The Australian 17 May 2005

Working locally, influenced globally

BRIAN McKay has been a central figure in West Australian art practice for the past 40
years but, unlike Howard Taylor, Guy Grey-Smith and Robert Juniper, there is little that is immediately identifiable as W A content or influence in his work. Familiarity has locked his work into our consciousness as typically local but, as the retrospective at the Holmes a Court Gallery reminds us, his practice has always been idiosyncratic.
One influence he shares with his contemporaries is the effect of early English modernists such as Ben Nicholson and Victor Passmore. But where others adapted their surfaces and elegant line to describe the dry and sparse landscape of the state, McKay focused on the
urban environment, the walls and manhole covers, defying any uniquely local reading.
His use of text is another strategy adopted early from Nicholson. It enabled him to create a more focused political content, but even this is hard to pin down. Text is often deployed as
a compositional device and almost always it's indecipherable. It's most often employed to suggest meaning rather than make it explicit. Additionally, the veneer of age or weathering he applies distances the works further by situating ideas and activities in an unspecified past.
In this way, McKay has always sought to address a wider audience by eschewing the immediate and the local, and his sensibility in the handling of materials and in creating alluring surfaces does have a universal appeal. From the early works produced in Perth through the atmospheric landscapes painted in Greece to these present works created by abrading and
painting aluminium panels, he has generated a highly sophisticated version of abstraction that is immediately accessible and engaging.
While the starting point is always figurative in his best works, it remains nothing more than a catalyst for a process of reductive abstraction that pares away all unnecessary detail and reference.
In his concurrent exhibition at Galerie Dusseldorf, the ancient Egyptian Sphinx's headdress is the starting point for a wonderfully refined work that suggests its source in the title Giza but leaves viewers to fabricate their own meanings.
McKay is well served by the combination of a retrospective and an exhibition of present work be cause it reinforces his constancy in examining the ideas that sustain his practice and his ability to give them new form and relevance as each decade passes.

Ted Snell
VISUAL ART

Brian McKay: Holmes a Court Gallery, Perth. Inquiries: (08) 92184540. Extended till 17 July
Brian McKay: Recent Work Galerie Dusseldorf, Perth. Inquiries: (08) 93840890. Until May 29.

Illustrated:

Advice to Civic Leaders 1965 Oil on board 39.3 x 50.7 cmThe Holmes à Court Collection

Giza 2005 Oils on etched and sealed aluminium 100 x 100 x 4 cm Galerie Düsseldorf