Loplop presente Lop-lop

Andrew Frost

Although all art might be said to stand in for the artist in some fundamental way some art is inextricably connected to its maker.  Max Ernst’s Loplop was a bird-like creature that made recurring appearances in various prints, paintings and collages, and was the main character and narrator of the collage novels La Femme 100 Tetes and Une Semaine de Bonte. Kurt Schranzer’s exhibition of resurrects Ernst’s alter ego in a sequence of collage drawings that shift between abstraction and figuration.

Schranzer’s previous work has in the past included bodies and machine parts but where those works suggested the intersection of flesh and metal Loplop presente Lop-lop is a fascinating excursion through time and space with tightly wound graphs and lines connecting machine elements held at a tense distance.  Schranzer works at small scale to create images that suggest the folding and unfolding of space and time as dense curlicues of graph paper swirl into cones, while the visual field is littered with the debris of the surveyor. Schranzer’s world may be obscure but it’s compelling.

Until December 21

Flinders Street Gallery, Surry Hills

http://www.flindersstreetgallery.com/#/album/5e030y

Pic: Kurt Schranzer, Lop-Lop and the Astronomical Storm (for Utagawa Sadahide), 2013. Giclee print, pigment ink on cotton paper, 42x49cm Courtesy of Flinders Street Gallery.