Crossing the Divide: Von Guérard After Tillers

Attracted, as is his custom, to the copy instead of the original, in 1985, Imants Tillers gridded a reproduction of Eugene von Guérard’s North-East View from the Northern Top of Mount Kosciusko (1863). Coming across an image of the painting on the cover of an exhibition catalogue, Tillers painstakingly transferred his small, squared-up reproduction onto multiple canvas boards, creating the massive, mural-like work that has become his signature style. Mount Analogue, positioned within the progression of Tillers’s work, emerges as a decisive piece. With its monumental size, accentuated by the fact that the entire work refers to just one painting, it is a dramatic declaration of the artist’s relationship to the history of Australian art. But what might this relationship be? What happens in the transition from the von Guérard original to Tillers’s copy? How, after Tillers, do we now look back at von Guérard?