documentary films on the creative arts

Argy Bargy: Dean Bowen

Synopsis:

A 60 minute documentary on the life and practise of Australian painter, sculptor and printmaker Dean Bowen.

From a 2009 essay by Sheridan Palmer:  In a rapidly changing, urbanised world, Dean Bowen's art maps our metropolitan and emotional conditions, transforming contemporary rituals and memories into accessible images, emblems and narratives. Indeed, Bowen persuades us to look not so much at the grand or romantic spectacle but at ourselves, and those intimate elements we often take for granted. His paintings, sculpture and prints show us a world populated by birds, animals, humans, aeroplanes, trucks and quirky automobiles.

But with a subtle manoeuvring of our senses he guides us to intangible places where the earth meets the sky, or where the mysterious realm of stars, space, light and darkness, fullness, emptiness, movement and inertia invite our emotional and intuitive faculties into play. His images are usually reductive, even primal, an aesthetic language that invokes the simple pleasures of the natural world or the honed rhythms of a mechanical metropolis.

Moreover, Bowen's art shatters the notion of post-structuralist complexities and the sterile elegance of conceptualism, with an emphasis on a 'radical innocence', a figurative engagement that is at once playfully antagonistic yet felicitously humorous.