, a space that will rattle all of the bars between mediums.
Located in High Street, Armadale, the new gallery takes over from the space established by Scott Livesey Gallery who have moved down the road. The Melbourne Compendium tattoo studio will run from a space beneath the exhibition space.
“The tattoo studio will have a gallery space with rotating art by tattoo artists and once a year we will curate a tattoo artist to exhibiting in the main space,” says Zoltak. “Both owners, Sam and Kris, have been tattooing and painting in multiple forms for over 12 years each, so having a gallery owned by artists gives us a great framework and advice to help both upcoming and established artists.”
MORE ON SAM AND KRIS
The gallery will focus on emerging artists with some established names, including occasional artists represented by Scott Livesey. “The first year or so we’ll be exhibiting a variety of different styles which favour towards the more realistic and surrealistic oil paintings, but we want to exhibit all styles and genres of art,” says Zoltak.
And the selection thus far is eclectic indeed. In June Compendium will exhibit Harry Bayston, a painter and sculpture RMIT Graduate, and in July, Zac Chester, an exuberant painter who lives with Down Syndrome and is also an actor and dancer.
In September, the space will host a major showing by Ben Howe, a painter who the team spotted at the NotFair Art Fair of which Zoltak is a board member and curated by gallery director Kris Sunkee.
Howe is an Australian-based artist born in London, UK. Over nearly two decades, he has explored the nature of consciousness, personal history and the incongruities of memory through his artwork, which has taken him to England, Germany, China and the USA. Howe is known for his signature quasi-scientific aesthetic that is at once hyper-realistic yet reductive. His at times stark and lonely works are often derived from preliminary explorations in other media such as sculpture, photography and film; his process distorting the boundaries of the real and the perceived.
Following that, Compendium will host a group show of RMIT Painting Graduates, Marion Abraham, Karen Eriksen and Michelle Yuan Fitz-Gerald and RMIT Photography Graduate
Parminder Kaur, while in October they will feature the photography of established artists Deborah Paauwe and Mark Kimber. In the smaller space they will feature Amander Westley, a young Indigenous (Ngarrindjeri from Encounter Bay in South Australia) female painter.
From the graphic imagery of some of Australia’s top tattoo artists to the painterly and photographic, Compendium promises to be a vibrant and fresh space for Melbourne’s ever burgeoning art world.
