July 31, 2012
The graffiti-like style of the recently deceased Adam Cullen became nationally famous with his portrait of actor David Wenham in the film The Boys, loosely based on the Anita Coby murder. The portrait won Cullen the Archibald prize in 2000.
Cullen paints types, stereotypes and genres that have been identified as ‘Australian’: larrikins, bushrangers, drovers, footy players, beauty queens and antiheroes including criminals, prostitutes and drunkards. He also regularly depicts a particular type of soft-bellied, butt-crack-exposing, balding older male who seems as overly familiar as Donald Bradman or budgie-smugglers.
Cullen's painting conjures up an awkward humanity, frequently dangerous and often clunky. It is peopled with several recognisably Cullenesque types: male figures whose flesh melts down to the hips where it thickens in folds and useless genitalia, headless females and garishly pneumatic women that bring to mind the word 'floozy'. Popes, crooners, crooks and kangaroos also pop up, with and without antennae, in barely sketched landscapes redolent of disconnectedness, dysfunction and failure.
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