Bungle Bungle

Luke Elwes at Rebecca Hossack Gallery treats real landscape of a most unlikely nature, filtered through a young artist’s poetic sensibility. Elwes follows the four-wheel drive trail-blazed by the Australian artist Fred Williams in seeking pictorial metaphors for the mysteries of the desert heartland. The artist’s renderings of desert flowers, boab trees and the contorted, mollusc like rocks known as bungle bungles have a haunting and colourful strangeness.

Giles Auty, The Spectator, April 14 1990

William Packer writes: ‘Finally, a simple recommendation of Luke Elwes’ Bungle Bungle paintings that now occupy the Rebecca Hossack Gallery (35 windmill Street W1; until May 12). Their subject is the landscape of the remote Australian outback, cast in the tradition of Nolan, Williams and Boyd, but more surreal than mystical, full of the quirky, active pictorial invention and incident of early Miro. Yet their quality is entirely Elwes’ own, at once funny, ironical and absorbing.’

William Packer, Financial times May 8 1990