SYDNEY.- MY FELLOW AUS-TRA-ALIENS presents artworks spanning nearly five decades of the long career of Victorian-based artist Aleks Danko, from his earliest exhibitions in the late 1960s through to his recent large-scale installations.

Born in Adelaide in 1950, the son of Ukrainian émigré parents, Danko began making art in his parents’ suburban garage. After studying at the South Australian School of Art Danko moved to Sydney in 1971, where he was a central figure in city’s conceptual art movement The artist has consistently drawn upon his own history in his artworks. The suburbia of his upbringing—its banality, architectural forms and seemingly anti-intellectual ethos—are a consistent presence in his work, as is his family’s dark humour. Danko has also worked with a series of repetitive motifs, the most notable of which is a simple house structure, in order to reorientate ideas from his own creative history into the present.

Although Danko is versed in a range of disciplines, his practice remains firmly grounded within the world of objects. Using language as his starting point, he transforms sound, speech, rhymes, puns and repetitions into something more concrete. Akin to poetry, these text-based pieces are short and sharp, designed to be read aloud, vocalised and performed.

In addition to many objects sourced from public collections, this major survey features significant works remade or reconfigured by the artist specifically for the exhibition.

Curated by Glenn Barkley and Lesley Harding. Presented in association with Heide Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

The Artist
The son of Ukrainian migrants, Aleks Danko was born in Adelaide in 1950 and lives and works in Daylesford, Victoria. His career spans over four decades and encompasses diverse media – from sculpture, performance, installation, to text and language-based works. Drawing actively upon Australia’s political and cultural history, it is infused with satirical humour and a subtle and at times not so subtle critique of contemporary social values.

Danko studied sculpture at the South Australian School of Art 1967-70 and started exhibiting in 1970 in Adelaide. The first exhibition at Llewellyn Galleries, Adelaide was titled UCK, a collaboration with the poet and artist Richard Tipping. Since then he has held over 45 solo exhibitions and his work has been selected for a number of national and international exhibitions and collections. They include Born to Concrete, the Heide Collection, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2011); The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010); Mortality, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2010); Contemporary Australia: Optimism, Gallery of Modern Art/Queensland Art, Brisbane (2008-9); and International 04, Liverpool Biennial, (2004). Danko’s work is held in many public collections, including the British Museum, the National Gallery of Australia and the major state and regional galleries of Australia, as well as university and private collections.