Akky van Ogtrop

    
Akky van Ogtrop
Print Council of Australia
akkyvano@bigpond.net.au
www.printcouncil.org.au


Biography

Akky van Ogtrop graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, majoring in printmaking, and has a Masters Degree Fine Arts, Sydney University.
Akky is the founder and Executive Director of the Sydney Art on Paper Fair. She has worked as an arts administrator and creative manager on major national and international events, including the Biennale of Sydney, and as an art historian and independent curator with art museums, galleries and contemporary art spaces. She is an Approved Valuer for the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program.
Akky is the President of the Print Council of Australia and a foundation member of the Art Gallery of NSW.


Abstract

International Investigations in Print. Navigating New Territories/Connecting Traditions: Recent Prints in Australia
Contemporary manifestations of Australia’s diverse cultural traditions thrive in Australian printmaking. This talk discusses how artists have navigated old and new skill sets, media and technologies to connect new audiences with traditional stories and annex new cultural territories.

Brook Andrew combines abstracted signifiers of his Aboriginal heritage with figurative and text-based works to critique official accounts of history and colonial discourses. Acknowledging his Tongan ancestry, Queenslander Samuel Tupou manipulates a large digital image bank to print ‘Tiki culture’ — faux exotic Polynesian images in a pop art style. Alick Tipoti has adapted Torres Strait Islander carving skills to linocut techniques on an epic scale. Combining natural history with the supernatural, he retells complex traditional stories in breathtaking prints of up to eight metres in length.

Since the first voyages of Antipodean exploration, Europeans have been fascinated by Australia’s flora and fauna. Updating Australia’s natural history print heritage, their descendants are creating new print aesthetics through cutting-edge technologies, linked to scientific data about Australia’s biota. Melissa Smith’s exhibition about an important endangered marine species included 3D printed shells, QR-code generated relief prints, and prints generated using CADCAM software and a CNC Router on linoleum. Eleanor Gates-Stuart and Julie Ryder use high-resolution scanners and digital imaging software to manipulate, colour and print from botanical samples. Garth Henderson’s computer-generated mathematical constructs of futuristic flora mimic the organic.

Countering this trend, Australia’s major printmaking award recently recognised three artists who use near obsolete print techniques to creatively challenge cultural assumptions. Ampersand Duck’s letterpress poem Discontent questions the human urge to explore the unknown — to navigate new territories, while Lucas Ihlein & Ian Milliss’ suite of offset litho prints combine text and image to recognise farming innovation as a cogent form of cultural innovation.

Exhibitions

Peripheral Vision, Australian Prints since 1968
The general understanding of Australia’s existence as a culture on the periphery, from the ‘far-flung colonies’ of the nineteenth century to the isolated nation of the twentieth century, continued up until the 1960s. Even as a robust national identity was being forged in the 1890s in the lead-up to federation, Australian artists and writers felt compelled to head for the cultural capitals of Europe for enrichment. The generation that reached adulthood in the late 1950s and early 1960s were to provide one of the last streams of Australian cultural exiles, (one thinks of the intellectuals Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes and artists Sydney Nolan and Arthur Boyd).  Those who grew to maturity in the late sixties were the first to see cultural hubs growing within the capital cities in Australia, and were seeing the nation as culturally robust and no longer searching for its identity. Artists and writers no longer felt the imperative to leave the country to establish a career. The establishment of the Print Council of Australia (PCA) in 1967 was part of this historic cultural shift. 

 The PCA was formed by artists and curators determined to build a community of print practitioners and collectors in Australia. The Council began annually commissioning a work by an Australian printmaker for distribution among members. This commissioned print process has been so successful that, after forty-seven years, the PCA can now commission up to ten works per year. The Print Council’s extensive archive of these prints provides a unique mapping of the development of this new cultural ‘self-esteem’ from 1968 to the present day.

Peripheral Vision, Australian Prints since 1968, curated by PCA President Akky van Ogtrop, is a survey of unframed prints drawn from the PCA Print Archive collection.