REW HANKS

THE CAPTAIN'S CATCH

CURRENT TO 23 DECEMBER 2023

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ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Sydney-based printmaker and teacher Rew Hanks has held solo exhibitions since 1982 in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Canberra and internationally in India. His work has been included in international group exhibitions in Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom and the United States. Hanks has a Master of Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts, University of Sydney.

Internationally, Hanks has been awarded the Trienniale Print Prize in the 4th Bangkok Triennale International Print and Drawing, Bangkok, Thailand (2015), First Prize in the 9th Kochi International Triennial Exhibition of Prints, Kochi, Japan (2014), First Prize in the IV International Print Exhibition, Istanbul, Turkey (2011) and Grand Prize in the 8th Bharat Bhavan International Biennal of Print-Art, Bhopal, India (2008).

Nationally, Hanks has been awarded the Lerida Estate Acquisitive Prize (2020), the Megalo International Print Prize (2020), Freemantle Arts Centre Print Award (2019), Burnie Print Prize (2019), the Hornsby Art Prize (2019), First Prize in the City of Hobart Art Prize (2014), Grand Prize in the Open Section, Silkcut Award for Linocut Prints, Melbourne (2013) and First Prize in the Geelong Print Prize, Geelong, Victoria (2008). Hanks has been a finalist in the Blake Prize (2003, 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010), the National Works on Paper Prize at Mornington Peninsula Art Gallery (2016, 2012, 2002) and the Basil Sellers Prize 5 at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne (2016).

Rew Hanks’ work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of South Australia, Artbank and several significant regional and tertiary collections.

The Captain’s Catch is Rew Hank’s fourth exhibition with Nicholas Thompson Gallery.

ARTIST CV

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EXHIBITION WORKS

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Australia Felix 2022

hand coloured linocut, edition of 8 + 2AP; 105 x 74 cm

$4,000 unframed / $4,900 framed

 

Australia Felix (Latin for prosperous) was an early name given by Scottish explorer/surveyor Major Thomas Mitchell to lush pastures in parts of western Victoria  in 1836. As Surveyor General he led four extensive and historically significant expeditions into the interior of eastern Australia mapping future towns and roads.

Mitchell is accompanied by John Piper a Wiradjuri man who acted as a guide, diplomat and translator for Mitchell during three major expeditions in southern-eastern Australia between 1836 and 1846.

Major Mitchell wrote and illustrated several books of his discoveries and was knighted in 1839.

Rew Hanks

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"Banks, which one is mine?" 2022

hand coloured linocut, edition of 8 + 2AP; 103 x 75 cm

$4,000 unframed / $4,900 framed

 

In “Banks, which one is mine?” we quickly recognise the faces of both Captain Cook and Joseph Banks. Both men wear the unamused expressions by which we have learned to identify ‘great men’, but what are they doing with golf clubs? And then the details start to register—cane toads abound around their feet, one couple even fornicating; St Andrews clubhouse, mecca of contemporary golf, nestles gracefully in the middle distance; kangaroos forage on the course; and cattle graze near a windmill behind a picket fence. This is bizarre, but as a smile forms on the viewer’s face, so also does a question start to present itself about the story here.

Based on a well-known golfing image, L.F. Abbott’s (1790) The Blackheath Golfer which became the first golfing poster produced, Hank’s linocut depicts a dandified gentleman out for a game of golf attended by his manservant carrying a bundle of clubs. The original image contains a grand country house, the windmill and the picket fence. Hanks reproduces the composition exactly, but maps Cook’s face (the one familiar from our history books, Nathaniel Dance’s 1775 portrait) on to the golfing dandy and the equally recognisable image of Banks’ face (from Joshua Reynolds’ 1773 portrait) on to his manservant. The grand country house becomes St Andrews and other smaller details are added to invite closer inspection—note Cook’s belt-buckle.

