Anthony Mannix: The beast of the unconscious and other well-known entities

Professor Colin Rhodes, Dean of Sydney College of the Arts, will open a survey exhibition spanning the past 24 years of Anthony Mannix’s practice. The exhibition is an opportunity to reflect on his status as one of the most celebrated of the Australian Outsider artists, the bewitching worldview articulated in his journals, works on paper, canvases, prints and sculptures and his technical invention. A celebrated Outsider artist, Mannix has exhibited to international and national acclaim.

Psychotic experiences, and the insights they afford, are the bedrock of Mannix’s practice. Creatures, or sets of eyes, or disembodied heads accompany people - between their legs, on their shoulders, above their heads. Sometimes people are within other people’s bodies. There are creatures – and people - with multiple heads. There are at least as many creatures as people, and while some creatures appear benign, many are beastly. And these figures are not used sparingly, as powerful moments or accents; they inhabit a world teeming with others of their like. Mannix says the work is about:
‘Emotional intelligence and inner space technology. I feel privileged to have had a lot of contact with my inner world and to have developed a lot of inner space technology. One is forced or shuffled into contact with one’s inner worlds by madness. You’re given all that emotion and visionary stress and it occupies you. Psychotic experience is not real, it’s gibberish to anyone else, but to me it’s actual experience’

Mannix is essentially an artist who uses drawing and text. Even the canvas works (which began in 1995) are more often drawings than paintings. Since diaristic inscriptions first appeared in his work in 1990, stream of consciousness outpourings have become a constant (often the artist has revisited earlier works, adding text). The mainstay of his practice is the ongoing illustrated diary project, Journal of a madman, commenced in 1986. This exhibition includes twelve books from the series that was germinated during 1977-78 while Mannix was studying anthropology at Macquarie University. ‘By then I had experience of psychiatric wards. I wanted to make subjective studies of the madman aspect of mental hospitals.’

The beast of the unconscious and other well-known entities will open on Saturday 31 January, 4 – 6pm at the Penrith Regional Gallery and The Lewers Bequest. The exhibition will continue to 4 April 2009.