User:Kramshramtit/sandbox/Mark Titmarsh

Mark Titmarsh

Mark Titmarsh (born 1955) is a contemporary Australian artist best known for his expanded painting practice. His work involves various permutations of painting, sculpture, installation, video, performance and writing. He published a book, Expanded Painting (Bloomsbury 2017) that details the evolution of contemporary painting into its current expanded form. He lives and works in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Early life

Titmarsh was born in Ingham, in the far North Queensland, Australia. At the age of 22 he moved overseas to pursue a career as an artist in Europe. In 1981 he returned to live in Australia permanently.

Work

In the1980s he established an international reputation as an experimental filmmaker exhibiting in Europe, North America and South America winning awards at Ann Arbor and Montreal International Festivals. In Australia he was a significant contributor to the development of the postmodern debate in the visual arts in his role as co-editor of the Visual Arts magazine, On the Beach, and as a new image painter included in Perspecta, Art Gallery of NSW, 1989.

In the 1990s he co-founded the Sydney based artists group Art Hotline that exhibited ephemeral works in non-gallery everyday sites. He also edited a book documenting their activities between 1992 and 1995. Much of this work could be described as post-painting objects in that they take the form of 3 dimensional constructions that refer specifically to the conceptual aspects of painting. His screen based work included video and experimental websites that were exhibited in Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific in 2000.

His current work, executed under the rubric of ‘expanded painting’, is a form of painting as constructed colour that dissimulates into objects, videos, performances and texts. Recent work has included paintings on industrial materials, environments of fluorescent string, video works for mobile phones and performances using painterly materials. In early 2006 he was a cofounder of the artist run space, Loose Projects in Sydney.

He is currently a tenured, part time lecturer in Interdisciplinary Studies, School of Design, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, where he has taught since 1999.

He is active in issues surrounding the arts, having been a co-founding member of WAAR (Working Artists Against Ralph) and PEAASS (Promoting Electoral Awareness of the Artist’s Status in Society), two groups that were formed to defend artists’ rights and raise awareness of their contribution to the national cultural environment. He was a co-founding member of Group 3 three, an artists’ collaboration exploring the boundaries of painterly practice through installation and photographic documentation; and Art Hotline, a consortium of 20 artists working mainly in ephemera and installation. He was the co-founding editor and a regular contributor to the Sydney-based visual arts magazine, On the Beach, as well as a contributing writer for Australian Art Collector magazine, where he was Associate Editor from 1997 to 2001. He is currently Associate Editor of Ligature magazine, a Sydney based Design Journal.

He was Assistant Coordinator, and then National Coordinator, of the New Image Research program at the Australian Film Commission from 1991 to 1994.

He was a co-founding member of the Super 8 Film Group, a Sydney-based organization for the promotion, distribution, and exhibition of Australian professional experimental filmmaking. He was the founding member of Metaphysical TV -- a group of 5 experimental filmmakers whose work relied on reconstructing fragments appropriated from television imagery.

Among other qualifications, Mark holds a PhD degree in Painting from the University of Technology Sydney and a Masters degree in Visual Arts in Painting from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, and has studied at St. Martin’s College of Art, London; the University of London; and the Pietro Vannucci School of Fine Arts, and the University for Foreigners in Perugia, Italy.

Exhibitions

Titmarsh’s exhibition history comprises Australian and international exhibitions. It includes the Pompidou Centre, Paris, Ionion Centre for Art and Culture, Greece, Barbara Braathen Gallery, New York City, Christopher Leonard Gallery, New York City and Lang Gallery, Vienna. In 1986 he participated in the 6th Biennale of Sydney, Origins, Originality + Beyond. He has held numerous exhibitions at commercial galleries including Roslyn Oxley9, Bellas Milani Gallery, and Powell Street Gallery.

A monograph about his work, titled, The Thing, was written by Cameron Tonkinwise, and published by Artspace. Sydney, in 2006.

Collections

Titmarsh’s works are held in museums and private and corporate collections in Australia, Europe and the United States. These include

The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

The Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia.

The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.

The Monash University Museum Art Collection, Melbourne, Australia.

The Lake Macquarie Regional Gallery, Lake Macquarie, NSW, Australia.

Art Bank, Canberra, Australia,

Parliament House Collection, Canberra, Australia.

The University of Technology Sydney Art Collection, Sydney

The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia.

Cinemedia,  National Film Library, Melbourne, Australia.

The National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, Australia.

Recognition

Titmarsh was awarded the Grace Cossington Art Award in 2016 and the The Lake Macquarie Regional Art Prize in 1989.