Vacant Possession: Dick Frizzell
In Vacant Possession, Frizzell takes his own statement a step further by recreating famous works with a glaring omission, or a hole. In doing this, the artist has placed himself straight into the heart of these iconic Modernist European paintings, as a clear space, a ruled line, an aberration.
Dick Frizzell is a perpetual student, always revisiting and re-evaluating art history. The origins of his recent exhibition can be traced back to his university days when he travelled to Europe on sabbatical in the early 1990s. Having previously relied on images in books he delighted in seeing works in the flesh. As he toured galleries and museums, he collected postcards as mementoes of the masterpieces he had admired. He recently noted that:
To amuse myself ‘on the road’ I started cutting up the cards and reassembling them in small ‘combines’. Dali spliced with Miro, Ben Nicholson spliced with Kandinsky etc… some worked, some didn’t. [Then, on his return to New Zealand] I put the best of the postcard collages away for a rainy day.
It wasn’t until almost two decades later, and those early, rainy days of the pandemic, that these postcards began to reappear. For his 2020 exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery, Frizzell released his self-illustrated publication Me, According to the History of Art, and began his own reincarnation of those postcards from all those years before. The works currently on display in the Wellesley St gallery evolved from this place of reflection; from Ben Nicholson to Jean Tinguely, the spirit of the 20th century has been reinterpreted into Frizzell’s own vision of time and place. He has injected into his paintings the essence of these artists, artworks, art movements or eras, whilst creating whole new compositions.
In Vacant Possession, Frizzell takes his own statement a step further by recreating famous works with a glaring omission, or a hole. In doing this, the artist has placed himself straight into the heart of these iconic Modernist European paintings, as a clear space, a ruled line, an aberration. Of the process he says:
I wasn’t just repainting these works… I was putting myself into them. Right in the middle! The pure white, untouched void was all me! So I got serious with the research. The selection process became quite strategic. A lot of Modernist works lent themselves to the idea perfectly because of the ‘even surface distribution of information’ nature of the Modernist idea… the invasion of the negative space by the positive space… The interesting thing is that, to make the statement, to get myself into the middle of it all, I have to paint it! The Picasso, the Duchamp, all that work for ‘nothing’.
This is the charm of Frizzell’s creations – one cannot deny his skill, his honed talent of painting, as he explicitly challenges himself to match the skillset of great Modern masters. Yet his enduringly playful, rebellious spirit is also on display. He has taken the recognisable, 20th century art history’s arbiters of fine art, and challenged how we experience and define this ‘high art’, and in fact any art at all. Frizzell asks his viewers to rethink their own conceptions and to challenge their own biases.
Provocation and experimentation are undoubtedly mainstays of Frizzell’s oeuvre, and this show does not disappoint. As he has stated: I’m happy with my vacant possession… my little bit of ownership. I’ll see where it goes.
