• About Martin Sharp
    From an article by Greg Weight, "Australian Artist" Magazine
  • Exhibition
    Selection of limited edition posters and prints available for purchase


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    WORK IN PROGESS

    Regarded as this country's most prominent Pop artist, Martin Sharp has made significant contributions to Australian culture since the early 6Os, with his posters and record covers in particular receiving international recognition. However, his paintings, some being started as long ago as the early seventies, have undergone a longer, more obsessive transformation towards completion. Whenever Martin has an exhibition, (which are often "events' as well as shows), by the time you have jostled with the crowd to view the works on display, the major works, the paintings, usually bear a sticker stating "Work in progress -- not for sale." Not yet anyway! Martin began his career at art school contributing to the magazine "The Arty Wild Oat", along with fellow artists Garry Shead and John Firth Smith. Martin's contributions were noticed by Richard Neville, Editor of the University of NSW "Thuranka", and by Richard Walsh. Editor of Sydney University magazine "Honi Soit". Both editors wanted to publish their own magazine and asked Sharp and Shead to become contributors. Australian "Oz" magazine hit the streets on April Fool's Day, 1963. The popularity of "Oz' magazine with its lampooning and social satire continued to increase during the few years it was published. and gained Martin sufficient following to prompt his first one man exhibition at the Clune Galleries in Sydney in 1965. "Art for Mart's Sake" was virtually sold out on the opening night, broadening the artist's horizon. At that time the obvious destination for young artists was London.

    Upon his arrival in the UK Martin found an ideal studio space in Chelsea. Germaine Greer, who was in the process of writing the "Female Eunuch", lived downstairs. When Richard Neville established the London "Oz', which was just as controversial as its Australian ancestor, Martin became its Art Director and w itty cartoonist. Pop culture in England at the time attracted and activated Martin’s already highly alive imagination. “Oz” magazine was achieving for him in England what it had done in Australia. He was becoming known. When he was introduced to a musician in a night club one evening Martin wrote some lyrics on a serviette and gave it to him in the hope it would lead to something. The musician was the famous rock guitarist Eric Clapton, and the song "Tales of Brave Ulysses” was recorded on the Cream’s next record album “Disraeli Gears" for which Martin subsequently also designed the cover. Haymarket Poster The next cover design for the Cream was ''Wheels of Fire'. For this cover Martin was awarded a New York Art Directors Prize for Best Album Design for 1969. Martin had found in England the Pop culture he knew existed there. He became a recognised Pop artist and designed posters of Bob Dylan, Jimmy Hendrix and Donovan. He also found Tiny Tim, an artist whose influence and inspiration has remained with him to this day. Martin's second and most important art education was living in Chelsea in the late sixties. Eric Clapton, and the Australian film maker and artist Phillipe Mora, were sharing Martin's studio, and other important British artists like Eduardo Paolozzi lived down the road. Expatriates such as Colin Lanceley and Brett Whiteley were also making their mark on the European art world at that time.

    WHAT IS POP ART?

    Pop art is art about art, it is also art about the history of art, and art about popular icons of the time. "Appropriations" are well known in the Pop and Contemporary art genre and have to do with re-using images familiar to the art world or popular culture of the time, and presenting them as a new art form for new appraisal. In the language of art a picture speaks a thousand words. Well chosen appropriations may add chapters to the language of a particular image without losing the value of the original message.

    Orange Festival Arts Poster In 1969 Martin returned to Australia. setting up residency in the old Clune Galleries. Thelma Clune, the Director. Had decided to sell the building. There was no rush for the sale however, and under the watchful eye of mutual friend "Charlie'' Brown, Martin presented his first exhibition after his return. This was followed by ''The Incredible Shrinking Exhibition", which comprised photographs of the first show re- exhibited in small gem-like mirror frames. These two exhibitions laid the foundations for the ''Yellow House", an unrealised dream mentioned by Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo about a house in the south, in the sun, filled with creativity. Although Vincent did not imagine his artists community would be so far south, the opportunity for realisation of the idea had arrived. Conceptual Art had emerged. Music and Theatre along with film nights and total environment installations were encouraged and fulfilled. Martin produced a catalogue and coordinated the setting up of artists' spaces to be prepared for the Spring show of 1971. "The Yellow House' was a milestone in the history of contemporary art in Australia and was retrospectively reviewed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1990 coinciding with the centenary of Vincent Van Gogh’s death in Auvers, France on the 29th July 1890. Returning to London in 1972, Martin continued his interest with the idea of Appropriation creating “Art Book", another gem-like production approximately 5" x 6" in size and incorporating 36 colour collages cut from the pages of glossy art books, bringing together the work in single images of Magritte and Van Gogh, Matisse and Magritte, Botticelli and Picasso with occasional overlays of Van Gogh on Van Gogh. Van Gogh on Botticelli or Vermeer on Vermeer. Still Life Explained Martin, “I have never been shy about cutting things up if I had a good idea. To me it was worth the price of a book for the idea it expressed, the interconnecting of different worlds. I could put a Gaugan figure in a Van Gogh landscape, make the composition work, and also say something about their relationship.”

