Rick Amor

Biography

In 1999 the Australian War Memorial sent Rick Amor to East Timor. He was among the first Australian artists to hold the status of Official War Artist there, and the first since the end of the Vietnam War. He made the Timor works as reportage, but according to critics they keep the same unfathomable subtext as the rest of his work.

Richard William Amor was born on 3 March 1948 in Frankston, Victoria, and grew up in a suburb of the town. He began painting in oils at twelve, following the example of his father, an art teacher who had himself studied under Murray Griffin. His aunt, the writer Myra Morris, and his older sister Liz introduced him early to the work of Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dalí. His mother died when he was thirteen.

In 1965 Amor received a certificate in art from the Caulfield Institute (Caulfield Institute of Technology), and from 1966 to 1968 he studied at the National Gallery School in Melbourne. In 1967 he shared the National Gallery Drawing Prize, and in 1968 he received its Travelling Scholarship. From 1972 he worked as a freelance artist. His first exhibition was at the Joseph Brown Gallery in 1974, and since 1983 he has exhibited at Niagara Galleries every year.

In the late 1970s he had a solo exhibition at the Trades Hall in Melbourne, and in 1980 he became the first artist in residence there. He worked in factories, taught drawing at Pentridge Prison and illustrated trade union publications. He was politically active at the time, making cartoons and illustrations for the journals “Labor Star” and “Tribune”. After his divorce in 1983 he cut back on cartooning and painted more. One of the main motifs of the 1980s is the “runner”, which recurs in paintings and prints.

His early etchings of 1968, in the view of his biographer Gary Catalano, show a sharply polarised view of the world. Later Amor withdrew from etching for a long time and, until the early 1990s, explored social-realist and satirical subjects in painting and woodcut. In the 1990s he took up mezzotint.

Australia Council studio residencies gave him studios in Barcelona (1991), New York (1995) and London (2000). His impressions of Barcelona show in work of the early 1990s.

Since the early 1990s Amor has also made sculpture, usually in bronze. He shapes the forms at home, and they are cast in a foundry by the lost-wax method. The surface is deliberately textured: he wants an impression of the subject, not an exact copy. The National Gallery of Australia bought a two-metre-high bronze dog, which Amor described as a made-up dog, a survivor. In November 2007 he won the McClelland Award (A$100,000) for “Relic”, a figure with a head resembling a jackal’s. He himself explained that it is not Anubis or any Egyptian deity; the form simply “popped up” from the unconscious. A version of the work commissioned by artsACT stands in Canberra, near the intersection of Childers Street and University Avenue.

The sources of Amor’s painting lie in Symbolism and Surrealism. He handles light and depth of field so as to produce tension and a sense of mystery. His recurring subjects are the solitary watcher, figures at twilight, the emptiness of urban spaces and quiet interiors. To my mind, the title of Catalano’s biography, “The Solitary Watcher” (2001), describes him better than any definition. A monograph by Gavin Fry followed in 2008.

Exhibitions: a survey at McClelland Gallery (1990, then touring regional galleries in Victoria and South Australia), an exhibition of prints (1993–1994), “Standing in the Shadows” (2005), “A Single Mind” at the Heide Museum of Modern Art (2008), “21 Portraits” at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra (2014) and “Contemporary Romantic” at the Art Gallery of South Australia (2017). In 2014 he received the George Collie Memorial Award from the Australian Print Workshop. In 2016 he gave the State Library of Victoria all surviving proof impressions of his prints. He lives and works in Melbourne.