Elin Howe

 

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Fish between the flags 2023

hand coloured linocut, edition of 8 + 2AP; 106 x 75 cm

$4,000 unframed / $4,900 framed

 

Fish between the flags is a colonial parody that depicts Captain Cook at the water’s edge of Botany Bay parading in a vintage bathing suit holding aloft a miraculous catch of fish reminiscent of the disciple Peter fishing from the sea of Galillee.

This salvational sailor appears oblivious to the First Nations people’s 50,000 years history of sensitively harvesting the marine life from the oceans which surround this continent.

As two British flags stand sentinel monitoring the consumption of seafood a defiant First Nation fisherman stares incredulously as if pre-empting the next two centuries of overfishing by the new arrivals.

Unfortunately, the current “Marine Act” (2014) which allows Aboriginal Cultural fishing for communal needs and ceremonial purposes is still poorly managed.

Rew Hanks

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Josephine's ark 2022

hand coloured linocut, edition of 8 + 2AP; 106 x 75 cm

$4,000 unframed / $4,900 framed

 

This work was inspired by the Greek myth Leda and the Swan which pictures the god Zeus in the form of a white swan seducing the mortal woman Leda. Many artists have reinterpreted this myth, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rubens, Cezanne and Cy Twombly, typically portraying Leda as a submissive, subjugated victim. In contrast, she is depicted here as an empowered Josephine Bonaparte who displays contempt for her black Zeus while confidently taking control of her menagerie, estate and her own desires.

In 1799, Josephine Bonaparte purchased Chateau de Malmaison,  a 150-acre run-down estate not far from Paris for an exorbitant 300,000 francs while Napoleon was away fighting the Egyptian Campaign. She transformed the large estate into a botanical and an antipodean zoological garden and established the most comprehensive rose garden in Europe, with over two hundred and fifty varieties. Additionally, she built an Olympic-sized greenhouse warmed by twelve charcoal stove heaters, just to grow three hundred pineapples.

In 1800, Napoleon endorsed Nicholas Baudin’s scientific expedition to Australia, where one of the ships became known as Josephine’s Ark. It returned to Paris with no fewer than two hundred live plants, twenty kangaroos, two wombats, four dwarf emus, two black swans plus four hundred other live birds and one hundred and ten mammals. She successfully bred black swans and decorated her house with large sprays of Sydney golden wattle. An invitation to her famous garden parties was sort after by the Parisian gentry, who favoured the unique kangaroos and the novelty of the black swans.

In 1809, Napoleon divorced Josephine as she failed to produce an heir. For the sake of France, Bonaparte married the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, who would bear him a son the following year.

Josephine lived at the Malmaison until her death from pneumonia the aged of 50 in 1814.

Rew Hanks

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Krefft's chair 2022

hand coloured linocut, edition of 8 + 2AP; 102 x 76 cm

$4,000 unframed / $4,900 framed

 

Gerard Krefft  (1830-1881) was one of Australia’s first and leading zoologists and palaeontologists. In addition to many scientific papers, he wrote The Snakes of Australia and The Mammals of Australia. Krefft formally described the Queensland lungfish suggesting it could be the ‘missing link’ between fishes and amphibians.

Krefft was Director of the Australian Museum from 1864 – 1874. He built up the museum’s collections and won international repute as a scientist. Kreft corresponded with Charles Darwin and was one of the few Australian scientists to accept Darwin’s theory of evolution and disseminate his ideas in the 1860’s. Eccentrically, he secretly staged a fight between a snake and a mongoose in the museum’s basement for the visiting Duke of Edinburgh.

Devoted to the museum’s interests, Krefft clashed with the trustees, notably Sir William Macleay who was building up his private collection at the expense of the museum. The staunchly conservative religious views of the board of trustees strongly opposed Krefft’s radical theories on evolution. They strategically charged him with drunkenness, theft and disobeying the trustee’s orders.

