Rick Amor
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| Rick Amor | |
| Birth name | Richard William Amor |
| Born | March 13, 1948 Frankston, Australia |
| Nationality |  Australian |
| Field | Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, Printmaker |
| Training | National Gallery School, Melbourne |
| Awards | McClelland Sculpture Award 2007 |
Rick Amor (born 1948) is an Australian artist and figurative painter. He was an official war artist.
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[edit] Life and work
Rick Amor was born in Frankston, Victoria Australia. He has a certificate in art from the Caulfield Institute of Technology, and Associate Diploma in Painting from the National Gallery School, Melbourne.
He began exhibiting at the Joseph Brown gallery in 1974. He has entered the Archibald Prize at least 11 times and been exhibited nine times. He has been the recipient of several Australia Council studio residencies, allowing him to work in London, New York and Barcelona. In 1999 he was one of the first Australian artists to be appointed as the Official War Artist to East Timor by the Australian War Memorial, and the first since the end of the Vietnam War.
Rick has held over 40 solo exhibitions since first exhibiting at Joseph Brown Gallery in 1974 and has shown annually at Niagara Galleries for the past 20 years. A major survey exhibition of his paintings was curated by McClelland Gallery in 1990 and toured various regional galleries in Victoria and South Australia throughout 1990 and 1991. An exhibition of his prints toured various regional galleries in Victoria and Tasmania 1993-4.[1] In 1993 another exhibition mounted by Bendigo Art Gallery toured Australia.
He still lives and works in Melbourne.
He was interviewed in the 2005 Peter Berner documentary about the Archibald Prize called Loaded Brush.
[edit] Paintings
His work borrows heavily from the pictorial inheritance of Symbolism and Surrealism. There is always a poetic mystery and sense of menace, even in apparently journalistic work, such as the East Timor paintings. His major themes are the solitary watcher, figures at twilight, the vast emptiness of urban spaces and quiet mysterious interiors. His works resonate with powerful symbolism, and his landscapes in particular are full of disquieting atmosphere, with objects bathed in half light and shadows.
A Sebastian Smee, a reviewer of Amor's latest retrospective exhibition, concluded that he was
| “ | convinced not only of Amor's singularity in contemporary Australian art -- there is really nobody like him -- but of his importance. His commitment is unmistakable, his intelligence acute, and his best images impossible to forget. [2] | ” |
[edit] Sculpture
Since the early '90s, he has also incorporated sculpture in his repertoire, generally bronze figures which he moulds at home, then has cast in foundry using the lost wax method. The National Gallery, Canberra, has purchased a two-metre-high bronze sculpture of a dog - "a made-up dog, a survivor"[3].
In November 2007 Rick Amor won the prestigious $100,000 McClelland Sculpture Award for his haunting work Relic.
| “ | It's a relic, it's a distant memory. I don't know where it came from, from the unconscious. It's not meant to be an Anubis or any Egyptian deity, it's just something that popped up.[4] | ” |
[edit] Collections
Rick Amor is represented in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the National Portrait Gallery, the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery and numerous state, regional and university collections throughout Australia.
[edit] References
- Gavin Fry (2008) Rick Amor, Beagle Press. ISBN 0724102337, ISBN 9780724102334.
- Gary Catalano (2001) The Solitary Watcher: Rick Amor and His Art, Melbourne University Publishing. ISBN 0522849482.
- Davida Allen, Rick Amor, Stephanie Burns et al. (2000) The Australian Drawing, Australian National University.
- ^ Gary Catalano (1993) Rick Amor and the Graphic Arts, Niagara Galleries Melbourne, and NETS Victoria. Catalogue for the touring exhibition.
- ^ Sebastian Smee, Touching the void, A Review of A Single Mind: Rick Amor Heide Museum of Modern Art in The Australian 12/4/2008
- ^ In search of beauty - Arts - www.theage.com.au
- ^ Sculptor's win revives faith in the human spirit - Entertainment - theage.com.au
