Andrew Hazewinkel, untitled figure 04. Lead, beach sand, shell fragments and stones, 25 x 7.5 x 5.5cm. Courtesy: the artist and Olsen Gallery, Sydney.

For the first time in their 30 year history of supporting, presenting and promoting contemporary Australian art, Olsen Gallery have dedicated all of their Sydney exhibition spaces to a major exhibition created by one artist. Andrew Hazewinkel is a highly respected contemporary Australian artist based in Athens. This exhibition, his first solo presentation in Sydney, brings together 6 conceptually cohesive and materially diverse bodies of work previously unseen in Australia.

Hazewinkel blends an expanded field of lens-based practices and sculptural processes with museum collection investigations and photographic archive engagements. His research-rich practice is characterised by his confident deployment of diverse methodologies and materialities, through which he strives to create works that speak directly to our bodies. Combining a highly refined aesthetic with a personal visual language of rupture, he creates and configures objects and images with striking corporeal intensity, reminding us that deep time and ancient pasts are alive and active in all of us. In doing so he returns again and again to the human figure.

Comprising more than 80 individual works, this exhibition includes a monumentally scaled 10m long b/w photographic installation representing spectral deserted archaeological sites; intimately scaled folded brass low-relief sculptures in which classical European idealisations of the body fold in on themselves; large shimmering gold and aluminum leaf ‘portraits’ on sandpaper that meld broken statues in museums with their visitors; gem like colour photographs Hazewinkel has printed from found b/w negatives representing ancient sculpture which he describes as “damaged artefacts of modernity cradling damaged artefacts of antiquity”; a series of  reclining figures cast in lead in the wet sands at low tide on beaches of personal significance to the artist and more than 30 ceramic figures titled Psychopomps equally human and supernatural.

In the artists own words “to sense is to apprehend the ineffable, to feel is to allow that sense to flood the body”.

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