News

Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to the opening of David Booth [Ghostpatrol]’s ‘Hello blue sky’ and Rob Howe’s ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ on Thursday 28th November 6-8pm.

Of Hello blue sky Booth states:

It has been ten years since I first exhibited with Hugo Michell Gallery in Adelaide. We use time as a marker, for obvious reasons, and this milestone has had me wondering whether I’ve spent more time in my creative place – a virtual space – than in the real world.

Hello blue sky.

The title for this new series of work stems from the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, a short-lived but global thinking social movement in England throughout the 1920s and ‘30s. Led by John Hargrave and comprising writers, artists, scientists and campaigners, the Kibbo Kift espoused practices of well-being, handicraft, pacifism, teaching and philosophy across a peaceful community. Discovering their art, attitude, rituals and manifestos has had a resounding effect on me: their vision, ambition and optimism providing a source of not only of deep reflection, but action.

Hello blue sky.

I’ve collected and created this body of work over the past two years, working across different spaces, utilising new materials and returning to older mediums from my first exhibitions with the gallery as a means to make sense of this ten-year span. The series of crafted, totem-like shrine objects can be seen as echoes of guided thoughts. Artworks are bearers of secrets. Perhaps some are revealed, maybe others are shared, and many will go untold, but I am absolutely sure that stories are passed in their existence. I created these sculptural objects so that people can hold them, because frankly, that’s the best part.

Hello blue sky.

The installation shows the works almost sliding on and off the walls, as if scrolling on forever. This is, at times, what my mind feels like when I’m searching for a memory or saved image. And so I offer to you this exhibition as an invitation into my mind over a period of time, where I have looked both backwards and forwards, where you can take a moment to sit atop the green grass and find something of me in this world, me in you, you in me or you in the world. 

Hello blue sky was the Kibbo Kift’s warm welcome, and so too is it mine.

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Earlier this year footage was released of the rocket used to put spacecraft into orbit off Cape Canaveral in Florida. On its return to Earth, the rocket swung itself into a vertical position and lowered itself gently onto a landing platform on an autonomous spaceport drone ship commissioned by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. The name given to the vessel on which the rocket so softly landed? Of Course I Still Love You.

For the rocket returning from its mission in space, ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ represents home. And for this body of work – taking as its subjects local children, houses and landscape – home is the common thread.

‘Of Course I Still Love You’ represents what I see in my vicinity, what I like to pay attention to. These are ongoing themes in my paintings of recent years – my continuing infatuation with the colours and possibilities of local suburbia.

Please join us in celebrating the launch of our final exhibitions for 2019!

Exhibition runs until December 20.

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.

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.

The latest Countess Report has been released, providing a reference point for gender equity in Australia’s contemporary visual arts. The report builds on the 2016 edition, showing significant increase in gender equity across public galleries, artist-run initiatives, major museums and university galleries, biennales, commercial galleries and contemporary art organisations. A total of 13,000 artists were counted across 184 organisations.

“Congratulations to the ARIs, contemporary art organisations, commercial galleries, major museums and university galleries, public galleries and biennales who’ve made such significant gender equity gains.
However, the research as revealed in the report focuses public attention on the pressing need for state-owned collections and institutions to match the progress made by the independent sector to redress the gender imbalance in collecting and promoting the work of women artists.”

– John Cruthers, The Sheila Foundation, Chair.

The Countess Report is a benchmarking project and online resource on gender equality in the Australian contemporary art sector, founded by Elvis Richardson. The Countess Report is funded by the Sheila Foundation Ltd (formerly Cruthers Art Foundation), and backed by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA).

Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to the opening of Trent Parke’s ‘The Crimson Line’ and Sangeeta Sandrasegar’s ‘Bestiarium 2019’ on Thursday 31 October 6-8pm.

For Trent Parke’s new series ‘The Crimson Line’, industrial landscapes are merged with ethereal cloudscapes, a splicing of atmospheres and dual notions of reality.

Life and death, light and shadow, space and time, memory. These are the themes that have always been at the forefront of Parke’s work. The Crimson Line continues to explore these ideas. Cinematic in his vision, Parke’s work has always been firmly established in film Noir. From the micro to the macro, science, genetics, factory lines, laboratories and processing plants. Global warming, consumerism and beauty, his landscapes provide a backdrop that frames a dark and foreboding narrative of strange truth and fiction.

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The series Bestiarium 2019 draws upon the history of visual representation from botanical and natural history illustrations and classical Western art genres to examine the legacy of artistic vision upon ways of knowing the world around us. The cutouts draw upon the watercolours of Austrian master dyer Aloys Zötl’s Bestiarium, a series of exquisite paintings of various animals undertaken from 1831 until his death in 1887. In Sandrasegar’s re-interpreted Bestiarium 2019 these fantastical animals sit alongside sculptures from collections of various German museums in settings of the artists imagination. The palette of the series draws upon they hyper-colour of Indian miniatures, and through these varied references Sandrasegar attempts to fix multiple expressions of seeing.

Sangeeta Sandrasegar has exhibited professionally in national exhibitions of emerging art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne; and the Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland; in addition to major international exhibitions and biennials in New Zealand, Korea, India and the USA.

Please join us in celebrating the launch of these two incredible exhibitions!

Exhibition runs until November 23.

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.

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

Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to a special event in partnership with Tarnanthi. Join us for an ‘In Conversation’ between artist Djambawa Marawili AM and Will Stubbs, Co-ordinator of the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre.

For this stellar exhibition, some of today’s foremost and pioneering Yolŋu artists come together as a group, or miṯtji. The exhibition demonstrates the collective revolutionary energy that inspires and emboldens artists from the same dynamic art centre, even as they work independently of each other. Together the artists push boundaries and conventions at Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, at Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land – yet each in their own boldly creative direction.

Showing works from Gunybi Ganambarr, Malaluba Gumana, Manini Gumana, Djambawa Marawili AM, Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, Dhuwarrwarr Marika, Baluka Maymuru, Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu, Garawan Waṉambi.

We look forward to seeing you on Saturday the 19th of October from 3pm.

Light refreshments provided.

Gunybi Ganambarr | Manini Gumana | Malaluba Gumana | Djambawa Marawili AM | Noŋgirrŋa Marawili | Dhuwarrwarr Marika | Baluka Maymuru | Garawan Waṉambi | Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu

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.

Tony Garifalakis is showing in Hope Dies Last: Art at the End of Optimism at Gertrude Contemporary. Curated by Mark Feary, Hope Dies Last spans two spaces, Gertrude Contemporary and Margaret Lawrence Gallery and presents a selection of Australian and international contemporary art.

Hope Dies Last self-identifies as “one of the most depressing events of the year,” promising to leave audiences emotionally crippled and wracked with negativity. It puts the dead in deadpan, examining our own mortality, suffering and failure through the lens of gallows humour.

Nicola Dowse

Hope Dies Last is on display at Gertrude Contemporary from October 5 to November 9, and at Margaret Lawrence Gallery from October 18 to November 14.

Paul Yore is included in the 16th International Triennial of Tapestry held at the Central Museum of Textiles, Łódź, Poland. The watchword of the 16th edition, “Breaching Borders”, refers to the issues of the modern world, which redefine the meaning of the identity of our civilisation, ethnic groups, social groups or each of us individually. Yore is one of 32 artists chosen to participate in the triennial. Since its beginnings, through 15 editions, the Triennial has had 1595 participating artists from 71 countries. 

The exhibition runs until the 15^th of March 2020.