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Apr 22, 2023

Old director pins hopes on hot young artist

A young Sydney artist whose work rarely goes under the hammer is helping carry

A young Sydney artist whose work rarely goes under the hammer is helping carry the hopes of a Sydney performing arts legend and his vision to shake up the "sheltered workshop" that is often the Australian arts scene.

A major painting by Tom Polo is among 47 artworks and items of memorabilia from the collection of director Jim Sharman.

Tom Polo: Three Steps to Reveal, 2018. This huge (268cm x 200cm) painting in acrylic on canvas is estimated to sell for $20,000 to $30,000 at Shapiro on June 20.

Titled Three Steps to Reveal, 2018, the Polo painting is estimated at $20,000 to $30,000 by Shapiro auctioneers in Chippendale where the auction will take place live and online on June 20.

Sharman will donate the auction proceeds, along with other funds, to the National Institute of Dramatic Art for the establishment of a NIDA Future Centre, which is his idea. Sharman hopes the Future Centre will flush out individuals with globally-influential, innovative ideas.

At the moment, the arts in this country often resemble a sheltered workshop, Sharman said.

"There's an awful lot of singing to the choir in every art form," he told Saleroom. "I’m interested in people that puncture that idea."

In his long career, Sharman created more than 80 productions including radical interpretations of Shakespeare, Strindberg and Brecht. He radicalised Australian musicals when he directed Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar and The Rocky Horror Show.

Australian director Jim Sharman is selling his collections of ephemera and art. Louie Douvis

Sharman also co-wrote and directed the cult film, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in 1975.

Sydney art brokerage firm Sims Veldekis curated the auction sale from the works in Sharman's collection, following the director's sale of his Randwick home last year.

Tom Polo caught Sharman's eye after the artist won the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship in 2015 and was selected for the annual Primavera exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in 2017. Primavera foregrounds potential among artists aged 35 and under, and has been highly successful in doing so.

Given that Polo's auction average price is currently $3100, the work in the Sharman sale is boldly estimated. Sharman bought it directly from Roslyn Oxley9, which represents Polo.

"I loved it on sight, but somebody else had bought it," Sharman said.

"I was so disappointed but then I got a call. (The buyer) couldn't get it in their house. They sent it back, and so I got it."

Australian artist Nigel Milsom won the 2015 Archibald Prize with a portrait of his barrister, Charles Waterstreet. This oil on linen painting by Milsom is Untitled, Judo House Pt. 5 (Faith, Hope & Luck), measuring 80cm x 60cm. Painted in 2012, it is estimated at $1000 to $2000.

The picture measures an enormous 268 cm x 200 cm. But Sharman wasn't daunted. He loved the latent psychological energy of the woman depicted.

"She sees life as a stage and she's about to step on to it," he said.

Sharman believes both Polo and Newcastle-born Nigel Milsom could one day be in "the pantheon" of great Australian artists. Four Milsom paintings are in the auction, including one of a greyhound in a muzzle, straining to win a race. It's a study for a large painting that Sharman gave to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Levitation is Easy, 2018, is the first work by Australian artist Sidney Teodoruk (born 1988) to come to auction. It is estimated at $2000 to $4000.

The study, Untitled, 2011, is estimated at $1000 to $2000.

Milsom won both the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize and the Archibald Prize. But Sidney Teodoruk is little known, although that will change when his work is featured in the Affordable Art Fair at Sydney's Royal Randwick Racecourse later this month.

Bill Henson's grainy photograph, Untitled #120, 1983-84, is estimated at $10,000 to $15,000 in Shapiro's Sydney auction of 47 works from the Jim Sharman Collection.

Sharman saw Teodoruk's works in a friend's gallery. They exude "a totally different, new, young energy", he said. In Levitation is Easy, 2018, measuring nearly two metres square, Sharman recognised "every young artist, their feet bound to the ground and wanting the world".

Sharman was an early buyer of work by the now celebrated Melbourne photographer Bill Henson. Untitled #120, 1983-84, featuring a grainy image of a beautiful girl or young woman, is estimated at $10,000 to $15,000.

Of the posters in the auction, one is for Bell Shakespeare's Tempest, 1997, directed by Sharman. Estimated at $1000 to $2000, it was by Michael Wilkinson who went on to be an Academy Award costume design nominee.

An original signed billboard poster for HAIR, at the Metro Theatre, Kings Cross. The production was directed by Jim Sharman. "Today, HAIR might qualify as dinner music, but in its day it made governments quake, censors bristle and audiences dance on-stage".

There's a vintage poster from famous UK artist Francis Bacon's exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1972. Two days before the exhibition's opening, Bacon's partner George Dyer committed suicide in their Paris hotel.

This tragedy provided the springboard for Stephen Sewell's stage portrait of Bacon, Three Furies, directed by Sharman for the 2005 Sydney Festival. The poster's estimate is $600 to $800.

Other artworks in the auction include those by Michael Ramsden, Martin Sharp, Brent Harris and Geoffrey Proud.

The auction estimate total is approximately $230,000 to $330,000. As for what kind of arts NIDA's Future Centre might nurture, Sharman is entrusting that to the younger generations to invent. But he does think the future of the arts is online.

"I don't think it's film or theatre or television, I think it's something else," he said.

TGirl with Modigliani, 1981, by Geoffrey Proud (1946-2022) is estimated at $1500 to $2500.

"I think the arts at the moment are marking time. I would like to see Australia on the front foot, not waiting for somebody else to do it and copy it."

An important plank of the NIDA Future Centre will be a triennial Future Award for an innovator. The award was partly inspired by the Asia Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art, in Brisbane, which Sharman admires for its exciting, anti-insular inventiveness.

NIDA CEO Liz Hughes said Sharman's vision was well aligned with NIDA's.

"Jim Sharman has been a trailblazer in the entertainment sector for decades," Hughes said.

"We are delighted to be sharing an ambition with Jim to imagine the future of entertainment through cross disciplinary collaboration and courageous experimentation with form and technology."

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