In 1874 Krefft was fired. Refusing to vacate his office, he was physically carried by two prize fighters from the museum while still in his chair and was thrown onto the street.  After several appeals to the Supreme Court, Krefft was left demoralised. Without his livelihood, he was left destitute and died of congestion of the lungs.

Krefft’s chair can be found outside the boardroom at the Australian Museum as if patiently waiting for the next dismissal.

Elin Howe

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Napoleon in exile 2022

hand coloured linocut, edition of 8 + 2AP; 106 x 75 cm

$4,000 unframed / $4,900 framed

 

This is a satirical portrayal of Napoleon Bonaparte in exile on a small island off the coast of Western Australia. Napoleon was actually exiled twice. Once on Elba, a Mediterranean island off Tuscany where he escaped within the first year and again after the defeat of the French in the Battle of Waterloo, when he was exiled to St Helena, two thousand kilometres off the west coast of Africa for six long years.

Napoleon is depicted as the fallen French Emperor with a bad case of ‘small man syndrome’ (Napoleon Complex). A fanciful scenario has erupted between Napoleon and the male dwarf King Island emu (now extinct), both sizing each other up with inflated chests over a mate, territory or just ego. Maybe it’s ‘tiny island syndrome’. The major size discrepancy fails to deter this fine-feathered beast. Behind Napoleon, a solitary dwarfed marsupial, the quokka, quietly observes these sparing ‘peacocks’, realising it is better left to the big guns.

Littered in the foreground is evidence of the preferential treatment Napoleon was continually given. He received a steady supply of quality coffee, followed by his customized mandarine cognac consumed over a game of chess that he approached like an obsessive military strategist.

The colony of rabbits reminds Napoleon of one of the few times he retreated from a battle after signing the Treaties of Tilsit at the end of the war with Russia. A celebratory rabbit hunt was organised using hundreds of domestic rabbits, and as Napoleon alighted from the coach, the rabbits mistook him as their keeper and charged at him expecting to be fed. They ran up his trousers and into his coat, nipping at anything as they went. Completely outnumbered, he retreated back into the coach, discarding these ravenous little creatures out of the window as the coach sped away.

A defiant pug named Fortune was Josephine’s constant companion. Apparently, Napoleon tried to banish Fortune from the marital bed on the wedding night, but Josephine refused to sleep with him unless Fortune was welcomed into their bed.

The Nautilus (an 1800 submarine) can be seen partially submerged in the waters, just out of Napoleon’s view. Once considered by him as a possible addition to his navy, here it may be planning to evacuate him from this isolated hell hole.

Bonaparte was not to escape from this final exile and died a painful death caused by stomach cancer - or was it arsenic poisoning? On his death bed, he repeatedly begged for a final sip of coffee and which he exclaimed was the only good thing about Saint Helena. He also declared his eternal love for France and Josephine. He died aged 51 in 1821.

Rew Hanks

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"Stop! There's no need to shoot the natives" 2022

hand coloured linocut, edition of 8 + 2AP; 75 x 106 cm

$4,000 unframed / $4,900 framed

 

The interpretation of significant historical artworks is a potent artistic tool for commentary on Australian history. “Stop! There’s no need to shoot the natives” engages with both the iconic 1902 image of Cook’s arrival by Australian impressionist Emanuel Phillips Fox, The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay (1770) and the more recent 2006 post-colonial interpretation by indigenous artist Daniel Boyd, We call them pirates out here.

In Fox’s painting, Cook is portrayed as a compassionate British explorer who beckons to his crew not to fire on the two Aborigines who have their spears raised ready for possible conflict. In contrast, Boyd’s painting depicts Cook as a ruthless pirate waving a flag emblazoned with a skull and cross bone. A small plume of smoke can be seen on the headland contradicting the notion of Terra Nullius.

