JAMES GLEESON BETWEEN DREAMS, EROS, EARTH, SEA & SKY

Australian surrealism cuts across all forms of art including painting, prints, drawing, cinema, literature, sculpture, photography, installation, and performance art. How committed was Gleeson to surrealism as a method and critique of the role of art in society and in literature, art criticism and poetry?

What is important to grasp concerning Gleeson’s oeuvre was how through its highly allusive, autobiographical, and vivid aesthetic, cultural and iconographical architecture and iconography. Gleeson was constantly concerned with the role of the self in society, and how reason itself needed to be critiqued because of its immense capacity to individual and social conformity.

Gleeson was always examining how the self was fashioned by the many critical and institutional orthodoxies of society concerning art, culture, and religion