KEITH BROADFOOT’S Crossing the Divide: von Guérard After Tillers featured in Memo Art Magazine

Imants Tillers, Mount Analogue, 1985

synthetic polymer paint, oilstick on 165 canvasboards, nos. 7416–7580

279 x 571.5 cm, Collection of the National Gallery of Australia

In Memo Art Magazine’s latest publication (Issue 4, Summer 25) Keith Broadfoot, Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Sydney, discusses Tillers’ 1985 painting Mount Analogue and it’s effect on the painting it appropriated Eugene von Guérard's North-East View from the Northern Top of Mount Kosciusko (1863).

Both paintings belong to the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, but have been hung in close proximity for the first time as part of the exhibition A Bigger View currently on display at HOTA (Home of the Arts), on the Gold Coast, Queensland. The exhibition will continue until the 31st May, having opened in June of 2024 as part of the Australian Government’s ‘Sharing the Collection’ initiative.

‘Attracted, as is his custom, to the copy instead of the original, in 1985, Imants Tillers gridded a reproduction of Eugene von Guérard's North-East View from the Northern Top of Mount Kosciusko (1863). Coming across an image of the painting on the cover of an exhibition catalogue, Tillers painstakingly transferred his small, squared -up reproduction onto multiple canvas boards, creating the massive, mural-like work that has become his signature style. Mount Analogue, positioned within the progression of Tillers's work, emerges as a decisive piece. With its monumental size, accentuated by the fact that the entire work refers to just one painting, it is a dramatic declaration of the artist's relationship to the history of Australian art. But what might this relationship be? What happens in the transition from the von Guérard original to Tillers's copy?

How, after Tillers, do we now look back at von Guérard?’