In Hanks’ linocut, Cook is seen admonishing his crew as they are about to indulge their hunting impulse. Their targets are two kangaroos ready to take flight. One is from a John Gould lithograph and the other from a George Stubbs painting. The later is one of the first representations of this giant macropod and its recent sale to Australia has been stalled by the British government because of its historical significance. His image challenges the recent decision by the New South Wales government to allow amateur hunters to cull feral animals in National Parks without any supervision and regulations and thus placing the safety of native wildlife in serious jeopardy.

Hanks’ concerns extend to the thoughtless introduction of many domestic and agricultural species into Australia. Their careless management and eventual accidental release into arid and coastal environments have contributed to it attaining one of the worst records of native species becoming extinct in the world.

French explorer Le Perouse can be seen exiting this colonial calamity on his windsurfer, unfortunately never to be seen again. Perhaps this may reflect Hanks’ views on the permanency of this loss of wildlife and Australia’s lethargic implementations of environmental initiatives to help arrest this rate of extinction from continuing.

Elin Howe

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Surfing the Bombora 2022

hand coloured linocut, edition of 8 + 2AP; 100 x 74 cm

$4,000 unframed / $4,900 framed

 

Surfing the Bombora puts sporting culture firmly within its sights. In this image, Hanks focuses his critical gaze on macho surfing culture—we see a wooden and graceless Cook, improbably staying upright on his board as he surfs a bombora, accompanied by the ubiquitous cane toad. Bombora is originally an indigenous term for large sea waves which break over a submerged reef or sand bar, but it has been subsumed into contemporary surfing language and abbreviated as ‘bommie’.

Because of the obvious danger, riding a bommie confers immediate hero status on the surfer. And right on cue there is a bevy of Hawaiian maidens watching this hero admiringly from the shore. But wait, behind them is the Botany Bay Hotel. Something is wrong. There are never waves, and certainly not bomboras, in Botany Bay—it’s a flat enclosed stretch of water. Despite this improbability, Surfer Cook has absolutely absorbed  the ethos of macho surfing culture—he puts surfing before all and neglects his duty to record the transit of Venus, happening above in a murderous-looking sky; and he becomes an instant exhibitionist, showing off in front of the beach maidens and drinkers on the pub verandah. He’s also neglecting Botticelli’s Venus (art), as she waits patiently for him in his transit-of-Venus tent.

Other details lurk, waiting to be discovered: Brett Whiteley’s famous matchstick sculptures in the background symbolically interred within a funereal iron fence; Ned Kelly, mingling on the verandah with other pub patrons; and Cook is (impossibly) wearing the beautifully embroidered, but unfinished, waistcoat his wife Elizabeth was making for him at the time of his death. Incommensurable notions clash, but despite this, Hanks’ witty critique of the privileging of sport over art and the problematic relationship between sport and alcohol in Australian culture is clear.

Elin Howe

 

 

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The Battle of the Wills 2022

hand coloured linocut, edition of 8 + 2AP; 104 x 75 cm

$4,000 unframed / $4,900 framed

 

Tom Wills was an all-round sportsman – a talented cricketer and pioneer footballer. Born (1835) into a wealthy family with convict roots, he grew up on pastoralist properties in Victoria, where as a boy he befriended local Aborigines and learned their language and customs. Educated at The Rugby School in England he excelled in the sporting arena, playing later for the Cambridge University Cricket Club and the Marylebone Cricket Club. Returning to Australia in 1856 he continued his sporting success on and off field, becoming a pioneer in the formation of AFL rules. In 1861 while on an eight-month trek into Queensland’s outback with his father, the expedition was attacked by local Aborigines and his father was killed. Wills survived the massacre, returned to Victoria and continued his sporting career. Despite his father’s death at the hands of Aborigines, Wills appears to have resisted the prevailing orthodoxy of homogenising them all into one group.

