Saturday, July 2, 2011

Daniel O'Toole / Max Berry at Harrison Galleries

The tour of our new 'hood continues for the Big Lamington team and Harrison Galleries on Glenmore road was on the agenda today. It is a pretty big space and they managed to squeeze in two artists on the ground floor.

First up was Daniel O'Toole aka Ears. 'The Grid' is primarily a collection of portraits. Quite big ones too, most around 1m x 1m for $1-2k and big ones of 2m x 2m for $3+k. Ears (as he is known) has an interesting, slightly abstract, if a little creepy style which a couple of collectors having fallen for - probably 5 out of 14 of the big ones have sold. Bargain hunters have attacked the salon style wall of smaller pieces - maybe they need to ensure they can live with his style before taking one of the full wall canvases. My favourites were probably the uniforms in pieces like Samurai, Indian Prince, The Admiral and Infantry.

Walking on through the gallery you get to Max Berry's show 'Passenger'. Here there are a couple of big works (around 90 x 90cm for about $1,100) but mostly smaller stuff (20 works sub $300 - even yours truly has sold a piece for more than that!) where the gallery really seems to display a fetish for salon style hanging. The room sheet was a basically a work of art in itself with diagrams of odd rectangles, squares and numbers trying to explain what was what. Max's stuff is a what I would call a little more trippy and anthropomorphic - think Nell style smily faces on mountains. The gallery, more politely, explains that his "work creates a world where every object has a life of its own, a daydream land where houses talk to clouds". 'nuff said.

Points - with the captain as an alter ego I'll give 3 to the Admiral, 2 for the prince and 1 to Max's 'Other Worlds'.

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