Nike Savvas: Rally

Overview

One of Australia’s most distinctive and spectacular installation artists, Nike Savvas has long had a flair for the genuinely epic, but Rally is her largest installation yet. Comprised of some 60,000 coloured strips of plastic bunting hanging from the ceiling, it covers a whopping 480 square metres and occupies almost the entire roof of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ cavernous entry hall.

Art scholars have often evoked colour theory in describing Savvas’ work, but this is theory harnessed to crowd-pleasing, ecstatic effect with a sense of fun and kitsch. You could see it as an exercise in using geometry for a purely aesthetic result, or a contemporary twist on pointillism’s approach of synthesising pure individual colours into a cohesive whole. But most of all, it’s an eye-catching, conversation-starting transformation of a previously functional and underused aspect of the gallery space into a day-glo bright visual feast.

Previous Savvas works have included the unforgettable Atomic: Full of Love, Full of Wonder, made by stringing up literally thousands of coloured bouncy balls. Like that work, which involved a laborious process of hand-painting every single element of the work, there’s a sense with Rally that a meticulous, factory-like process has gone into producing something which is ecstatic and in the best way, quite simple.

The work can also be blown around by fans and the movement of people below, meaning the work is interactive and is never quite viewed the same by any two different viewers. Savvas has previously talked about her interest in “the idea of using materials from the real world and turning them into high art”. This is both a fascinating continuation of her approach to her work and a successful one-off. It’s a work that functions on a number of levels; you could write an art theory paper on it, remix the work’s colour scheme yourself with a camera phone and Instagram filters or just reflect that the Art Gallery of New South Wales has never seen anything quite like this.