How to sleep with Adam Cullen
The Cullen Hotel, filled with his work, prepares to open.
When you’ve had a mid-career retrospective at the age of 43, what’s next? For Adam Cullen, the subject of last year’s major survey Let’s Get Lost at the Art Gallery of NSW, the answer seems to be the hotel business.
Cullen, whose best known work is his 2000 Archibald Prize–winning Portrait of David Wenham, is having a boutique hotel named after him that will house more that 450 pieces of his art in its 115 rooms.
Not bad for someone who famously kicked off a career as an artist with a performance piece that involved dragging around a rotting pig’s head chained to his leg while still at school.
The Cullen Hotel is on Commercial Road in Prahan opposite the Markets in the heart of the southside gay entertainment strip. It is already an unmissable landmark now that its lime green facade has been completed. As the fitout continues towards a late-October opening date, Cullen is putting the finishing touches to the work that will greet guests in the foyer: two life-sized fibreglass cows.
Original Cullen paintings and sculpture will be displayed throughout the hotel, with fine-art prints in all of the rooms.
When art in hotel rooms is usually innocuous to the point of being anodyne, Cullen’s work is an surprising choice. He was often labelled the “bad boy” of Australian art early in his career as a result of his aggressively painted pictures of dead cats and kangaroos, punks and headless women, drunks and bushrangers. But of all the artists of his generation, he’s also the most Australian; his work is a reflection of a particularly dark version of Australia, seen through a broken mirror.
Adam Cullen, 'Auto Portrait'
Now in his 40s, Cullen is neither bad nor a boy. His portraits of famous men, especially, including the Wenham portrait, AGNSW director Edmund Capon and comedian Mikey Robbins, have brought him a new level of notoriety. So has the continuous harping of critics who dismiss his technique as careless and haphazard.
I think part of Cullen’s importance is his preservation of the aesthetics of punk: stripped down and raw, free from the constraints of sentimentality and virtuosity. He can also be very funny, which is often overlooked, and he’s a superb colourist.
The Cullen Hotel is the first of a planned six “Art Series Hotels” being built in Melbourne by Asian Pacific Building Corporation between now and 2011. The others are being named after John Olsen (Chapel Street, South Yarra), Charles Blackman (St Kilda Road), David Larwill (High Street, Prahran), Michael Knight (Glenferrie Road), and Brett Whitely (Daly Street, South Yarra). The company created The Storrier (after Tim Storrier) in Sydney in 2007, which it sold to the Quest serviced apartments group in 2008.
Painting details
Adam Cullen, Auto Portrait 2007. Ink, synthetic polymer paint and enamel on canvas, 183 x 182.5cm.
Paul Hayes 2009.