Subsequently he coached the first Aboriginal XI drawn from the Western District of Victoria, speaking to them in their native Djab Wurrung language which he’d learned as a boy. This team played the Melbourne Cricket Club to great acclaim at the MCG in 1866 and in 1868, under the captaincy of Charles Lawrence, toured to England where they played 47 matches with even results (14 wins; 14 losses; 19 draws). In addition to performing on the cricket pitch, team members would also often entertain the crowd with exhibitions of spear and boomerang throwing afterwards. Another entertainment popular with the crowds involved hurling cricket balls at a player armed with a Nulla Nulla which he would skillfully use to deflect them. Wills’ later career was marked by controversy as he challenged the establishment over game rules, the amateur/professional divide and other issues. Psychologically scarred by his father’s death, he descended into alcoholism, eventually suiciding by stabbing himself with scissors. For Hanks, Wills’ story is grist to the mill – a complex man who could recognise the humanity and athletic skill of indigenous Australians and was prepared to challenge existing norms in order to play with them.

Rew Hanks reconfigures an 1870 heroic cricketing portrait of Wills by William Handcock. He incorporates clues to Wills’ lifelong efforts to straddle the cultural divide – on the left is Anglo culture with a background image of Wills as a young footballer in Geelong colours; a Merino ram pointing to Wills’ pastoralist background; a bottle of Victorian stout; and one of Wills’ favourite caps; on the right is Aboriginal culture with an image of one of the XI, Dick-a-Dick, who toured England in 1868 and, as the image attests, excelled at the post-game Nulla Nulla exhibition of dodging cricket balls; and in the foreground an indigenous Brushtail Possum, whose presence alludes to the Aboriginal game Marngrook (possum skin football) claimed by some to be a forerunner to the AFL code. In the centre a conflicted Wills, clutching the fatal scissors, is here portrayed as something more complex than a cricketing hero.

Rew Hanks

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The conquest 2022

hand coloured linocut, edition of 8 + 2AP; 100 x 75 cm

$4,000 unframed / $4,900 framed

 

Rew Hanks revisits the stories of Captain James Cook’s forays around the South Pacific, while simultaneously addressing our obsession with sport at the expense of art and the environment. His narrative is suspended across two invasion narratives: Cook’s arrival in 1770 from Europe; and the cane toad’s introduction in 1935. Hawaii figures in both stories – romanticised in history paintings, it was the site of Cook’s demise and also from where the cane toad originated.

 

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The hunter and collector 2022

hand coloured linocut, edition of 8 + 2AP; 75 x 106 cm

$4,000 unframed / $4,900 framed

 

The Hunter and Collector is perhaps one of the most successful prints in the series. The central figure of Joseph Banks is loosely inspired by two works—a 1773 mezzotint by J R Smith after Benjamin West's portrait of Banks and the 1774 mezzotint by William Dickinson after Joshua Reynolds' portrait. Like the West portrait, in which the figure of Banks is surrounded by ethnographic objects collected on the Endeavour voyage, Rew Hank's Banks is surrounded by a loose iconography of objects with connections to the central subject. Among these are the eponymous Banksia flowers, May Gibb's wicked 'Banksia Men' and a prickly pear plant, the noxious weed first introduced to Australia at the suggestion of Banks in an attempt to create a local cochineal industry. The greyhounds, rifle and ray refer to Banks' method of collecting fauna specimens, while the skull of a merino sheep refers to Banks' post-exploration occupation as 'Master of the King's Flock'. In a jar can be seen the head of Pemulwuy, a warrior who has come to signify early Indigenous resistance to colonisation, and who participated in an initiation ceremony at yoo-lahng, or Farm Cove (site of the modern Gardens) in 1795. Following his death in 1802, Pemulwuy's head was reportedly decapitated and sent to England to Joseph Banks by the Governor Philip King. Since lost, it was the subject of repatriation claims by Indigenous Australians, who in 2010 approached Prince William in Sydney advocating for its discovery and return.

