Narelle Jubelin: Flamenco Primitivo

Narelle Jubelin is well known to our readers. She was the first artist published in issue 01 METALOCUS, her work has continued to publish on other times, as on 05 or 20, and constantly she is noted on other works. Jubelin was born in Sydney in 1960, she has lived and worked in Madrid since 1996. Her work engages with the translation of visual international culture, with particular reference to the legacies of Modernists. For over two decades, Jubelin has stitched miniature petit points, combining them with objects and textual citations in architectural, photographic and painterly installations.

Exploring the way objects travel through the world, Jubelin uses art and architectural movements as a vehicle through which to navigate such flows. The physical context of Jubelin’s work is central to the exhibition; Marlborough, and the gallery’s own relationship with seminal artists such as Bacon, almost instinctually become part of the artist’s narrative.

The exhibition feature thirteen works in petit point, all are images reference to other artists. There are 20th century masters like Pablo Picasso or a collaboration between Josef Albers and Harry Seidler, as well as 21st century stars such as Christopher Wool and Austrian collective Gelitin. In amongst these familiar figures are half a dozen works referencing female artists whose names have had a more circuitous journey into the annals of art history. Works by Anni Albers, Lina Bo Bardi, Lee Bontecou, José Guerrero, Hannah Höch, Ree Morton or Mira Schendel.

As a preface to the publication produced for this exhibition Jubelin has included a passage from a text by John Berger, read to her as a birthday gift by a friend last year.  It describes the two of them lying on their backs, gazing up at the stars.  It conjures the image of the people who first gave names to the constellations, positioning them as the tellers of tales. “Imagining the constellations didn’t alter the stars, nor the black void that surrounds them.  What changed was the way we read the night sky”. It is a very neat metaphor as it quite precisely defines this questioning of the processes, if not the individuals who ‘join the dots’ between facts in creating histories.

In between the framed works are a series of prototype for bronze sculptures that hang on the walls. Reading as geometric abstract reliefs in monochromatic modernity, are, in fact,  cardboard packaging molds used to protect goods in transit. They are Duchampian objects, an objet trouvé / found object, as well as subtly referencing the flows of merchandise around the globe that so characterise the age we live in. Also included in the exhibition are two films. These are not artists’ films but rather films of extraordinary events witnessed by the artist. One is the silent performance by the Flamenco singer Nino de Elche, wearing a Francis Bacon T-shirt, indirectly referencing Marlborough’s own art history, from whose work the exhibition takes its title. The other is footage of a dance of welcome performed by an Aboriginal artist in Australia.  The films anchor the coordinates of Jubelin’s life while emphasising the pre-eminence of lived experience.