ALEKS DANKO

A(GAP)E— mesmerized by some / thing.
A reflection 2016 – 2026

For over fifty years, Aleks Danko has shown an unwavering interest in the ways people interact with art. Now in his mid-seventies, Danko’s observations of the absurdities of the art world and contemporary life are as fresh and provocative as those of his early career, his focus and wit razor sharp.

A(GAP)E is an exhibition of work made by Danko over the past ten years. Curated by the artist himself, it is a distillation of his critique of the conventions governing the making of art, and how and where it is encountered, perceived and read.

In Danko’s conceptualisation of A(GAP)E the gallery visitor plays an essential role. For each work is incomplete until the visitor brings to it their memories, experiences, desires and moods. A(GAP)E does not offer a passive art experience, rather an intuitive, complicit and consciousness-raising one.

Aleks Danko began making art in the late 1960s. As well as being a period of acute political and social upheaval internationally, the era precipitated Australia’s cultural transition from modernist painting and sculpture, with its unyielding principles of autonomy, authorship and originality to post-modernism’s assault on the art object and its radical questioning of the role and status of art. New movements and forms—conceptualism, performance art, ‘happenings’, Minimalism, and Fluxus— privileged processes and ideas over objects.

Audiences are invited to enjoy this collection of beguiling, poetic, darkly funny works by one of Australia’s leading spatial practitioners.