BERLIN.- Contemporary Fine Arts is presenting the exhibition Difficult Pleasures with works by Cressida Campbell (born in 1960 in Sydney) and Tim Storrier (born in 1949 in Sydney).

The idea for this exhibition came from Sidney-based collector Steven Nasteski, who over recent years has assembled a remarkable collection of international art. As is the case with almost every collection, the initial spark came from his encounter with the contemporary art of his home country. Cressida Campbell and Tim Storrier are two artists who are prominent and celebrated on the Australian continent, honoured there with museum exhibitions and prizes; yet they are not widely known to an international audience outside of the Commonwealth.

Cressida Campbell’s works are paintings on wood panels that she prepares like a printing block. First, she creates a drawing with fine lines on a piece of plywood. “When the drawing is wrong, then everything is wrong”, she says; hence, this part of the process takes the most time. Afterwards, she carves out every line from the wood with a fine knife, and paints it with watercolours. After several layers of paint, she sprays the picture with water and makes a print with it: the result is the painted wood block and an inverse unique print on paper.

While Cressida Campbell’s earlier works depict landscapes and street scenes, over the years her gaze is becoming increasingly more intimate, limiting itself almost exclusively to domestic interiors and still lifes. In their naturalism, they go beyond a mere depiction of what the artist sees and observes, and their artistry and craftsmanship has more in common with Japanese ukiyo-e prints than with western realism. Her works are devoted to the “material” of the everyday, not to the great classic themes. Campbell’s works captivate by the way they are produced and their timelessness. They stand for an art that resists the current continuous desire for meaning and “messages”, an art that can discover the knowledge of the world also in a flower still life.

Tim Storrier’s landscapes, on the other hand, are symbolically and emotionally charged. They depict the wildness and intransigence of Australian nature and serve as a backdrop for the dramatic interplay of symbols and ideas, culture and nature. While Campbell’s views of the things that surround her tend to be introverted, Storrier directs his gaze to the distance and expanse and the things behind them. The nocturnal starlit sky above the open void landscape contains Storrier’s memories of his childhood in the Australian outback and evenings with his father at the campfire. The bright sky of the Australian south, the seemingly impenetrable green ocean, just like the strips of fire and the burning horizons, have been characteristic elements of his paintings since the early 1980s.

Storrier‘s works are in numerous collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.