James Fardoulys / Dean Manning - painting Exhibition THE AIR IS FREE - Opens July 3 at 2 pm. Delmar Gallery, 144 Victoria Street Ashfield, Sydney NSW

To be opened by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Assistant Director & Senior Curator, Artbank.

Artist talk by Dean Manning, Saturday 16 July, 2 pm.

Exhibition continues to July 31 (Wednesday to Sunday 12-5pm).

Curator Catherine Benz.

Winter fest at the opening with Greek style lamb on the spit courtesy of Father Leslie.

DELMAR GALLERY Trinity Grammer School

144 Victoria Street Ashfield NSW 2131

In a studio on a South Brisbane verandah, James Fardoulys (1900-1975)

conjured Australian outback and colonial scenes in high register colour

and a carnivalesque tone. He arrived in Australia from Kythera, Greece

in 1914, and criss-crossed outback Queensland and NSW with his

ventriloquist wife and vaudeville troupe in the 1920s. Taking up painting

after he retired from taxi driving in 1960, Fardoulys mixed memories with

whimsy, history with fantasy, and quickly established himself as one of

Australia’s foremost naïve painters.

In a kitchen in Athens in 2016, Dean Manning (1964-) mixed traditional

Greek pigments to etch out fragments of Athenian life: portraits of rembetiko

singers from the 1920s, graffiti and street protests, smoke and conversation

in cafes, refugees arriving in Onassis’ port, Ariadne’s thread and the Minotaur.

His paintings and video animation find their way beneath the surface of his

father’s homeland. Like Fardoulys, Manning is part of the Greek diaspora

and a self-taught painter, arriving at painting through his music.

The Air is Free brings together Manning’s imagined Greece with Fardoulys’

imagined Australia.