Landprint I 2000

IMANTS TILLERS born 1950

Landprint I 2000

synthetic polymer paint and gouache on canvas boards (54)
229.0 x 213.0 cm (overall); 25.0 x 35.5 cm (each)
inscribed to backing: Landprint I
each board numbered verso

Provenance:
Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide
Private collection, Adelaide

Exhibited:
Imants Tillers, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, 21 June - 16 July 2000, cat.8

Estimate: $40000 - 60000

Imants Tillers is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists, having represented the nation in the São Paulo Biennial (1975), the Biennale of Sydney (1979, 1986, 1988 & 2006), Documenta 7 (1982) and the Venice Biennale (1986). In 2006 the National Gallery of Australia held a significant retrospective titled Imants Tillers: One World Many Visions.(1) More recently, in 2018, a major exhibition of Tillers' work, Journey to Nowhere, was held at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, an acknowledgement of Tillers’ Latvian heritage.

Tillers’ successful career is owing to his highly disciplined practice whereby all his works since the early 1980s have been constructed using his signature canvas boards, as seen in Landprint I. He developed this system of painting in 1981, in which multiple canvas board panels fit together to form large, gridded works.(2) The individual boards are numbered from 1 onwards, and are considered to be part of a ‘continually-expanding whole’, collectively titled the Book of Power.(3) In this format, his paintings have explored many themes over the decades, including image reproduction, diaspora, landscape, metaphysics and global politics. In acquiring a painting by Tillers, one is not only acquiring 54 individual panels, but also a segment of the quixotic Book of Power, Tiller’s all-encompassing magnum opus.

Tillers’ Nature Speaks works of the late 1990s and early 2000s are his most recognised and desirable. His Landprint paintings appear as a subset of this series, using the same dusty bronze layers of imagery and text, overlaid with a large-scale fingerprint, which cleverly resembles a topographical map of a landscape. The series’ impetus was the Tillers family’s move in 1996 from Sydney to the small town of Cooma in the Monaro region of southern New South Wales. Tillers described this regional outpost as ‘godforsaken, bleak, arid, [and] treeless.’(4) Despite these harsh words, he was no doubt inspired by the ‘austere vistas of a landscape tempered by heat, frost, drought and decomposing granite.’(5) The severe nature of his environment became inescapable to him in a way that urban Sydney never had, impressing itself on his psyche and giving rise to his Nature Speaks series, where layered text and iconography evoke the landscape.

The word ‘horizon’ looms largest in Landprint I, a typescript substitute in the place of an actual skyline - a frequent occurrence throughout the series. Other phrases and words are drawn from diverse sources, creating a convergence of ideas and a multiplicity of references. For example, there is a fragment from Japanese American artist Shusaka Arakawa’s book The Mechanism of Meaning 1979: ‘the distance out of which who repeatedly hypostatised speaks.’ In the lower left, partly obscured, is the phrase ‘we have decided not to die,’ taken from Australian filmmaker Daniel Askill’s 2004 short film. French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s phrase ‘a throw of the dice will never abolish chance’ borders the work in bright blue letters, as it does repeatedly throughout the series.

A less abstract reference is the word ‘basalt’ stenciled prominently in yellow at the bottom and right edges of the composition. This is a gesture to the Monaro region’s geological history, where millions of years ago lava cooled to form basalt beneath the treeless Monaro plains south of Cooma.(6) Majority of the text is made up by the local placenames, including Bolaro, Caddigat, Bredbo, Numeralla, and Tombong. Tillers’ various visual elements come together to create a patchworked whole, the poetic romanticism and stark austerity as direct reflections of the Monaro landscape itself.

Footnotes

1. Hart, D. (ed.), Imants Tillers: One World Many Visions, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2006
2. ‘Biography’, Imants Tillers, accessed March 2025: https://www.imantstillers.com/biography
3. Ibid.
4. Tillers, I., ‘When Locality Prevails’, Heat, Sydney, no.8, new series, 2004, p.114
5. Ibid.
6. Lennox, P., Geological History of the Cooma Area, University of New South Wales, Sydney, n.p.

Asta Cameron

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