News
Of the exhibition Bridie Gillman states: My practice is informed by ideas of place, and the ways in which experiences and memories shape our perspective of a site. Everyday observations that could be easily overlooked or forgotten are remembered and expressed in paint using colour and abstract gestures. This process of responding to past experiences from the context of my studio environment offers me different ways of connecting to a place when I am physically no longer there. Memories of a place often shift over time, with details fading and colours changing. My practice welcome’s the distortion that occurs in the process of remembering.
Exhibition runs from: 11 November – 9 December
Hugo Michell Gallery are thrilled to be presenting the work of Richard Lewer and Lucas Grogan in Sydney
Contemporary Presents 2020!
“Designed to showcase art a little differently, Sydney Contemporary presents 2020 is an experiential platform that takes you on an art buying adventure from the comfort of your own home. Explore, discover and buy from over 450 artworks by 380 Australian and International artists all created in 2020. We always remember the story of when, how and why we bought an artwork so why not take this opportunity to acquire a work created during this iconic year, and support our artists.”
Running from 1-31 October.
– If you wish to join us for the opening of these exhibitions, RSVP is essential.
“The show is about how since moving to Canada a year and a half ago, I have been feeling a bit of isolation and missing my family and friends. It’s hard starting off in a new country. I’ve found solace is listening to Nick Cave’s music which is like listening to a familiar old friend. These paintings are about me wondering what Nick and I would get up to if we were best friends.”
Exhibition runs from: 8 October – 7 November
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.
Hugo Michell Gallery welcomes the addition of Clara Adolphs to our represented artists!
Referencing abandoned photographs, Clara Adolphs works explore the notion of time and memory. She is fascinated by the question of what remains after a moment has passed.
Based in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, Adolphs completed her Bachelor Degree in Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales in 2008. Adolphs has exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions in commercial and public galleries. Adolphs has also been a finalist in the Archibald and Sulman Prize.
In 2018 Adolphs was the recipient on the Eva Breuer Traveling Scholarship, travelling to Paris for a residency at the Cite International des Arts. She has also undertaken residencies at Corridor Projects, ArtSpace Mackay, Leigh Creek, The Armory, and the New York Studio Art School.
Adolphs has work in numerous private and public collections including ArtBank, Goulburn Regional Gallery and Gold Coast City Gallery.
We congratulate Clara on all of her achievements and are thrilled to be working together in the future.
Congratulations to Richard Lewer and William Mackinnon who have been announced as finalists in the 2020 Archibald Prize, presented by Art Gallery of New South Wales!
The Archibald Prize, first awarded in 1921, is Australia’s favourite art award, and one of its most prestigious. Awarded to the best portrait painting, a who’s who of Australian culture – from politicians to celebrities, sporting heroes to artists.
Of the work, Lewer says: “It is easy to feel an instant rapport with Elizabeth Laverty (a fellow red-head) because she is a warm, passionate, humble woman. I will always remember her response when I first asked if I could paint her portrait, “Why would you want to paint me, what have I done?”
Liz and her late husband Colin were among the first collectors to travel the country and stay in remote Aboriginal communities to visit the art centres and meet the artists of the work they were falling in love with. Over several decades, they built one of Australia’s best collections of indigenous Australian contemporary art whilst championing the artists and art centres and working tirelessly to raise money to provide dialysis centres on country and swimming pools for the communities they visited.
The portrait’s rugged materials allegorise Australia’s beautiful yet harsh outback landscape and required a physical painting process involving scrubbing and scraping of the paint and working with the mercurial rusting process until the final portrait revealed itself.”
Of the work, Mackinnon says: “Birth is such an overwhelming and emotional moment. The image of one’s newborn suckling his mother’s breast is just incredible. I thought it would make a great painting, so simple but so powerful; however my emotional register was so overflowing, I was finding beauty and meaning everywhere. I let the idea and initial drawings percolate then last year revisited the subject, working in quite a realistic way, which didn’t capture the intensity. I began using collage and included pieces of fabric from the gown Sunshine wore at the birth and a kimono from a memorable holiday when we were falling in love.
‘I made seven successive paintings, continually simplifying the composition and managed to make the mother/son interconnection more powerful and sensual. The final painting came out in a week or so, the speed and familiarity with the subject giving the painting a freshness and intimacy.”
