Hello. Goodbye.
After nearly a decade in Newcastle, Mario Minichiello is getting his first solo art exhibition.
Within two months, Minichiello and his wife, illustrator Liz Anelli, will be leaving Newcastle and heading back to live in Cambridge in the UK.
Minichiello came to Newcastle to work as a professor of design at the University of Newcastle. That job has come to an end, part of the university's major program cuts.
Minichiello's show, A Time of Chaos: The Quick and The Dead, will show at Clyde Street Studios in Hamilton North, opening on Monday, January 10, from 5.30pm to 7.300pm.
Although Minichiello worked in academia in the UK prior to moving to Australia, he had a lengthy career as an artist and illustrator.
"Usually you have a show when you arrive, not when you leave," Minichiello teases about The Quick and The Dead. "I'm still finishing a couple of works on Covid, but much of it is a retrospective."
There will be about 60 works in the show, much of showcasing illustrations he did during his busiest, full-time years as an illustrator and artist in the 1980s and 1990s.
To have some ambiguity in any work is important, because it gives all of the different doors the ability to open," he says. "The title The Quick and The Dead is a biblical reference, the saved and the damned. A lot of it is about people who can give their lives some resolution, or if things go badly wrong...
I generally deal with the stuff of life, the compromises that people make, sometimes in the extreme... that's what people are interested in seeing, those situations and how they they play out for others."
Many of the works in the show are large, and dense in content, including a mural that's more than 15-metres long.
The exhibition gives them breathing space.
Some works from The Amsterdam Drawings series, done 1996 to 1999, stand out. The result of three years of drawing subjects around the city's industry scene, he was quoted in a catalogue of the works as saying, "in these drawings there is nowhere to hide for the viewer. They are about daring to look; daring to examine one's own humanity".
After graduating from university in the UK, Minichiello worked as a designer, illustrator, and artist for more than 15 years, including seven years for BBC Newsnight as a reportage illustrator making drawings for events such as the Spycatcher trial, and pre-television coverage of the House of Commons including the Guildford Four appeals and Beirut hostage releases.
He carved out a reputation for hard-hitting political commentary using linocuts, drawings and other art forms.
The historic works cover events of the day, many with a political edge. And you'd have to say that's one of Minichiello's strengths - he certainly sees it that way.
"One thing I do: I think very, very quickly. In my work as an artist, you have to think fast, you have to think through the problems very quickly," he says. "It may not always align with how people are thinking, but we crave novelty, and what you do as an artist has to have a novel take. It doesn't matter what you do, if it's 100 per cent original - other people have used graphite, have scale. Other people have made work about death, the foibles of humanity. But you do your thing.
"Sometimes it upsets people because they haven't thought of it that way. I think that need not to conform is really important."
