News

Acknowledging the passing of James Darling
06
Sep

Acknowledging the passing of James Darling

It is with profound sadness that we share the sudden passing of James Darling, a deeply respected artist whose work has left an indelible mark on the arts community.
As partners in life and artistic collaborators, James Darling and Lesley Forwood created monumental and ephemeral installations using mallee roots collected and conserved on their Duck Island property in the South-East of South Australia.
Their installations, which engaged with themes of ecology, land management, and the Australian rural experience, have been exhibited across Australia and Internationally including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Pori Art Museum, Finland; Centro Culturale Conde Duque, Madrid; La Defense, Paris Summer Festival, Paris; The Esplanade, Singapore; Setouchi International Arts Festival, Japan.
In 2018 they presented ‘Living Rocks: A Fragment of the Universe’, at Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide, which went on to represent Australia at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Italy as an official collateral event and in 2022 it was restaged at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany.
In addition to his artistic contributions, James was a passionate supporter and dedicated patron of the arts; deeply committed to encouraging creative talent and celebrating the power of art.
“James’ impact on the arts has been profound and his personal friendship and support have been pivotal in my career from a very early stage.
He was a unique and singular individual, whose vibrant personality cannot be captured in just few words.
His tenacious passion for creative practice extends beyond his own international profile, to that of supporting others. A champion of the arts and a generous soul, his wit and cheekiness has absolutely left a lasting impression. I am honoured to have called him a friend.” – Hugo Michell
While our hearts are broken, our thoughts are with Lesley, James’ family, his friends, and all those who have been touched by his work and generosity of spirit. His activism, artistic ingenuity, and passionate interest in conservation will be remembered by all who had the privilege to know him and experience his work.
Pictured: Selected works by James Darling & Lesley Forwood, courtesy the artists and Hugo Michell Gallery
Hugo Michell Gallery Opening: Binygurr Wirrpanda + Min Wong
04
Sep

Hugo Michell Gallery Opening: Binygurr Wirrpanda + Min Wong

Please join us for the launch of Binygurr Wirrpanda’s ‘Dancing Brolgas’ and Min Wong’s ‘You can’t talk butterfly language to caterpillar people’ on Thursday 12th September from 6-8pm.
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Binygurr Wirrpanda
Dancing Brolgas
In the accompanying catalogue essay, Will Stubbs writes: “Each particular pattern carries the essence of an estate of land which is held in the hundreds of songs which are encoded in that design. These epic song cycles are a cross between poetry and the Latin Mass. They retell the movements of ancestral forces through the landscape.”
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Min Wong
You can’t talk butterfly language to caterpillar people
Birthed from a broken heart, this work examines the emerging principles of interpersonal neurobiology as an embodied and relational process to support compassion, kindness, resilience, and well-being in our personal lives, our relationships, and our communities.
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Hugo Michell Gallery are proud to partner with Bird in Hand Winery for this opening event.
Please join us in celebrating the launch of these two exhibitions!
Hugo Michell Gallery acknowledges the Kaurna people as the traditional custodians of the Adelaide region, and that their cultural and heritage beliefs are still as important to the living Kaurna people today.
Min Wong, I told you a lie, 2024, print on velvet, 110 x 80 cm
Julia Robinson launches solo exhibition and publication launch as 2024 SALA Feature artist
31
Jul

Julia Robinson launches solo exhibition and publication launch as 2024 SALA Feature artist

Julia Robinson’s solo exhibition ‘Split by the Spade’ and publication launches on 30th July at Adelaide Central Gallery. 

Julia Robinson’s ambitious new installation ‘Split by the Spade’ is the latest entry in her ongoing series of odes to the folk horror genre. This exhibition promises to be a finely crafted, immersive experience by Robinson, highly esteemed graduate and staff member of Adelaide Central School of Art and the 2024 SALA feature artist.

