Merrick Fry: The Charmer's Picnic

XX Mon. YYYY

Last weekend I attended an opening of a group show by my friend Di Holdsworth at Stella Downer Fine Art in the Dank Street complex in Waterloo. Di has two delightful new assemblage works in the show, along with two shown at the Museum of Sydney exhibition "City of Shadows"

While there I was captivated by an exhibition in the Depot Gallery by Merrick Fry, an artist of whom I had heard but remained unfamiliar with his work. I found a strong empathy with Fry's debris and found object constructions. Although I have such little time spare to indulge my passion for constructionist art these days, it is heart warming to see the genre being embraced with such enthusiasm and indeed gaining ground. Merrick's work is truly a tour-de-force of assemblage/found object/bas-relief/constructionist sculpture.

As you can so easily apprehend from the above images, Fry's body of work is full of dry humour, whimsy and wit whilst remaining rigorously eloquent. His neat execution withstands close scrutiny yet he is by no means precious about what goes with what or for that matter how his materials may have been manipulated. The glass artist purist may well throw up their hands in horror at mixing slumped glass with formed perspex but in context it works, and here context is everything.

The exhibition continues until Saturday June 20th, with the artist attending 11am - 6pm Tuesday to Saturday. The Depot Gallery, 2 Danks Street Waterloo.

Portrait photos by Tony Grech

Bennett @ Soldiers' Road

XX Mon. YYYY

Curator Daniel O'Toole has done it again with a brilliant solo exhibition by a young Surry Hills artist named Bennett. Their third show since opening earlier this year, Soldiers' Road Gallery goes from strength to strength, bringing a high level of professionalism to what is essentially an underground Artist Run Initiative on the 4th floor of a rambling warehouse inhabited by artists, musicians and rats.

These mixed media works show a surprising level of maturity for a young artist. They are pared back and beautifully restrained, satisfying yet simultaneously leaving you aching for more. I could live with every one of these images and relish the patina of the burnished surfaces and tiny sgraffito scratchings and minute but spare detail for a very long time.

This body of work represents a paradigm shift for Bennett, with his earlier work apparently brightly coloured and quite 'pop'-y, so it will be very interesting to see where these explorations in cool retro imagery take him next. A full catalogue of the exhibition, which finishes this weekend, can be found here.