Dürer-inspired etching series

Geelong Gallery is presenting a suite of contemporary etchings from Australian artists Raymond Arnold and Ian Westacott.

Double Vision: Mapping Dürer in a Time of Crisis exhibition begins tomorrow (Saturday, August 3) and will showcase works in direct response to Albrecht Dürer’s master engraving, Melencolia I (1514).

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was a prolific German Renaissance artist most recognised for his significant achievements in printmaking.

Dürer’s work “Melencolia I” depicts the winged personification of Melancholy, a solitary figure who sits dolefully amid various instruments and objects, largely measuring devices associated with the sciences of weights, time keeping, acoustics, architecture, perspective and geometry.

Arnold and Westacott first viewed the piece together in early 2020 at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, before the pandemic saw them operating from different sides of the world.

This project involved the artists drawing and etching 18 objects found in Dürer’s composition onto A4 copper plates.

The printed images were then exchanged between Australia, where Arnold was living in 2020, to Westacott, who was 15,000 miles away in Scotland at the time.

Each artist took turns printing their own images on top of the first and interpreting the complete Dürer image, with a focus on the winged personification of Melancholy.

The works were acquired by the Colin Holden Charitable Trust in 2022 and are on long-term loan to Geelong Gallery.

As part of the exhibition, Dr Matthew S. Champion, senior lecturer in history at the University of Melbourne, will consider the astonishing proliferation of measurement devices in “Melencolia I” in an illustrated lecture at the gallery on September 20.

Attendees will be asked to consider what thinking about the making, meaning, and use of these objects in renaissance Nuremberg reveals about Dürer’s landmark engraving.

Double Vision: Mapping Dürer in a Time of Crisis will be exhibited at Geelong Gallery from August 3 until October 27. Entry is free.

For more information, head to geelonggallery.com.au