This Big in the Afterlife, 1990
oil on canvas
179.5 x 179.5 cm (image); 198 x 198 cm (framed)
signed, dated and inscribed '"THIS BIG IN THE AFTERLIFE" Stephen Bush' and further 'Stephen Bush 25/990-14/10/90/"THIS BIG IN THE AFTERLIFE"' (all on the reverse)
Provenance
Private collection, Melbourne
Important Australian & International Art Auction, Mossgreen Auctions, Melbourne, 13 November 2007, Lot No. 31
Private collection, Melbourne
Exhibited
Claiming. An Installation of Paintings by Stephen Bush, ACCA, Melbourne, 27 February – 17 March 1991, cat. 13
Blackwood Skyline: Stephen Bush; work in progress #5, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, February 2003, cat.28, illus.
Literature
Naomi Cass, Kevin Murray and Juliana Enberg, Claiming. An Installation of Paintings by Stephen Bush, exh. cat.,
Melbourne, 1991
Peter Hutchings, 'Hegel after Warhol: Stephen Bush and the spirits of the age', in Blackwood Skyline: Stephen Bush; work in
progress #5, Melbourne, 2003, p.5
This big in the afterlife (1990) comes from an early body of work in which Bush deployed the compositional and stylistic tropes of pre-modern United States art in ironic reflections upon colonial ways of seeing. Exhibited in Claiming: An Installation of Paintings by Stephen Bush, Australian Centre of Contemporary Art (1991), each painting contained self-portraits of the artist in absurd and anachronistic scenarios. In This big in the artlife, Bush is both an heroic figure – described by Naomi Cass in the catalogue essay as "the general, the patron, the owner, the artist, the leader, the actor, the president" – and the supplicants at his feet.
Of the exhibition, curator Naomi Cass observed 'Various genres are recalled here, with varying degrees of truth or seriousness: the tableau, sepia photograph, nineteenth century travel post card, anthropological photograph, propaganda poster, 1950s advertising. These slide together, not in pronouncement of the artist's invention but as repertoire.' (Naomi Cass, Kevin Murray and Juliana Enberg, ibid, 1991, p.4)
In Bush's classic play of repeated paintings, a further composition, This big in the afterlife, too (1992, Art Gallery of Western Australia), shows the same composition and characters recast as frontiersman or explorers.
Image courtesy of the artist