Since 2003, Julia Robinson's textile-focused sculpture and installation practice has ruminated on enduring human narratives around sacrifice, sex, and death. Living and working on Kaurna land in Adelaide, South Australia but drawing on the folkloric and, importantly, folk horror traditions of her British ancestry, Robinson conflates humour and horror in ever more unexpected ways. In this, the first major publication dedicated to Robinson's practice, curator Leigh Robb, novelist and poet Hannah Kent, and visual artist Jess Taylor examine her work through their respective lenses and weave together the visual art, literature, folklore, and film most influential to Robinson's practice. The essays and poems contained within are accompanied by reproductions of key works in stunning detail which reveal the artist's keen understanding of historical costuming and sewing techniques. This monograph surveys over twenty years of a prolific and wildly imaginative visual art practice, that combines exceptional technical skill, fantastical invention and thoroughly researched cultural touchstones.

‘Split by the Spade’ will be on display at Adelaide Central Gallery from 30 July to 6 September as part of the 2024 SALA Festival.

Zaachariaha Fielding, Ildiko Kovacs, and Richard Lewer announced as FINALISTS in Mosman Art Prize
31
Jul

Zaachariaha Fielding, Ildiko Kovacs, and Richard Lewer announced as FINALISTS in Mosman Art Prize

Congratulations to Zaachariaha Fielding, Ildiko Kovacs, and Richard Lewer who have been selected as finalists in the 2024 Mosman Art Prize!

Also congratulating previous exhibiting artist Marisa Purcell and Christopher Zanko, who will be exhibiting with us in 2025, for also being named as finalists.

The Mosman Art Prize is the longest running and most prestigious municipal art prize in Australia. Winning entries form the basis of the Mosman Art Collection, a valuable and historic collection that surveys Australian painting since 1947. The Mosman Art Prize is an acquisitive award of $70,000 sponsored by Mosman Council.

Finalist works will be on display from 10 August to 6 October 2024 at Mosman Art Gallery, NSW.


Richard Lewer, Let Me Tell You a Story, 2024. Acrylic on found table, 150 x 90 cm

Zaachariaha Fielding, Paralpi, 2024, acrylic on linen, 152 x 122 cm

Ildiko Kovacs, Shine, 2024, oil on linen, 122 x 70 cm.

Julia Robinson major solo exhibition 'Split by the Spade' launches at Adelaide Central Gallery
31
Jul

Julia Robinson major solo exhibition 'Split by the Spade' launches at Adelaide Central Gallery

Julia Robinson’s solo exhibition ‘Split by the Spade’ launches on 30th July, at Central Gallery, Adelaide Central School of Art.

Launching in tandem with the 2024 South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Publication, Julia Robinson’s ambitious new installation ‘Split by the Spade’ is the latest entry in her ongoing series of odes to the folk horror genre. This exhibition promises to be a finely crafted, immersive experience by Robinson, highly esteemed graduate and staff member of Adelaide Central School of Art and the 2024 SALA feature artist.

Robinson’s long-standing themes of death, decay and renewal are explored through her signature blend of historical costuming techniques and archaic found objects. This body of work takes inspiration from Andrew Michael Hurley’s 2019 novel Starve Acre, a text that is emblematic of folk horror with its bleak narrative and sinister pseudo-folklore that challenges the concept of the rural idyll. Motifs from the novel – a gallows tree, a fallow field, and a burial site – are conjured by the artist to haunt the gallery as a series of textile apparitions.

‘Split by the Spade’ will be on display at Adelaide Central Gallery from 30 July to 6 September as part of the 2024 SALA Festival. The project has been supported by Arts South Australia.

Enquiries to mail@ugomichellgallery.com
Hugo Michell Gallery Opening: Narelle Autio + Cassie Thring
24
Jul

Hugo Michell Gallery Opening: Narelle Autio + Cassie Thring

Please join us for the launch of Narelle Autio's 'The Eyes of Her' and Cassie Thring's 'Goodbye Toki Hello' on Thursday 1st August from 6-8pm, presented as part of the 2024 South Australia Living Artists Festival.
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Narelle Autio
The Eyes of Her
Narelle Autio’s vibrant images of Australian outback and coastal life have won her widespread acclaim and continue to capture the hearts and imaginations of viewers. Her sophisticated use of colour, light and composition create photographs that evoke the complex beauty of Australia’s landscape, which is otherwise eroded by postcards and clichés.
-The Eyes of Her-
Across the ocean, under the waves.
Calming the sea gods.
She calls us,
Into the undersea.

