It’s an art exhibition with a department store sell.
When painter Alesandro Ljubicic’s debut exhibition at Michael Reid Gallery in Sydney opens today, visitors will find floral arrangements adorning the hang of 45 paintings across three levels.
If Ljubicic’s large decorative canvases, priced at $5000 to $10,000, are beyond your range, he’s made a series of little sample oils on birch priced at $1600 each. Limited edition scarfs are selling for $900 and there’s a custom magnolia eau de parfum made to the artist’s specifications for $50 a bottle.
A marketing masterstroke amid difficult trading conditions or a return to the 19th-century idea that art, design and beauty are part of the same continuum?
Reid said the floral extravaganza was a deliberate attempt at sensory overload in which gallery visitors are invited to “participate in the vision of the artist”.
“We’ve finally come round to the notion of beauty as available in everything, a well-designed toast rack or a painting,” he said. “It’s about participating in the vision of the artist.”
The vision of National Art School graduate Ljubicic, 29, stretches to excellence in watchmaking, to which end Swiss watchmaker IWC and its agent Gregory Jewellers will host a client party in the exhibition space.
Ljubicic said: “Why not have a multilayered experience so when people come to the exhibition, I don’t need them to buy a painting but they can still walk away with something and have a story.”
The Reid Gallery show is the third time Ljubicic has exhibited his floral paintings alongside bouquets by florist Sean Cook but the first time an Australian artist so early in their career has branched into fragrance and fashion as well.
The exhibition catalogue was emailed to subscribers on Wednesday morning; by that afternoon, half the paintings were sold.
Two canvases were bought by collectors in Los Angeles and Hong Kong, who are among Ljubicic’s 14,000 followers on Instagram.
Reid said he attempted to favour Australian buyers in a deliberate attempt to grow Ljubicic’s following here but so far his paintings had not been acquired by any of the public art galleries.
An international exhibition is planned for next year. In between time, Ljubicic will return to his day job running The Sydney Art Store, a retail art supplies shop he founded while he was a student whose generous experiments with oil and canvas proved more expensive than his part-time job could afford.
The store now has six full-time employees, including his parents. No prizes for guessing where the artist’s knack for retailing was hatched.
Resource: http://www.theaustralian.com.au
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