Shadow of the hereafter

Imants Tillers
Australia
13 July 1950

Shadow of the hereafter
2007
synthetic polymer paint & gouache on 72 canvas boards
Place made
Cooma, New South Wales
Medium
synthetic polymer paint & gouache on 72 canvas boards
Dimensions
25.5 x 35.5 cm (each panel)
229.5 x 284.0 cm (overall)
Credit line
Gift of the Art Gallery of South Australia Contemporary Collectors assisted by Gosia Kudra-Schild and P. and T. Taliangis 2007
Accession number
20077P28
Signature and date
Not signed. Not dated
Media category
Painting
Collection area
Australian paintings
Copyright
Courtesy the artist

  • Today considered one of Australia’s foremost painters and with an outstanding international reputation, Imants Tillers commenced his artistic career in 1969 by assisting renowned installation artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude with their first major environmental project, Wrapped Coast, wrapping two-and-a-half kilometres of coastline in Little Bay, Sydney. Since the 1980s, Tillers has worked almost exclusively on the creation of large-scale paintings, comprised of multiple small canvas boards, these encapsulating his own visual language of quotation and appropriation.

     

    Tillers often includes familiar and easily recognisable motifs and imagery in his work, inviting audiences to reflect on and consider their knowledge and understanding of the world at large. Shadow of the hereafter takes inspiration from Hans Heysen’s watercolour of the Flinders Ranges Land of the Oratunga in AGSA’s collection. Layered over the surface of the landscape is a series of words referencing erased or displaced Aboriginal communities and vanished white settlements. Tillers’s landscape remains largely unchanging, yet the people and human cultures are more fragile and transient.

     

    Tansy Curtin, Curator, International Art pre-1980

  • [Book] AGSA 500.