Ralph Hobbs: Where Art, Instinct and the Unexpected Meet.
There are people who enter the art world by following its established pathways, and there are those who seem to arrive by a rather more interesting route. Ralph Hobbs belongs to the latter category.
His name is closely associated with an Australian art landscape in which instinct, connoisseurship and conversation remain as important as institutional credentials. Over the years, Hobbs has developed a distinctive position within that landscape, moving between artists, galleries, collectors and the wider cultural currents that give artworks their context and consequence.
There is something inherently curious about speaking with someone whose professional life has been spent in such close proximity to art. The longer one looks, the less straightforward the territory becomes: Taste is never entirely personal, collecting is never simply acquisitive, and a gallery is rarely only a room in which objects are displayed. Behind the visible surface sits an intricate network of relationships, histories, judgements and intuitions.
Hobbs has spent considerable time navigating precisely that terrain.
His perspective is therefore less a matter of delivering definitive answers than of offering another way of looking - attentive, considered and occasionally delightfully contrary.
The American writer John Berger wrote that seeing comes before words. In Hobbs's case, a lifetime of looking has given him plenty to say.
We met him to talk about art, the business and culture surrounding it, and the peculiar alchemy that occurs when people, ideas and objects find one another.
You have spent more than two decades moving between the roles of dealer, artist, writer and educator. How have those different ways of looking at art changed one another - and which has most profoundly shaped your eye as a gallerist?
Ralph Hobbs: I’ve always been interested in meaningful images, paintings, drawings, and engravings. As a child, I looked at and read many history books, many of them illustrated with great paintings. I was intrigued by the ways moments in history and the people who played a role could be represented visually - those images became great jump-off points for one's imagination to run wild.
The principles behind being an artist, a writer, or a dealer are, I think, quite similar. I carry a long bank of visual knowledge with me, stretching back through my own history. When I look at art, make art, indeed write about art, I’m looking for intrinsic relationships and context: How it’s been created, what mark the artist has made to hold our attention and where it sits within history and culture.
Nanda\Hobbs has developed a reputation for identifying and nurturing artists over the longer term. When you first encounter an artist, what are you actually looking for beneath the immediate visual impression - and what suggests that a practice might endure?
Ralph Hobbs: There are several things I look for. With a more experienced artist, a style or a particular way of working may be more established. That can be a strength, but it can also bring limitations. With emerging artists - and that’s not necessarily a question of age - we might look closely at how images are made. Does the artist ‘have a touch’ if they’re a painter, or in how a work is structured? It’s about understanding their visual language, but also - and perhaps most importantly - sensing the artist's drive towards future possibilities - these are the things that keep it all exciting.
I firmly believe art isn’t about decoration. Decoration might be a by-product, but we’re looking for something more intensely felt. That result may well be something beautiful, or it may be tougher - it’s about the integration of the piece. Some of the great artworks in history are intensely charged images. Those are the kinds of things we look for.
You write about art with an unusually strong sense of history, place and memory. Do you think contemporary art becomes richer when it knows where it has come from, or does an artist sometimes need to forget art history to discover something genuinely new?
Ralph Hobbs: An artist’s success often comes when their art can make a connection between the work, the collector and/or curator. I think it’s ludicrous to imagine that artworks exist in isolation - isolation from history, from aesthetic principles. There’s a strong visual language running throughout the various traditions of world art. From the earliest images on cave walls right through to the most contemporary images, including those made using AI.
Each has a history and connection; each comes from somewhere - not out of thin air.
If an artist is striving for something new and innovative, I think it’s as important to understand history and what has been made before and why. I love the idea that you can’t change the future if you don’t understand the past. As an artist, you ignore that history at your peril.
Much of your programme moves between landscape, portraiture, abstraction, cultural memory and very different material practices. What allows a gallery to hold such divergent voices together without imposing a house style upon them?
Ralph Hobbs: I like to think that our house style - if that’s the right term - is good art, rather than a particular stylistic imperative. I also have a low threshold for boredom! We always strive for technical skill, in whatever medium, whether we’re looking at photography, sculpture, painting or drawing.
Personally, I like as many varied ideas as possible, as well as various media. Innovation is exciting; so are learning different ways of looking at things.
Great artists have a way of seeing the world that makes you want to engage. That’s an important part of what art does; I think it’s an essential goal to making work. A gallery can narrow its aperture and say, “We only look at minimalism” or “We only look at landscape.” That’s all well and good, but we’re interested in engaging people in a broader church.
There is a moment in every artist’s career when promise has to become commitment - the willingness to keep working when recognition is uncertain. How do you recognise that quality, and how much of it can a gallery actually nurture?
Ralph Hobbs: The role of a gallery in an artist's career is interesting. For a successful partnership between an artist and a gallery, there must be dialogue. An artist has their own vision, and some artists don’t want that vision interrupted by other perspectives. But our role is not only to sell the work; it’s also to put it in front of curators and, hopefully, museums, to get as many eyes on it as possible, and to explain it beyond the simple question of whether someone likes it or not.
To do that, we need to have conversations - and sometimes frank ones. They can be robust. Sometimes things don’t work; sometimes the artist and gallery agree to disagree. That’s fine, too. But when it works really well, it comes down to collaboration. At the end of the day, it’s a partnership. It’s difficult for an artist to work without a gallery, and impossible for a gallery to work without artists. When it works well, there is a shared sense of history-making and genuine excitement. It can be quite intoxicating.
You have written about the difference between seeing something directly and encountering an image of it - a distinction that feels increasingly relevant in an age of screens and endless reproduction. What do you think is lost when looking becomes predominantly mediated, and what can an original artwork still do that an image cannot?