Exhibition runs 26 September until 10 January 2021.
*Please note*
-If you wish to join us for the opening of these exhibitions, RSVP is essential.
Exhibition runs from: 3 September – 3 October
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.
Hugo Michell Gallery welcomes the addition of Kate Just to our represented artists!
Kate Just is an established artist who works with sculpture, installation, neon, textiles and photography to produce art works that promote feminist representations of the body and experience. Just is well known for using textile crafts including knitting as both a narrative device and unwitting political tool. In addition to her highly crafted solo artworks, Just often works socially and collaboratively within the community to tackle significant social issues including sexual harassment and violence against women.
Just holds a PhD in Sculpture from Monash University, a Master of Arts from RMIT University, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Victorian College of the Arts. Just has exhibited her artwork extensively across Australia an internationally including the National Gallery of Australia, ACCA, Artspace, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Craft Victoria, Gertrude Contemporary, RMIT Project Space, the Margaret Lawrence Gallery, CCP, CAST, PICA, CCAS, AIR Gallery and the AC Institute in New York, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Richmond Virginia, the Rijswijk Museum in the Netherlands, Kunsthalle Krems in Austria, Sanskriti Gallery in New Delhi, Youkobo Artspace in Tokyo and Titanik Galleria in Turku, Finland.
Just’s work is held in numerous public and private collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Artbank, Ergas Collection, the City of Port Phillip, Wangaratta Art Gallery, Ararat Regional Art Gallery and Proclaim Management Collection.
We congratulate Kate on all of her achievements and are thrilled to be working together in the future.
Congratulations to Sera Waters who has been announced as the 2020 Guildhouse Fellowship recipient!
The Guildhouse Fellowship, valued at over $50,000, was inaugurated in 2019 with the generous support of South Australian philanthropists, The James & Diana Ramsay Foundation, to recognise and elevate South Australian artistic ambition.
The selection panel for the 2020 Guildhouse Fellowship comprised AGSA Director Rhana Devenport ONZM, Guildhouse CEO Emma Fey and Sebastian Goldspink, the recently announced curator of the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art.
Sera Waters is an Adelaide based artist, arts writer and academic. Since being awarded a Ruth Tuck Scholarship in 2006 to study hand embroidery at the Royal School of Needlework (UK), Waters’ art practice has been characterised by a darkly stitched meticulousness. Her embroideries and hand-crafted sculptures dwell within the gaps of Australian histories to examine settler-colonial home-making patterns and practices, especially her own genealogical ghost escapes.
Richard Lewer is now exhibiting at Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tāmaki.
Richard Lewer’s art frequently explores how specific locations become repositories or emotional signposts of shared events. In his New Zealand Disasters sequence of paintings, Lewer re-works the panoramic format of landscape paintings to envisage unforgettable traces left within New Zealand’s landscape and traumatic events in its history. In doing so, Lewer explores how our relationships and responses to specific places become shaped by the ‘imaginative geographies’ formed by life-changing and unexpected occurrences.
Read from left to right the seven panels chronologically chart a series of New Zealand disasters: the Napier earthquake (1931); the Tangiwai train derailing (1953); the sinking of the Wahine (1968); the Air New Zealand Flight 901 crash at Mt Erebus (1979), the Christchurch earthquake; and the Whakaari/White Island volcanic eruption (2019).
Painted as a series of fragments, the sequence relies upon, and is activated by, the subjective and personal responses which local audiences bring to the artwork’s revisioning and remembering of place and event.
The suburban love story of Herbert Erickson, a Perth-based pensioner, who survived a suicide pact with his wife only to die soon after by drowning himself, prompted Richard Lewer to draw, colour and narrate this animation which addresses a real-life tragedy. Tender and troubling, the video raises issues about love and euthanasia. The title quotes Erikson, who told reporters outside court: ‘I want to be with my partner really, but I’m still here, worst luck.’
Using an overhead projector to create the visuals, Lewer narrates the senior citizen’s tragic story which gives the video animation a tender and personal reality. Reflecting on the work, he commented: ‘Tragic everyday storytelling is something that I have always gravitated towards.’
Exhibition runs: 29 July to 13 Sep 2020
Full details here.
Showing: 131-140 of 306