Exhibitions Caroline Rannersberger After Arcadia: Limerence, Landscape and Chaos 16th February 2021 - 5th March 2021

Please contact the gallery if you would like to request a preview for this exhibition.

Through a geophilosophical awareness of the landscape Tasmanian artist Caroline Rannersberger's work seeks to encapsulate the ever evolving shifts inherent within notions of place. Via a series of large scale, highly textured paintings her latest body of work is a meditation on chaos, both geological and human, and the altered states that arise from an unrequited and somewhat turbulent relationship with the land.

After Arcadia: Limerence, Landscape and Chaos
Artist Statement

"I realize the Arcadian beauty I have long found myself in is fleeting. I am crushed by the ease with which my freedom to roam to the land is squashed by the unrelenting punishment of a global pandemic. Locked away from the liberty to range the mountains and oceans, I sense an unrequited love affair with the land in which I constantly seek to walk on the wild side of chaos. I begin a process of scratching, of tearing, of erasing; of recomposing landscape into art. In my painting practice it is important that the work reflects this element of chaos. It is as if the land resists containment and is still shifting and moving and evolving, evading possession but yielding ineffable beauty, which I inevitably attempt to capture on canvas.

Indeed, many artists have engaged with chaos. Francis Bacon saw chaos as a means to unlock sensation. Paul Klee saw a grey vanishing point that would leap over itself to resolve a painting. I see chaos as the yearning to experience the sensation within the void, the horizon far beyond line of sight, a looming storm, the syrup of fog shrouding the water, the mountain peaks.

This is a space of never-ending chaos that presents in my work as a kind of limerence; a fusion of altered states arising from an unrequited and somewhat chaotic relationship with the land. My art processes however are not simply chaotic, but rather a composition of chaos conveyed as movement in the land. To do this I create repeatedly layered forms and striations lacerated into the thick impasto paint or heavily glazed surfaces. I want to convey the sensation of the rock fissures on the shore line, like frozen rivers of lava cascading and shattering along their journey; or valleys and mountains erupting out of the river, withstanding millennia of gale force winds; or violent storms and fires; or the gentle rhythm of water as the wind gusts across and folds itself into the undulating surface of repeated wave motion. And as I turn, with every movement and observation the land appears to shift, almost imperceptibly.

The world of the painter does not begin or end, but is in a constant state of change or difference as it passes through chaos. Arcadia is but a fleeting notion, glimpsed momentarily. As Gilles Deleuze has observed, “Painters go through a catastrophe, or through a conflagration, and leave the trace of this passage on the canvas, as of the leap that leads them from chaos to composition” Art indeed struggles with chaos, but it does so in order to bring forth a vision that illuminates for an instant, a sensation. Art begins when chaos is composed."

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Rannersberger is the Creative Director of the BRUNY20 Fellowship for the Arts, having held the position of Curator and Project Manager of the BRUNY18 Art Prize and BRUNY17 Art Prize. In 2017 she was appointed to the Australia Council’s Pool of Peers Assessment Panel and in 2016 she curated Bruny Island: EDGE2 Isthmus as a part of MONA’s MOFO Festival in Hobart. In 2014 Rannersberger was curated into Hazelhurst Regional Gallery’s exhibition Sublime Point: The Landscape in Painting, which featured 25 leading painters from across the country, each exploring ideas of self and responding to historical aspects of landscape and their relationship with nature.

She has been a finalist in the Glover Prize (2016, 2013, 2011), and the Blake Prize Director's Cut (2016), the Mosman Art Prize (2015), the Bay of Fires Art Award (2014), Hutchins Prize (2013), the Tattersalls Art Prize (2012), the City of Albany Art Prize (2011), the TogArt Contemporary Art Award, NT (2011), the Fleurieu Art Prize, the ABN Amro Award, Fremantle Print Award and the Alice Prize. She has undertaken many significant commissions for public and private institutions including th City of Hobart, Illawarra Primary School, Kingborough Health Centre via Arts Tasmania, Zinfra Pty Ltd, City of Darwin Public Art Installation for Celebrating Darwin, Queen Elizabeth Hospital Research Foundation, Cancer and Bowel Research Trust Association and SA Ambulance. Her work is held in prominent public collections including the RACT (Royal Automobile Club Tasmania), Price Waterhouse Cooper, The National Gallery of Australia, The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT), and Artbank.

CAROLINE RANNERSBERGER PROFILE
DOWNLOAD BIO / CV (PDF)

Caroline Rannersberger
Blue Rolling Hills, Quadriptych 2020
oil in linen
112cm x 228cm
$16,000 AUD