Stephen Bush

The Australian painter Stephen Bush may be best known for having made 27 copies of his The Lure of Paris, a black-and-white work in which Babar the elephant king, cast as colonial explorer, studies the view from a craggy seaside cliff. This survey of Bush's work since 2000, with a selection of earlier pieces, tracks a shift from that beautifully executed but cynical take on history painting towards a more surrealistic, Leipzig-esque style in vibrant, clashing colors. Hermetic, introverted figures and man-made structures--a beekeeper at his nests--are paired with dramatic scenery in an apocalyptic palette of hot pink, coral, lavender and kelly green. As Artforum has noted, Bush turns the landscape genre "inside out. Rather than a mind calmed by the natural environment, these paintings record the external manifestation of psychological trauma."