GERRY BELL - 'IF ANYTHING'
One Star Lounge & Gallery - 30th July - 9th August 2026
Convention has it the critic that reviews his own work exhibits a fatal conflict of interest. By the same token, to pretend one’s standards are independent of one’s own art practice is disingenuous. Choices and evaluations are guided by private taste and convictions. While I fall foul of good manners here, I nevertheless preserve the protocol of referring to the artist in the third person.
Installation view, main room
The show of twenty-one easel-size acrylic paintings on canvas is the artist’s first solo show in seven years and his first at the modest One Star Lounge and Gallery in west Melbourne. The gallery has no website but operates through Facebook and Instagram accounts. Bell is a veteran of the Melbourne scene with an exhibition record stretching back to the eighties, a work in the NGV collection, a background in commercial art and reputation as a critic, writing for Melbourne Art Seen.
The curious title ‘If Anything’ takes a contrary conditional phrase to signify an attitude counter to assumptions or assertions. If anything, Bell downplays the challenge.
NB - CLICK ON IMAGES FOR ENLARGEMENT
Senior Rider (2025) 107 X 92 cm acrylic/canvas
His work was last seen in a group show in 2022 at the Kingston Arts gallery in Moorabbin and the concerns with web-sourced imagery, iconic or symbolic figures and fauna, continues in a treatment that owes something to digital graphics, but invites a looser, more painterly technique – claiming territory for painting that graphics has so far little use for. The approach is Bell’s main claim to originality. And to the visitor’s eye, the process is not obvious although the results are all the same, strange, intriguing.
Rapid Response (2024) 84 X 71 cm acrylic/canvas
Hardship confines the artist to a modest scale and working at home and the preference for a portrait format reflects his distaste for the reduced scale and an attempt to make the picture ‘look bigger’.
The variety of subjects or themes arises through a process whereby individual themes are explored at length in digital sketches and then a range of these themes is selected for extension into paintings. With that, the suggestion of underlying themes or affinities linking seemingly disparate subjects arises, and these are a key aspect of Bell’s project. Hence in the current show images of jet fighters jostle with fashion models, power scooter riders and mythic figures from the media and comics, for a ‘macho’ aesthetic reflecting the artist’s early interest in Pop Art.
Taking Black Mountain By Fly-By (2024) 107 X 92cm acrylic/canvas
Taking Black Mountain By Fly-by (2024) offers an unusually elaborate title for the artist and a complex allusion to political forces. ‘Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy’ was a famous Maoist ballet celebrating victory in the Chinese civil war (1927-49) with a noted film version made in 1970. ‘Black Mountain’ on the other hand, was an important arts college in North Carolina where Bauhaus principles of integrated art and design were practiced. The Fly-by part of the title is self-evident, the imaginary jet fighter a dubious meeting of art and design in the interests of capitalism.
Vigilante Nights (2024) 107 X 92 cm acrylic/canvas
The crossover from actual or literal subjects, such as the street vigilante in Vigilante Nights (2024) to more mythic or theatrical figures such as Housework Muse or Red Falcons On The Roof-rack: A Bad Omen (2024) is part of ground the artist attempts to stake out and the results are again, strange, unexpected. We are not quite in the realm of popular culture or allegory, and it is largely the manner of painting that gives pause.
Housework Muse (2025) 84 X 71 cm acrylic/canvas
Red Falcons On The Roofrack: A Bad Omen (2024) 107 X 92 cm acrylic/canvas
The brushwork conveys an expressive tenor, an involvement that does not quite undercut the iconography but creates a curious ambivalence or irony. The subject is not fully engaged, the treatment is in some sense self-mocking, as if engagement itself were not really possible. This may be a refinement of post-modern convictions.
Parroty (2024) 51 X 40 cm acrylic/canvas
In other examples this tendency pushes toward abstraction, as in Parroty (2024) and Spoon (2025) where subject is subject to more formal concerns, quite apart from web sources. A spoon, perhaps derived from an ad, revels in a looser, gestural approach that is trivialised for the exercise.
Spoon (2025) 51 X 40 cm acrylic/canvas
Whatever the source, one no longer has the sense of engaging with a wider iconography, but of painting auditing options for abstraction, in lieu of finding some more compelling subject. The sense of multiple approaches, possibly of multiple worlds or versions, also resides somewhere in Bell’s variety of subjects. And the pluralism is again of a piece with much post-modernism. Bell’s distinction lies in variety wrestling with virtuosity. The work perhaps deserves some other label – ‘Globalism, say – and the artist’s reluctance to confine himself to local or national subjects certainly supports a global scope. An appeal to the web all but guarantees a global perspective really.
Bum Steer (2024) 84 X 71 cm acrylic/canvas
A number of works take animals (wild and tame) as subjects and here too it is notable that the interest is less with photographic observation than imposing a more symbolic meaning. Bum Steer (2024) is an obvious example, where a horse acquires a steer’s horns and a stunning blue coat, to represent an amusing hybrid beast, again a mythic macho mount. As with Parroty, the image is divided, or offers a parity so that one assumes two views of a single beast or half views of two beasts. Our familiarity with horses inclining us to see it as a whole horse (even with horns) mostly blue and altogether otherworldly.
Bower (2025) 51 X 40 cm acrylic/canvas
Animals have a long history of myth, at least as long as observation, and even where this is not strictly available, as with a local bower bird, Bell’s treatment is intent upon some more mysterious significance. Observation here is stripped of many common features, a camera’s long lens compression adding to the abstracted, non-natural sense.
At seventy-four, Bell’s work understandably reflects a growing confidence with both a well-developed art theory and painting technique. While lacking long-term commitment of a gallery, he has nevertheless maintained a professional rigour in his website, offering a comprehensive archive (rarely matched elsewhere) extending to early films (by link) his history in commercial art and stories. If Anything marks the refinement of his project, a focus on key themes (but by no means the only ones – landscapes for example, find no place in the show). With a backlog of work since his 2019 show at Mora Galleries, running into the hundreds, no show could accommodate everything. But having now established a framework, future shows have a starting point and it remains to be seen where the artist takes the work next.
IMAGES COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Thanks to
One Star Lounge & Gallery for help in preparing this review