    Distributed in the United Kingdom, France and Italy in 1972, “Artbook" was released in Australian in 1973 to coincide with Martin's 1973 "Art Exhibition' at Bonython Gallery, Sydney. The previous collage images were presented as completed paintings, returning them to their original medium. Extending viewer involvement, one work, "Self Portrait' was simply a mirror in an ornate gold frame while another more iconicised work was a linen, cheap reproduction of the “Mona Lisa” in an equally ornate gold frame, entitled 'Tea Towel''.

    During the seventies, Martin engaged with the Nimrod Theatre and produced the Nimrod posters. This important set of posters, now a collectors' item like so many of his limited editions, included his poster for the play "Young Mo”. The Australian comic "Mo” became the symbol of the Nimrod Theatre and one of Martin's most well known images. The subjects of Luna Park and Tiny Tim became Martin's other preoccupations during the seventies. He was engaged as a designer and artist to oversee the restoration of Luna Park, including the commission to revamp the enormous laughing face at the entrance. This long commission had all the ingredients of Pop art: the nostalgic elements, huge sculptures, powerful images, wonderful paintings by Arthur Barton along with bright colours and lights. In 1978 he and fellow artist/designer Richard Liney, also an avid collector of memorabilia, loaned their combined collection of hundreds of fairground. circus, Luna Park and sideshow artifacts to the Art Gallery of NSW to coincide with the Festival of Sydney.

    In 1979 a tragic fire in the Luna Park Ghost Train claimed seven lives, and silenced the optimism for a newly restored Fun Park. Martin's work on the Luna Park Face was ruined. and the park's theme “Just for Fun” lost its meaning. Martin firmly believes the fire was an act of terrorism aimed at the park and establishing alternative interests. Along with various other artist friends and sympathetic supporters, Martin was instrumental in forming the Friends of Luna Park in an endeavour to remind the people of Sydney and the State Government of what they stood to lose if the site were developed. Martin’s painting "Snow Job” is a poignant reminder of his feelings about this matter, and if it had not been for the efforts of Martin Sharp, Sydney may have lost an important part of its character.

    As well as Vincent Van Gogh, Tiny Tim remains one of Martin's strongest inspirations. Tiny's appropriation of song is very much like my appropriation of images. We are both collagists taking the elements of different epochs and mixing them to discover new relationships. Martin's appreciation of Tiny Tim has manifested itself in several ways -- a 5 metre painting now hanging in Macquarie University was painted during the mid seventies with Tim Lewis. A film "Street of Dreams” is described in Martin's painting “Film Script”.

    Two of Martin's most compelling paintings are other "works in progress" ;"Pentecost" and "Courage my Friend", The latter, until recently entitled '“Japan”", is a recreation of a lost, most likely destroyed Van Gogh painting. The original hung in the Kaiser-Frederick Museum in Magdeburg, Germany and was allegedly destroyed during a bombing raid. A print of this painting hung in Martin's family doctor's surgery when he was young, and it was given to Martin by his stepmother some years later. It is the most optimistic self portrait painted by the Dutch master, depicting the artist on the way to work along the road to Tarascon in the summer sun. The surface of Martin's version is alive with the enhanced colours of acrylic paint applied with an obsession only an artist with such deep conviction can muster. Although Martin has used most mediums available today he says, "It is only with acrylics that I am able to paint this way. The building up of the paint surface has not only given a new effect with paint, it is possible through acrylics to cover one colour with another providing changes to the colour resonance of the whole painting.” For someone like Martin, who needs to tune his work to the highest possible octave, this is a distinct advantage -- almost a necessity.

    Whereas "Courage my Friend' is bright with simple direct composition, the kind of reduced-to-the-essential-elements solution which is often favoured in Martin's compositions, “Pentecost”' is a more complex work, "Appropriating images from Matisse -- the table and the leopard skin rug and the colour red; Magritte -- the cloud bird; Van Gogh -- the chair; Antoine De Saint Exupery -- the star and the landscape with the Southern Cross and Australia by Sharp, and the heart ash as the eye of the dove by a dear friend, the late Edda Walker." The flames are from “Pentecost”', as in the tongues of the holy spirit.

    Like much of Martin's work this painting has to do with ideas, the intellect, refined composition and colour. What else would one expect from an artist whose influences are the "History of Art", Vincent Van Gogh, Tiny Tim, icons of contemporary culture, the Bible, other great books, songs and more songs, and whose landscape is that of the imagination?