GARRY SHEAD

Solander Galleries, Canberra
Michael Nagy Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above in 1997

Pop satirist, landscape painter and Archibald Prize winning portraitist, Garry Shead is particularly celebrated for his extended narrative series such as D. H. Lawrence, 1993, The Artist and the Muse, 1997 and the sequence from which the present work comes, The Royal Suite, 1995. 

Originating in childhood memories of the royal visit of 1954, The Royal Suite also presents a more general characterisation - both nostalgic and critical - of Australian society at that time. It presents a romantic mood, with the young Queen Elizabeth as a kind of love goddess: totally desirable and at the same time totally untouchable. More broadly, the series represents the encounter and the disjunction of eros and power, or of two nations, two classes, two times, two myths.  

On the one hand Shead lays out all the absurd paraphernalia of royalty: an empire of swags and flags, red carpets and umbrellas, trains and thrones and a sacred, levitating crown. On the other hand he presents a catalogue of nationalist icons. In the present work, for example, the Queen is carried by two koalas, comic anthropomorphs in the tradition of Bunyip Bluegum and Blinky Bill. Behind the ladies-in-waiting is a besuited kangaroo, not only the national animal emblem, but also (in the context of Shead's previous D. H. Lawrence series) a cypher of the political extreme right. A Russell Drysdale- Brushmen of the Bush verandah'd country main street runs back to another architectural icon or cliché, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, while all around the Queen's loyal subjects enjoy the public holiday, indulging themselves in picnics and lovemaking. 

Behind these rich and richly comic narratives, it is the idea of impossible conjunction, of consummation endlessly deferred, which takes the series and this work beyond satire and into art, and which create their 'prevailing mood...of tenderness, tinged with melancholy'¹ 

1. Grishin, S., Garry Shead: Encounters with Royalty, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, p. 27