The Second Landing, Dutch migrant artists in Australia

Extract from "The Second Landing - Dutch migrant artists in Australia", Exhibition held at the Access Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, 12th November 1993 - 23rd January, 1994.

Of the fifty or so artists invited to contribute to this exhibition, Richard Woldendorp (born in 1927), a photographer in Western Australia who arrived in 1951, Jan Riske (born in 1932), a painter in New South Wales, who arrived in 1952 and Adrian Mauriks (born in 1942), a sculptor in Victoria who arrived in 1957, are the best known.

Well known also are Petrus Spronk, Annemieke Mein and Rob Knottenbelt. Each one is a part of the wider context of contemporary Australian art, irrespective of national origin, and can also fairly represent the variety and quality of Dutch-born artists in Australia as shown in this exhibition.

Adrian Mauriks has been included in exhibitions of contemporary Australian sculpture since 1975. He trained in Melbourne at the Victorian College of the Arts and has taught sculpture since 1978. His public sculpture commissions are understandably his best known. Totemic and monumental, these are also his most figuratively dramatic and arresting works.

Like Riske, Mauriks' sculpture is best understood as part of the development of western European art in the latter part of the twentieth century i.e. in sculpture, from Brancusi and Lipchitz to Caro.

Public sculpture is a highly visible part of major European cities, especially in Holland. Mauriks responds to the challenge of public spaces with the same confidence as his contemporaries there and in America.

Hendrik Kolenberg, 1993