The Big Gum at Langetty c.1970/2023 by Tim Gregory

Size (cm): 79.5 x 49
purchased painting, sanded pigment reconstituted into oil paint
The work is a modification of an original landscape painting, “The Big Gum at Langetty” c.1970 by Frank Mutsaers that was purchased from eBay. It was made by sanding the word “landscape” into the original painting and collecting the sanded pigment from above and below the horizon line. The pigment was hand-ground into two new oil paints and reapplied to its respective half of the painting. Using only the original pigment, the painting’s genre has been inscribed onto the canvas. It names the genre that supports the possessive logic of settler-colonialism. Its iconoclastic modification attacks the everyday amateur settler landscape painting tradition in Australia, or what William Kentridge refers to as ‘the plague of the picturesque’.