Narelle Autio's 'The Eyes of Her' at Hugo Michell Gallery, 2024.
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Cassie Thring
Goodbye Toki Hello
Cassie Thring is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice explores the tension found between loss and hope. Thring’s new body of work 'Goodbye Toki Hello' has emerged from time spent researching the collapse and subsequent resurrection of Japan’s wild ibis population. Informed by a recent residency in Japan, she will be presenting new sculptural and print works employing unequal amounts of tragedy and humour.
Cassie Thring's 'Goodbye Toki Hello' at Hugo Michell Gallery
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Hugo Michell Gallery are proud to partner with Bird in Hand Winery for this opening event.
Please join us in celebrating the launch of these two exhibitions!
Hugo Michell Gallery acknowledges the Kaurna people as the traditional custodians of the Adelaide region, and that their cultural and heritage beliefs are still as important to the living Kaurna people today.
Clara Adolphs featured on cover of Artist Profile Magazine
13
Jul

Clara Adolphs featured on cover of Artist Profile Magazine

Clara Adolphs has been featured in the most recent issue of Artist Profile magazine.

About Adolphs' painting practice, Elli Walsh writes: "Working mostly from old black and white photographs, Adolphs invents her palette of stormy greys, subterranean blues and smokey greens. As we talk in her studio, I suggest that her colours feel melancholy, stirring, which seems to surprise her. Her relationship to the past, to moments lapsed and people gone, isn’t one of loss. “I like to think that everything exists all at once. Or everything that has existed, still exists,” she explains. She ponders for a second, “I used to think it was nostalgia, but I’m not glorifying the past.” For Clara, time is not linear, for the past replays in the present through a shared thread of humanity, some inexplicable essence that she captures in bucolic scenes of leisure, rest, social gatherings, children playing outdoors. She relates her paintings to the phenomenological reflections of Roland Barthes, who posits photographs as markers of presence; not absence."

Clara Adolphs’ exhibition ‘Silent Reply’ is on display at Hugo Michell Gallery until 20th May.

Read the article in full here. 

Artist Profile Magazine | Issue 63 | 2023 - MCA Store Museum of Contemporary Art

Enquiries to mail@hugomichellgallery.com

Kate Just announced as FINALIST in the Lester Art Prize
10
Jul

Kate Just announced as FINALIST in the Lester Art Prize

We are delighted to share that Kate Just has been selected as a finalist in the Lester Prize with her hand-knitted artwork ‘Self Portrait: Everyone Can Be Pussy Riot’.
 
The Lester Prize is one of Australia’s most prestigious portraiture prizes—an award that places artists and the community proudly front and centre.
 
Finalist artworks will be exhibited at the Western Australia Museum Boola Bardip from 13 September to 27 October 2024.
 
Congratulations Kate!
 
Pictured: Kate Just, Self Portrait: Everyone Can Be Pussy Riot (from the 2017 professional headshot by photographer @g.g.mcg), 2024, hand knitted wool and acrylic yarn, canvas, and timber, 72 x 62 cm. Photograph by Simon Strong
Hugo Michell Gallery Opening: Marisa Purcell + Kate Ballis
19
Jun

