Imants Tillers

Imants Tillers’ A New World Rises pays homage to the first Kaldor Public Art Project, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast—One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia, 1968-69. Tillers was an architecture student when he helped to install the large-scale public artwork in 1969 and credits the experience as first inspiring his ambition to become an artist.

Comprising Tillers’ signature canvas boards, A New World Rises takes the form of a 132-panel painting, depicting a preparatory collage by Christo and Jeanne-Claude and layered with poetic text, and is accompanied by an installation of stacked canvas boards.

Imants Tillers is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary painters. He has exhibited extensively since the 1960s and has represented Australia at significant international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, 1986, documenta 7, 1982, and the São Paulo Bienal, 1975. Since 1981 Tillers has used his signature canvas boards to explore themes relevant to contemporary culture, from the centre/periphery debates of the 1980s to the effects of migration, displacement and diaspora. Most recently his paintings have been concerned with place, locality and evocations of landscape.

In 1984, Tillers was one of three Australian artists who contributed to Kaldor Public Art Project 8: An Australian Accent, presented at P.S.1, New York, and the Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC.

Exhibited as part of the exhibition Making Art Public: 50 Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 7 September 2019 – 16 February 2020
Images courtesy the artist, Kaldor Public Art Projects and Roslyn Oxley, Sydney