By five lengths

Ivan Durrant developed an affinity with animals at a very early age, one that has been sustained throughout his life. Animals, predominantly horses and cattle, have played the lead roles in his artwork for nearly 45 years. Durrant is motivated by the beauty of animals as well as a desire to increase awareness of how people interact with animals, whether by using them as a food source, or, in the case of horse racing, as entertainment. Over a career spanning five decades, Durrant has explored a variety of styles. For one of his earliest works Durrant dumped a slaughtered cow carcass in the forecourt of the National Gallery of Victoria. His early practice is characterized by a naive, folk-art idiom and in the 1980s, he established himself as one of Australia's leading photo-realist artists. In recent years Durrant has drawn inspiration from onscreen coverage of sporting events. Durrant's paintings here depict extreme close-ups taken from televisual coverage of horse racing. Durrant enhances the spectacle of horse racing, reducing it to a tightly-cropped image, blurred almost to the point of non-recognition. In the absence of the full experience, the thunderous soundtrack of horses hooves on the track, the smell of churned-up earth, the cinematic phenomenon of the race, Durrant provides an overload of the visual, so much so that his images are almost unreadable in terms of what we are looking at?horse, jockey, track and spectator become one in a blur of saturated colour and form.