Seeing these recent works, we realise once again why the name Erwin Fabian has long been synonymous with abstract expressionist or assembled-metal sculpture in Australia.

As with the artist’s past exhibitions, the current work demonstrates real sensibility and panache in the handling of materials that are, in essence, industrial detritus – beaten, crushed, twisted and abandoned fragments of rusted metal that plainly have seen better days. In Erwin Fabian’s hands, however, these otherwise mournful components are commandeered with keen aesthetic intent. And in the words of John Newton’s great if over-exposed 18th-century hymn, the raw components of Erwin’s sculpture ‘once were lost but now are found’ – that is, found and newly vested with attributes that are the converse of the scrap condition in which they were found.

Thus, at the time of their being found by the artist, the cut-steel discards were raw, brutal, intractable and tough. Commuted by Erwin Fabian into dynamic, even poetic configurations, what once was raw is now conceptually refined; what once was brutal becomes humane and civilised; what once may have seemed intractable is now shown to be eminently malleable. What once was tough and inert is, compositionally, still tough but now visually alive and muscular to use a word frequently employed in reference to the sculpture of Rodin by the great Rodin scholar, the late Professor Albert E. Elsen.

When, decades ago, Elsen visited Melbourne, he was intrigued by the National Gallery of Victoria’s cast of Rodin’s Thinker. Initially, the Stanford professor was sceptical of the cast’s integrity, citing some perplexing inconsistencies (in modelling) with other casts of the same subject. Afterwards, however, and quite contrary to his earlier suspicions, Elsen declared that he was now convinced that Melbourne’s Thinker was in fact a rare and rather special early version of the subject, and this explained the aforementioned ‘inconsistencies’ in handling.

To borrow from the text of Elsen’s assessment, we may say also of Erwin Fabian’s latest sculpture that it represents a rare and rather special account of the abstract expressionist or assembled-metal idiom as we perceive it today.

Geoffrey Edwards
Director
Geelong Gallery