In Flamenco Primitivo, Jubelin exhibits petit point renditions of formative regional Modernist works including Anni Albers, Lina Bo Bardi, Lee Bontecou, José Guerrero, Hannah Höch, Ree Morton, Pablo Picasso, Mira Schendel and a collaboration between Josef Albers and Harry Seidler. A key element of her oeuvre, Jubelin’s intricate and laborious sewing works compel the spectator to engage with the intimacy of scale, whilst mobilising the concept of needlepoint as ‘women’s work’.
The artist employs a redemptive curatorial practice to re-exhibit these modernist touchstones, offering a critique on the complexities of canonisation and the barriers inherent within art-historical precedents.
Marking the second time the artist has worked with the material, the exhibition also includes five bronze works cast from packaging buffers designed for secure travel over huge distances – hinting at the geographies of her practice.
The pieces reposition common disposable materials – in this grouping, collected from Granada, Madrid, São Paulo and Sydney – as quasi-Modernist, totemic sculptures. In monumentalising objects literally made to serve other items as they circulate through the world, throwaway facilitators for things of greater value, Jubelin teases out established ideas of material and cultural worth. Left untreated after casting, the works remain in a raw state, bearing comment on the established language of sculpture, whilst bringing the artist’s creative process of collating to the fore.
Also included in the exhibition are found and assembled video works which document ‘unrepeatable’ moments of the artist’s own experience. Through the capture of intimate cultural performances these pieces consider the way in which individuals digest and record histories of creative difference – personally and politically – whilst assessing how such experiences translate between cultures.
Naralle Jubelin has exhibited widely over the last twenty years including the Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2009); Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (1994); the Renaissance Society, Chicago (1994); the Hayward Gallery, London (1992) and the Venice Biennale (1990). Solo shows have been held at Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2014); Casa Encendida, Madrid (2012); the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2009) and Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2009). Jubelin’s works are held in major public collections including the Albertina Print Museum, Vienna; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.