Rick Amor: 21 Portraits

National Portrait Gallery, King Edward Terrace, Parkes

Closes March 1, Mon – Sun 10am-5pm

Rick Amor, now aged in his mid-60s, has been the "slow burner" in the Australian art scene.

Never a headline act, Amor has produced a substantial and consistent body of work, most of which is beautifully crafted, psychologically incisive, but generally under the radar for much of the glitzy art world. In the past couple of decades he has moved out of the category of being an 'artist's artist' or an artist working for the Labor Party left, and has become a modestly successful artist with a few sell-out exhibitions to his name and has remained a highly sought-after portrait painter.

This cameo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is a gem of a show, beautifully curated by Sarah Engledow, and it brings together an array of Amor's portraits of different years and in different mediums. These include drypoint etchings, pencil drawings and oil paintings, but these are not studies, but resolved portraits, each true to its medium.

The first thing that strikes you about the exhibition is its subject matter. With the exception of the commissioned portrait of General Cosgrove, 2006, which is also the least successful of all of the works on display, the sitters present a cross-section of predominantly Melbourne's artistic and literary intelligentsia. Fellow artists, art critics and writers whom Amor paints as an insider, one who has worked with them and knows them well, and knows intimately the world which they inhabit.

Remarkable is the character study of the painter Paul Boston, 1995, an outstanding Melbourne-based artist who has not as yet received his 15 minutes of fame. Apart from the strong likeness, which is mandatory for portraits in this mode of work, the portrait is both a psychological study of the sitter as well as a "conversation" between the sitter and the artist. It has a voice and presence. Another outstanding work is the portrait of Gary Catalano, 1994, a poet and writer on art, who in 2001 published the most significant monograph on Amor's art to date, The solitary watcher. Catalano is shown as alert, perceptive, yet very vulnerable, and appears almost like a snail retreating into its shell, while the clothes, which seem too large for him, give the impression that they shroud his body.

The softground etching of Michael Kelly, 1998, is quite a vivid and perceptive work, which consciously draws on the rich heritage of art which preceded it, while at the same time boldly and defiantly marking out its own ground. It would be useful for the Portrait Gallery to be a little more comprehensive on its labels and to identify the workshop where this was printed and the name of the printer, if it was not the artist himself.

I am not certain that I have ever been to an Amor exhibition which has not included at least one self-portrait. This one is rich in its studies of self, with one of the outstanding paintings in show, Self-portrait with a grey jumper (a month out of hospital after a bone marrow transplant), 2005. It is a somewhat enigmatic image of the artist in the corner of his studio with a backdrop of stacked paintings which are seen from behind exposing the blank canvases and stretchers. Amor had to confront his own mortality and was now undergoing a period of convalesce. Unknown to him at the time of painting this portrait, the operation which had saved his life, had also physically changed him as a person and he had adopted some of the physical make-up of the donor of the marrow. In this portrait there is something of a "person within a person" dimension to the work, which divorces it from the other earlier self-portraits in the exhibition. It was a number of years later that Amor realised that somehow within his body he was carrying some of the physical characteristics of his donor. The sallow complexion and ashen tones, as well as the slightly claustrophobic space of the composition, add to the note of introspective tension.

Rick Amor: 21 Portraits is a remarkable, yet quiet exhibition, by an artist who has mastered the tricks of the trade and without affectation or an agenda is assembling a gallery of friends and peers, which I suspect, retrospectively will be seen as a snapshot of Australia's creative life in the 1990s and 2000s.