Generation

Main Hall 22 June - 5 August

There’s another dry island, far from Malta in the southern seas, which some tens of thousands with Maltese blood call home. It was there – Australia – to the new red-roofed suburbs of Sydney, that Mark Gerada’s grandparents and parents sailed to build a new life after the Second World War ended. Having survived the death and deprivations of war, they were people who knew how to treasure their lives and their children, and how best to build a new life for their families. They took a chance on Australia’s suburban dream, the quarter-acre block, and bought one-way tickets to the new country.

In the Geradas’ new home, some things were the same; some were not. In Australia they found a wealth of opportunities under spacious blue skies, they found even modest suburban backyards had big green lawns for the children. They rediscovered stability and a future in which the next generation could dream their own dreams. There was hope.

But there was also tradition and a strong sense of continuity. The men of Mark’s family brought to their new home their love of cars, their prized craft of carpentry; the women brought their skill as seamstresses and as wonderful cooks. They all carried with them their love of the sea, carving out a new tradition in which the whole family decamped from the suburbs to spend summer holidays by the beach in Narrabeen in Sydney’s north. Beachside family gatherings would swell with friends and visitors, and there was always freshly-caught seafood and plenty of it for everyone.

These happy childhood memories are woven together in Mark’s Generation paintings, which incorporate wonderful old images from photographs that his grandfather Paul Bonello and father Vic Gerada – gifted, if unacknowledged artists in their own right – took during his 1970s childhood. Working on 60 canvases simultaneously, Mark worked the photographic images into collages, combining them with layers of paint and bright colour.

In Mark’s memories, his childhood is an almost miraculously peaceful time, a stable point from which the adult artist’s clear-eyed view of the wider world could emerge and grow. The troubles of that wider world were to impress themselves on him with shocking force on 7 July 2005. Mark was heading through London on his way to the Isle of Skye in Scotland that morning of the Tube terrorist bombings. He was going there to work on a series of landscape studies for painting and video works, yet after the bombings, he arrived in Scotland reeling, doubting the utility of art, distracted with worry for his friends in London. But there the ancient landscape – so pristine and so distant from the insanity of religious violence – reaffirmed the fundamentals of life, and the necessity of art.

Since leaving Scotland, he also filmed footage in Vietnam, Malta, New York and Australia for the resultant video piece, Mounds and Caves. In it, Mark meditates on the hope for humanity’s spiritual reconnection with the natural world; to a pre-religious experience of life before religion’s divisions and hypocrisies set us against ourselves. Complex and mysterious channels connect a carefree childhood in Sydney’s suburbs with the past and present realities of war and violence. Must freedom be predicated on the grim necessity of war? The Maltese people, who endured the most intensive bombing campaign in the earth’s history, know the answers to that better than most.

Biography

Mark Gerada is an Australian painter, illustrator and teacher with a background in architecture, ceramics and design. He has worked as an architectural designer and as a designer on a leading magazine, Interior Architecture, before graduating in Architecture with first class honours at the University of Technology, Sydney in 1993. Supporting his painting practice, Mark ran a successful ceramics business for many years, worked as an illustrator for magazines and newspapers, and produced commissioned paintings for private houses, offices and hotels.

He has taught in architecture, illustration and visual communications at the University of Technology. He is currently writing a screenplay called X’inti Taghmel? (What Are You Doing?)

He has exhibited work in Sydney, Melbourne, London and Brussels. Generation is Mark’s 12th solo exhibition and his first in Malta.