A fitting finale for an Adelaide gallery whose swagger will be hard to replicate

After 32 years, the good ship Greenaway gallery, flying the GAGPROJECTS flag, has reached final moorings. Some ropes will tether it to Adelaide. GAGPROJECTS has been reborn as GAG Art Advisory, pivoting between Adelaide and Berlin. The office space and store/viewing room remain. There will be a focus on art valuations, commissioning of works, advising on acquisitions and sales of works.

Released from the role of gallerist, Greenaway is anticipating a more free-ranging professional journey with enthusiasm. In the evolutionary spirit of its journey, this chameleon is reinventing itself and continuing to contribute to Adelaide’s “art scene”.

But let’s not pretend otherwise. This city has lost one of its few pre-eminent, independent contemporary art spaces. When Greenaway Art Gallery launched in 1992, the local contemporary scene was pumping, with heavy lifting being supplied by spaces which have since closed. This list includes Artspace, Anima Gallery, Chesser Gallery, the Contemporary Art Centre, Experimental Art Foundation, post-west, Art Zone and Union Gallery.

Paul Greenaway gives a speech at GAGPROJECTS’ final exhibition opening for the SALA Festival. Photo: supplied

Be of good cheer because new players have kept emerging: Samstag Museum of Art, Flinders University Museum of Art, praxis ARTSPACE, Adelaide Central Gallery, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental and Hugo Michell Gallery, as well as Art Gallery of SA programs associated with the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art and Tarnanthi. Parallel to this, artist collective spaces, local council and regional galleries, and established galleries such as BMG Art contribute to the mix.

Nonetheless it will be hard to replicate the GAG swagger and intriguing melange that has characterised each calendar year’s mix of shows. Take time to scroll through the GAG site archive of 645 plus exhibitions from 1992 to the present day and you’ll get the picture. Paul Greenaway’s taste and instincts as a gallerist are revealed.

Yes, he had the reputation and connections to convene an A list (Davila, Tillers, Gascoigne et al). But the backbone of his program was composed of emerging and established South Australian artists who were inspired by their inclusion to challenge their own practice and risk exposure to new audiences.

GAG never settled on a single media or format. Artists working in photographic and video media regularly appeared alongside sculptors who invariably challenged the conventions of plinth sculpture through installation strategies. “Outsider” artists such as Iris Frame or Danny Fotopoulos (current exhibition) continued to be welcomed and showcased.

From Greenaway’s perspective, the space was never a commercial but a “private gallery”. How else to explain the showcasing of so many artists’ works which embraced risk, more of interest to serious collectors and institutions than a buying public looking for something to cuddle up to. GAG exhibitions invariably offered, as the British artist Frank Auerbach has said of good art, a sense of escape “from a thicket of prepared positions” where it attains “some sort of freedom where it exists on its own”.

I believe that the gallerist Paul Greenaway and his exhibiting artists always bore this in mind, and the Adelaide “art scene” was the more interesting and challenging because of it.

Gallery visitors among the works of sculptor Danny Fotopoulos at GAGPROJECTS this month. Photo supplied

It is appropriate Deborah Paauwe’s association bookends GAG’s three-decade span. Her first solo show was held at Greenaway Art Gallery in 1994, and the artist has continued to exhibit at the gallery to the present day.

I have been fortunate to observe and write about Paauwe’s journey over this time. It struck me, looking at these latest photographs, that the artist has demonstrated a remarkable fixity of gaze. The elements that defined her work as an emerging artist have endured. The subjects are pre-teens, adolescents and young women captured in small moments of intimacy in which gesture, clothing and fashion accessories curate a reading of the image.

The young women who populate the current exhibition, The Other Twin, are served up in slices. Faces are cropped, heads turn away. Hair falls across features. Paauwe’s camera is a roving eye, seizing on small gestures of hands, the behaviour of garments as they encase a body and ornamental features such flowers, ruffs and bows. These are studio shots. Controlled lighting and tight visual editing distance the subjects for the viewer, who may feel more of a voyeur, or a fashion industry buyer riffling through a catalogue of next season’s lines.

Deborah Paauwe, The Gingham Society, 2024, courtesy GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide.

The tension that Paauwe’s images evoke is built on ambiguity. Are we looking at innocent moments of adolescent fantasy? Are these young women toying with self-identity? Of becoming an adult? Tenderness of gestures and suggestions of playing dress-ups might skew the reading into reassuring tropes of innocent pleasure and reverie but the legacy of cinematic creepy dolls and possessed children can cast a shadow.

Long tresses massed together to create a topography of common identity is analogous to the crackling synapses of social media. Through such means Paauwe has returned to a few central themes which authentically express her interest in, as she says, “the flux between identity, childhood and adolescence… the continuous interplay between the intuitive reactions of the child and the considered responses of our adult selves”.

In this exhibition we are treated to an extensive catalogue of finely calibrated gestures such as arms interlocked or encircling a waist, fingers interlaced or hands outthrust in self-conscious display. In association with a diversity of fabrics – gingham, organza taffeta and lace – fashioned at times into bows and floral ornamentation, these scenarios are awash with desire to retain that sense of remembering what it was like when the look, the smell, the feel and the sounds of the journey from child to adulthood mattered above all else. Perhaps we all harbour “the other twin” who occupies this shadow world while our current selves get on with the business of living day to day.

“The older we get,” the poet Charles Wright has written, “the deeper we dig into our childhoods, Hoping to find the radiant cell That washed us, and caused our lives to glow in the dark like clock hands Endlessly turning toward the future.”

Deborah Paauwe, The Other Twin, is showing at GAGPROJECTS until August 24 as part of the 2024 SALA Festival. In its final exhibition, the gallery is also presenting work by Danny Fotopoulos and Kurt Bosecke.