Adam Cullen
Art Gallery of NSW
******
By Tracey Lien
Cullen's work is all about forbidden fruit
Like a decadent cake being consumed by the morbidly obese, or a prom queen taking a puff from her first cigarette, Adam Cullen's retrospective, Let's Get Lost, is a piece of forbidden fruit. It's a meal that skips the entree of pretty pictures and tosses us straight into the main course: a taxidermic cat and honey-drenched, heavy-bosomed figures. This tantalising delight is dangled in front of immaculate lads and prudish lasses. We want to have a bite - but what would our mothers think?
As one of Australia's leading contemporary artists and an infamous provocateur, Cullen's retrospective at the AGNSW captures the artist's brash and bold career through a selection of paintings and sculptures that solicit much blushing, cringing, and sheer amusement. Let's Get Lost throws around crude images that border on the explicit and offensive. Why We Live In Groups, a painting that features an all-bare menstruating geisha next to a blob of a man on a bike, is one such cringe-fest that slaps us in the face. We squirm not so much because it's disgusting, but because the figures are so unashamedly exposed. We're not sure to feel sorry for them or to be scared of them.
Cullen's canvases are laden with candy for the eyes, with unlikely colours combining to create a visual treat. The images are painted on boldly, with thick, black, decisive lines that form the subjects of some kind of bizarro world. Cocktail Girl and Blind Date tricks us into loving its scattered but nevertheless decisive figures, before drawing our attention to a wobbly penis attached to an equally wobbly man. The better part of our conscience tells us to turn away, but Cullen's paintings - filled with enticing colours and adventurous style and concept - demand that we remain transfixed.
The recurring images of distorted and exploited nudes, accompanied by quirky titles such as Distants Cousins are in Limited Supply and This man has been in your bathroom, dominate most of the exhibition. Works like Bedtime TV, featuring a television on a mattress, give us a good giggle, but the strength of Cullen's artworks lies in the fact that the colours and lines work together with a dash of insanity to form paintings that are likable and easy to digest. His compositions are strong, the contrast of colours and shapes pop like balloons, and he places all the right marks in the right place - penises and all.
Some might find Let's Get Lost too messed up, raw, and filled with too many wobbly bits for comfort. But even prudes like being excited from time to time.