Justine Varga

Congratulations to Justine Varga who has been selected as a finalist in the 2021 Bowness Photography Prize for her chromogenic photographic work Shiaparelli. This work will be featured as part of Justine Varga’s upcoming exhibition ‘Masque’ to be presented at Hugo Michell Gallery in November 2021. 

About the work, Varga says:

“When we look at photographs, we are generally asked to view them as a window onto another place and time. Echoing a famously shocking hue, Schiaparelli ruptures this convention by asking the viewer to simultaneously look through and at its photographicness, and from its centre to its edge. The matrix from which this photograph is derived is a negative on which I have inscribed saliva, urine, bath water, ink and paint, mingled materials of genealogical and historical remembering. This photograph also deliberately draws our attention to its margins, an area of the photograph created during the printing process itself. Refusing to give up any easy meaning, Schiaparelli stages an encounter with the viewer, an experience as much as a document.”

Over the last 16 years, the Bowness Photography Prize has emerged as an important annual survey of contemporary photographic practice in Australia and one of the most prestigious prizes in the country. The winning work will be awarded $30,000 and will be acquired into Monash Gallery of Art’s nationally significant collection of Australian photographs.

The exhibition will be on display from Thursday 9^th of September until 7^th November at the Monash Gallery of Art.

Justine Varga is exhibiting her series ‘Areola’ at City Gallery Wellington as part of a curated exhibition titled ‘News from the Sun’.

The window, the horizon, and the still life are some of photography’s biggest clichés. Darkroom and Instagram famous, beloved by professionals and amateurs alike, they demand to be photographed. They have become ciphers for photography itself. News from the Sun features three photographers, who each explore one of these motifs. In each case, the favoured motif is abstracted, serialised, and transformed through formal processes and manipulations that push it far beyond the cliché.

Australian artist Justine Varga’s Areola series combines cameraless and lens-based photography. Key to her investigation is the repeated image of a latticed window, taken from the same negative but shown in multiple states. It harks back to some of the first photographs ever made, Henry Fox Talbot’s 1835 views of a latticed window.

‘News from the Sun’ runs until 15 March 2020. Visit the City Gallery Wellington website for full details.

Justine Varga is currently featured by Art Collector in their online art news. ‘Justine Varga : Camera Observa’ focuses on the balance between Varga’s intuitive and materially-emphasised photography practice and the controversy and critical response it has acquired.

The intellectual rigour of Varga’s work is often emphasised in descriptions of the artist and her practice. But while there is a fierce intelligence behind it, the work’s rich materiality is never diminished by an overbearing conceptual rigidity. Along with the film itself, Varga uses “a fairly limited amount of prosaic and abject materials in the production of my photo- graphs, coupled with various darkroom processes”, she says. The film is variously drawn on, handled, scratched, carried around, cried on and spat on by the artist over an extended period of time and then is physically manipulated in multiple ways to arrive at the final print.

Carrie Miller

Congratulations to Justine Varga who has been selected as a finalist in the Bowness Photography Prize 2019, presented by Monash Gallery of Art, for her work ‘Overlay’.

“The Bowness Photography Prize has become an important survey of contemporary photographic practice and one of the most prestigious prizes in the country, providing Australian artists with the opportunity to exhibit at one of Australia’s leading public galleries. Since 2017 the prize has been acquisitive and the $30,000 cash prize awarded to the winner ensures that it continues to provide a significant boost to an artist’s career.”

Exhibition runs from October 5 to November 17, with the winner announced October 10.

Trent Parke and Justine Varga are now showing in Defining Place/Space: Contemporary Photography from Australia at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego.

‘Defining Place/Space’ represents the current state of contemporary photography in Australia through the work of thirteen artists. The exhibiting artists were nominated by esteemed Australian curators of photography, and ultimately selected by MOPA’s Chief Curator Deborah Klochko.

Exhibition runs until September 22.

Fiona McMonagle and Justine Varga are now showing in Ways of Seeing at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

“With a primary focus on contemporary works, Ways of Seeing highlights over 100 recent acquisitions to the collection.”

Exhibition runs until April 22 in Galleries 9, 10, and 11 at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Congratulations to Justine Varga who has been announced as the winner of The Dobell Drawing Prize for 2019. This new biennial prize and exhibition is presented by the National Art School in association with the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation. The Prize is an open call to all artists and aims to explore the enduring importance of drawing and the breadth and dynamism of contemporary approaches to drawing.

Of the work, Justine states: ‘Photogenic Drawing (2018) is an artwork that ruptures any clear distinction between photography and drawing. The negative from which Photogenic Drawing has been derived was drawn on and daubed with pigment during its long exposure. When that negative is printed large-scale in the darkroom, these inscriptions are revealed to intermingle with the distinctive signature of my fingertips, a trace of touching that is generally forbidden in the production of photographs. This mode of working is, in part, due to my grounding in the logic of drawing while I was at art school. But it also recalls similarly drawn photographic prints made in the 19th century by artists like Camille Corot and Charles-Francois Daubigny, and in the 20th by Pablo Picasso and Len Lye. I have always seen my photography in these terms, as a drawing with light, or more literally as a light-sensitive substrate on which I make marks or allow the world to leave its own marks. This print is therefore the making visible of a drawing practice that is at once physical and chemical, autobiographical and contingent, painterly and photographic.’

The Dobell Drawing Prize is now showing at the National Art School and runs until 25 May 2019.

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