20 April -
2 June 2024
Gertrude Contemporary
21-31 High Street, Preston SouthArtist talks & opening event:
Saturday 20 April, 3 – 6pm
Generally, in our daily lives we do our best not to be, or to appear, stupid. Despite this, or maybe because of the unspoken normal/ising imperative it suggests, artists are one of the few groups who have openly embraced the generative possibilities of stupidity. Many artists in fact have seen stupidity as an affective force, embracing failure, mistakes, elisions, satire, parody, slapstick, mimicry and the absurd as part of a much wider assault on (common) 'sense.’
Dr Alex Gawronski is a contemporary artist working across multiple media as well as a writer and independent gallerist. He has a particular interest in the implications of galleries and museums as cultural sites of spatial and socio-political contestation. Gawronski’s PhD, No New Utopia: The Crisis of Art as Critique Under Globalisation was awarded by the University of Sydney in 2006. Gawronski has exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, and Carriageworks as part of The National. He operates the artist run initiative ethan frome (ex-KNULP) in Eora Sydney.