Husband and wife Marc and Gillie Schattner are international award winning artists and Archibald Prize finalists. Gillie, born in London in 1965 and Marc born in Melbourne in 1961 have been painting together for the last 15 years and have exhibited their art all over the world. Most of their artwork appears as diptychs. They work collaboratively on the same art piece combining their talent to arrive at a single vision. Every aspect of the art piece has both their minds and hands on it, reflecting their individual passions and influences in life.
Marc Schattner studied Graphic Design at Swinburne, Melbourne. Gillie Schattner is a self-taught artist. They have had solo exhibitions in Sydney, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong and Belgium.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Gillie and Marc Schattner’s work is the perfect marriage of style and content: their art uses a colourful and exuberant meshing of figurative expressionism and Pop Art to explore themes of contentment and happiness.
Their recent dog series was inspired by research that showed that if you want to live a happy life, the single most important thing you can do is get a dog. Gillie and Marc are fascinated by the things that give us pleasure, the things that make us happy, the things that make life worth living, and they make art which embodies that quest.
The bold, simple shapes and rich colours and textures they use in their paintings and sculptures are a source of simple, positive pleasure, while also suggesting metaphors for our search for happiness. Gillie and Marc Schattner’s art draws on their work in the fields of graphic design and advertising, as well as Gillie’s experiences working as a registered nurse.
They have worked with the Smile Foundation, The Black Dog Institute and Australian Red Cross Blood Service.
They are also successful portrait artists, and were recent finalists in the Archibald Prize. Specialising in children, pets and celebrities, their portraits are in international demand. Their subjects include Rhonda Birchmore, Scarlett Johannson, John Konrad, Archbishop Pell, Dr Harry Cooper, Jimmy Little, and the late Peter Brock.
Marc and Gillie have had over 30 solo exhibitions, and are hung in prominent corporate and gallery collections.
Drawing on their backgrounds in advertising and graphic design, Gillie and Marc use typical elements of commercial art, product packaging and advertising to create artworks which are pure Pop. They say that 2/3 of three year olds can recognise McDonalds’ golden arches. Commercial products, advertising, images and logos saturate our world, but have you ever really looked at them? Modern addiction is an exhibition that celebrates our product-soaked popular culture. Drawing on commercial products, fast food, popular images, graphic art and advertising, it takes familiar objects from the world of popular culture and turns them into art.
Gillie and Marc’s spattered acrylic diptychs are inspired by their love of the Pop Art movement – especially artists such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Burton Morris – and are also a response to the four years they spent living in New York. Their work Modern addiction also includes a range of sculptures by Gillie and Marc Schattner. This work is again inspired by popular culture, taking its imagery from advertising, graphic design and the world of everyday objects, blowing them up into larger than life images, and disrupting the perfectly smooth surfaces of advertising through their use of highly-textured brushwork. Sculpture is a new and exciting development for Gillie and Marc, who are better known for painting. Their whimsical animals and almost-life-sized chairs are striking in a gallery, but they come into their own in a domestic interior, providing a witty commentary on our use of pets and furniture as signifiers of personal style. Taking inspiration from the work of Claes Oldenburg, this exhibition took the objects of our desire and turned them into sculptures which are vibrant, accessible and fun.
- Writers:
- Schattner, Gillie & Marc
- Date written:
- 2008
- Last updated:
- 2011