Ralph Hobbs: We live in a really exciting age, where we can see so many things from around the world, all at our fingertips. The problem is that the platforms can bombard us. Most things are also reduced to the size of a laptop, or even worse, a phone screen. This means a sense of scale and texture is often lost. So, on the one hand, access to so many images gives us an opportunity to develop our understanding of artworks; on the other, it’s hard to get their intrinsic essence.
Earlier last year, I stood in front of Goya’s Black Paintings at the Prado. I’ve been looking at those works since I was five; I’ve studied them and absolutely love them. But they were incredibly different in the flesh. I moved around the room, as everyone else did, and noticed their varying scale: Some were bigger or smaller than I had thought, some rougher. Then there’s the texture of them; it was a revelation. That’s the magic of paint - the hand of the artist on a work made hundreds of years ago, and the fact that it can still move you. Original art created by the artist's hand is a beautiful thing, and I think we always need to keep that in mind.
Nanda\Hobbs operates simultaneously in the commercial market and in a broader ecosystem of museums, regional galleries, prizes and public collections. How do you think about the relationship between commercial success and cultural significance - are they ultimately connected, or are they measures of quite different things?
Ralph Hobbs: Commercial success can give an artist the capacity to do more interesting and expansive things, so I think it’s dangerous to malign an artist’s commerciality and their success. However, if an artist is striving only to sell, institutions tend to become less interested. By and large, institutions are interested in the zeitgeist of a particular time. Some artists connect with it; some miss the moment; and for others that connection reappears at a later date.
It’s important for artists to be true to themselves and to work in a way that keeps them connected to, and interested in what they’re doing - rather than simply chasing a major institutional show. And a major institutional show doesn’t necessarily lead to bigger or better sales.
There’s a strange balance between all the elements of the market. Tertiary endorsements - magazine articles, books, group exhibitions in major institutions and solo presentations in non-commercial spaces - are all important and can help commercial success. Conversely, commercial success in its purest form doesn’t necessarily mean an artist will win curatorial acceptance.
You are also an artist yourself, so you know what it means to stand in front of an empty surface rather than simply assess the finished work. Has being a maker made you more sympathetic to artists, more demanding of them, or simply more aware of how little can be understood from the finished object alone?
Ralph Hobbs: Absolutely. I think the hardest thing in the world is to stand in front of an empty canvas and begin. My own way of working through that is to make a mess, then try to draw some kind of image out of the morass.
The funny thing for an artist is finding the kind of work that keeps you excited. Often that begins with a conversation - with another artist, a dealer, or even yourself - and you stumble across something that really excites you. I’m always intrigued when an artist hits on a new idea and has the technical skill to realise it. It’s exciting to watch that happen. I sometimes feel a similar excitement when I sit back from a drawing or painting and think, “Gee, that looks really good.”
The hardest thing then is to step away, because the next mark might destroy it. That’s the constant struggle: not just bringing something to a conclusion, but knowing whether you’ve pushed it too far or made a mess of it. I’m in awe of artists and the struggle they go through.
It’s a bit like an explorer sailing into uncharted waters and surviving. You don’t know the answer; you just feel this strange pressure to create something that people will hopefully respond to.
After decades of looking, have the things that excite you changed? Is there something you once considered evidence of artistic importance that experience has taught you to distrust?
Ralph Hobbs: As mentioned, I have a low boredom threshold, so I’m constantly looking for things that visually excite me. That said, I can look at something I’ve known for many years and still be excited by it. I think that’s at the heart of great art: You can look at the same image for years and then, all of a sudden, its meaning changes, or you notice something about the way it was made. That becomes extremely exciting.
I’m interested in new media, but it’s like any other medium: it needs to be of quality and have some integrity in the artist’s process. It can’t just rely on readily available tricks to create an image. The challenge is to make work with a certain intensity and as always, integrity that references the maker.
Interestingly, in an era when AI and other techniques make it possible to create almost anything visually, it’s extremely exciting to find someone with the skill to do it by hand. The physicality and, indeed, the handmade nature of art will be really important in the future as we head down the path of artificial intelligence.
If you look far beyond individual exhibitions, sales and careers, what do you think a serious gallery is actually preserving - and what would you hope Nanda\Hobbs has contributed to Australian art when viewed from a distance of another twenty or thirty years?
Ralph Hobbs: One of the fundamental reasons I became involved with a gallery, rather than carrying on as an artist or art teacher - or, for the sake of argument, working in real estate or some other endeavour - is the idea that we can make meaningful contributions to our country's culture.
More than ever, it’s important to have galleries with an opinion: Galleries willing to champion artists doing incredible things, artists who challenge the way we look at the world. It’s important to put together exhibitions that aren’t just about lovely things, but that make us question the world around us.
I think Nanda\Hobbs has made a deep contribution to that. We look for an intellectual element in our artists; we like to write about them, and to hold seminars and talks. When I was coming up as an artist, that was a really important part of being an artist and being involved with galleries. A gallery that doesn’t participate, have an opinion or play an active role in education is problematic. Ultimately, it risks being remembered as a shop or not being remembered at all, rather than an institution.
I think about the great dealers in history, both in Australia and around the world. Many things are happening in the art world, and of course some of them have a commercial purpose - that’s how the world goes around. But voices need to be heard. We’re fortunate to have magazines, online platforms, Instagram and other ways to get messages out there. It’s an exciting time, and I do hope Nanda\Hobbs’ legacy will extend well beyond my own lifetime.
---
Words and questions by AW.
Answers courtesy of Ralph Hobbs.
Photo courtesy of Nanda\Hobbs.
