Footnotes

PROVENANCE
The Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, Sydney, a gift from the artist

Our discovery of Shaun Gladwell's work whilst he was still a student
at art school started a long, somewhat intense journey, involving
ongoing mentoring, curatorial and transactional exchanges, intellectual
discussions and ever-deepening friendship.
Shaun and I met during the course of a local council art prize
exhibition. During the judging process, together with my two
respected co-judges, (a senior artist and an art school educator), I felt
convinced we were in the presence of a promising emerging talent.
He took home the coveted student prize and we acquired the winning
work for our collection.
Years and many accolades followed for the artist. Shaun won the
Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship in 2001
and chose to study at Goldsmiths, London. When I found myself in
London at the same time, we made a point of catching up over drinks
and/or dinner. His insights into art history astounded me – as did
his ability to structurally dissect the multifaceted aspects of visually
significant works including painting, photography and the still relatively
new moving image art forms.
Our first Sherman Galleries show together, Festivus, mounted some
years later in 2002, included the soon-to-become celebrated Storm
Sequence (2000), the first edition of which is now included in New
York's MOMA collection. The number of young people who crowded
daily into the Gallery's welcoming spaces grew exponentially as word
got around about what was clearly an extraordinary work.
We share a love for Japan, for textual play and generally for the written
word. In conjunction with Shaun's 2015 commission for the Sherman
Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), we published an editioned,
philosophical text titled Patafunctions, alongside a comprehensive
bilingual English/French catalogue for his exceptional The Lacrima
Chair / La Chaise Lacrima (2015).
In the final year of exhibition making for the Foundation, I initiated,
curated and activated A Thousand Horses, a mega cross-continent
cutting edge Australian / Middle Eastern project designed to mark the
seminal desert Charge of the Australian Light Brigade which helped
free Palestine from the Ottomans, ushering in the British and, post
WWII, the establishment of the State of Israel.
The selected images relate to Shaun's core preoccupations: the
performative dextrous body in space, the relationship between text
and image, between urban and desert environments.
Dr Gene Sherman