Hugo Michell Gallery Opening: Marisa Purcell + Kate Ballis

Please join us for the launch of Marisa Purcell’s ‘Light Savour’ and Kate Ballis’ ‘Liminality Antipodes’ on Thursday 27th June from 6-8pm.
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Marisa Purcell
Light Savour
"After a drive back to the city from the bush at dawn, Marisa Purcell, mesmerised by the early morning light and its ability to shapeshift a landscape, drove straight to the studio and started work. With a lush palette of greens, she recreated the moment she had seen through the windscreen — night passing the baton to day, light carried on the fog and splintering through the trees. Purcell has long been interested in windows and frames — both what we see through a window and what we don't see.
To the edges of her paintings are clues to what lies within, a cipher to decode the ceaselessly captivating ambiguity of light and colour. One painting calls to mind the experience of flash blindness; the moment when harsh light floods the retina, causing both an explosion of colour and a temporary loss of vision. Another is like a fragment of Monet’s Water Lilies writ large “Everyone will see a different colour,” she says, on the erraticism of light, perception and colour. “Like a lamp in front of a mirror, these works reflect their own source of light.” – Ariela Bard, exhibition catalogue essay
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Kate Ballis
Liminality Antipodes
In the liminal spaces where the ethereal touches the terrestrial, my infrared exploration of the South Island of New Zealand captures a world both familiar and otherworldly. As alizarin crimson mountains rise and teal waters mirror the rich deposits of pounamu (greenstone), these surreal landscapes bridge the realms of reality and myth.
About this exhibition, writer Dylin Hardcastle writes: “To find a home in Liminality, in the threshold of a horizon, between deep sky and wide lake, where the near and far feel not so far apart, is to surrender, voluptuously, to something felt. It is an ability to sit between regions - opaque and edged - and to feel, instead, the incredible release of shapelessness.”
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Hugo Michell Gallery are proud to partner with Bird in Hand Winery for this opening event.
Please join us in celebrating the launch of these two exhibitions!
Hugo Michell Gallery acknowledges the Kaurna people as the traditional
custodians of the Adelaide region, and that their cultural and heritage beliefs are still as important to the living Kaurna people today.
Finalists in the 2024 Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prize
30
May

Finalists in the 2024 Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prize

ARTIST NEWS

We are delighted to share that Zaachariaha Fielding and Idiko Kovacs have been announced as finalists in the 2024 Wynne and Sulman Prizes.

Winner of the 2023 Wynne Prize, Zaachariaha Fielding has been named as a finalist in both the Wynne and Sulman Prizes. About his work in the Sulman Prize, Zaachariaha states: “I am one of nine children, Robert and Kay’s oldest. Since my birth, the songs of my Country have filled my soul. Alongside their beautiful lessons, came my responsibility to protect and celebrate this knowledge. These songs will always be the most immense joy of my life, my anchor and my kurunpa (spirit). They kept me safe as I grew up in one of the toughest places in Australia, amongst violence and sickness. While the brightest and loudest discussed how to close the gap, how to make First Nations people healthy and live another 20 years, Australia voted ‘no’. Some referred to my achievement of winning last year’s Wynne Prize as winning the lottery, as if it was a fluke. I’m left to wonder: will me and my mob ever have access to those ‘lucky numbers’?”


Zaachariaha Fielding, Who won the lotto?, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 200 x 152.4 cm

This work depicts the sounds of Paralpi, a special place found just outside of Mimili on the eastern part of the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, South Australia. ‘Paralpi is a place where people come to embrace and celebrate children,’ says Fielding. ‘They are taught by the Elders how to move and mimic their clan emblem, and, for Mimili, this has always been the maku (witchetty grub).’

Paralpi is an extension of Fielding’s previous Inma series (2019–23), which includes the titular work that won him the 2023 Wynne Prize. Fielding’s scratchy application of Pitjantjatjara text as a stylistic element used to outline and define Country also captures reverberations of bodies performing the act of inma (ceremonial song and dance).

‘When this inma is sung, the sounds of the soprano, alto, tenors and baritone are thick, hitting the heart and then returning to the ngura (country),’ Fielding describes. According to Fielding, who is also a finalist in the 2024 Sulman Prize, this is a cyclical process unique to Aṉangu culture, which celebrates one’s interconnectedness with the land.

Zaachariaha Fielding, Paralpi, 2023, acrylic and ink on canvas, 300 x 200 cm

About her work selected as a finalist in the Sulman Prize, Ildiko Kovacs shares: “Two-up is a gambling game played on Anzac Day. Tossing a coin upward and its inevitable falling are attributes of a certain kind of line. It isn’t a straight line, nor a singular line, but a line drawn from kinetic energy. A line fuelled with emotion, unpredictability and the excitement of chance.”

Ildiko Kovacs, Two-up, oil on wood, 220 x 90 cm

We would also like to extend our congratulations to Christopher Zanko who the gallery is excited to be working with in 2025.

Congratulations Zaachariaha, Ildiko, and all the finalists!

The Archibald, Wynne, and Sulman Prizes will be on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 8 June to 8 September 2024.