Anne Ryan

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Peaches and cream 2022

hand coloured linocut, edition of 8 + 2AP; 76 x 56 cm

$2,400 unframed / $2,900 framed

 

The scenario created in the linocut Peaches and Cream highlights the gender stereo-typing readily accepted in Australian culture and has virtually remained unchanged for more than a century.

A confrontational Russell Crowe appears to have just stepped off the movie set of Romper Stomper made in 1992 by Geoffrey Wright where he played Hando the leader of a racist Neo-Nazi gang. Here the muscle-bound Crowe has been cast as a misunderstood youth selflessly mowing the lawn of an aging neighbour or possibly undertaking community service or even perhaps fulfilling his day release commitments from prison. Tattooed across his chest in gothic script reads the words “Skinned Peaches” his favourite dessert.

Transported from last century the aging neighbour is played by an unlikely Dame Nellie Melba. This internationally acclaimed operatic soprano can be seen exciting a classical “Queenslander” homestead carry a bowel of her famous namesake dessert “Peach Melba”. This apron clad subservient housekeeper generously offers this delicacy to the suspect “Hando the Handyman”. In the early 1880’s Melba spent two grueling years combating snakes, leeches and the odd crocodile when bathing in the local river while living in the sugar region of Mackay in far north Queensland. During this brief period in her life she commenced a doomed marriage and gave birth to a son.

Both Melba and Crowe are renowned for their generous support of charities but often put their careers ahead of their family life.

* The two-stroke Victa rotary blade lawn mower was invented by Mervyn Victor Richardson in 1952 in Concord, Sydney. It was made of scrap metal with a peach tin as a fuel tank. It was fondly known as the “Peach –Tin Prototype”.

 

Rew Hanks

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Rabbit pie 2022

hand coloured linocut, edition of 8 + 2AP; 42 x 64 cm

$2,000 unframed / $2,500 framed

 

This satirical still life celebrates the spoils from a prosperous week a rabbiter may have had in the 1930’s after selling his wares of fresh rabbit carcasses and their skins. This candlelit feast offers a tin of fresh tobacco, a cold pint of lager and a steaming hot rabbit pie with ‘extra’ personality. This whimsical print compares an era when rabbit was a staple part of many Australian’s diets, known as ‘poor man’s chicken’, to contemporary cuisine where wild and farmed ‘white’ rabbits are served as a delicacy at elite restaurants. The matchbox carries the logo of the South Sydney rugby league football team founded in 1908. Some believe the team adopted their name from the catch cry of the street venders calling ‘rabbit-oh’ when selling fresh rabbit meat in the backstreets of Redfern. The candlestick holder is decorated with a blackberry motif, a reminder of the untameable bush where the rabbit seeks refuge and the solitary rabbiter might harvest a healthy snack.

Rew Hanks

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The beauty of ink 2022

hand coloured linocut, edition of 8 + 2AP; 72 x 57 cm

$2,000 unframed / $2,500 framed

 

English painter, printmaker and pictorial satirist William Hogarth painted a self-portrait The Painter and his dog in 1745. Hogarth portrayed himself as a learned artist supported by volumes of Shakespeare, Milton and Swift in casual attire. He shares his own theories on art by inscribing the palette with ‘Line of Beauty and Grace’. Hogarth’s favourite pug dog Trump represents the artist’s legendary pugnacious nature.

In Rew Hanks’ self-portrait he parodies Hogarth’s work questioning the supremacy continually bestowed upon painters over the manufacturers of the ‘minor’ art form of printmaking. Provocatively his palette is emblazoned with the words The beauty of ink. The foreground is cluttered with tools of the trade frequently used by printmakers and reminiscent of Hogarth’s own graphic interpretation The Painter and his dog Trump. Hanks’ pug, a very rotund ‘Tilly’ appears to share her master’s battle with an ever-expanding girth. It is very obvious that both Hogarth and Hanks share a deep fondness for this very odd-looking breed.

 

Elin Howe

 

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