News

National Anthem, featuring Tony Garifalakis and Paul Yore, and curated by Kate Just, is now showing at Buxton Contemporary.

Presenting a cacophonous array of artistic voices and perspectives, National Anthem brings together 24 artists, from a range of generations, who critically address Australian national identity. Built around key works in the Michael Buxton Collection, together with works sourced from beyond the collection, this project reflects on the ways that the desire for a singular national identity often excludes Indigenous histories and denies the multiplicity of voices, cultures and experiences that enrich, contest, and enhance Australian life.
Channelling humour and satire and engaging in tactics such as play, intervention and confrontation, the artists in National Anthem seek self-determination and collectively hold a mirror up to contemporary Australia, prompting new representations of who we are or who we might aspire to become.

Exhibition runs until July 7.

After Nature, the first major survey of Janet Laurence’s career, is now showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Presenting work from Laurence’s expansive career, the exhibition will features a range of work from sculpture, installation, photography, and video.

For over 30 years, Laurence has explored the interconnection of all living things – animal, plant, mineral – through a multi-disciplinary approach. She has employed diverse materials to explore the natural world in all its beauty and complexity, and to highlight the environmental challenges it faces today: the era of the Anthropocene.

Janet Laurence: After Nature includes key works from the artist’s career, with loans from public institutions around Australia and the MCA Collection work Cellular Gardens (where breathing begins) (2005). They encompass her alchemical works of the early 1990s that use metal plates, minerals, organic substances and lightboxes, through to her installations of the 2000s and beyond, incorporating plant and animal specimens within transparent vitrines and ‘wunderkammer’ environments. Laurence’s works reflect on the fragility of the natural world, its plight and potential restoration.

Central to the exhibition is a major new MCA commission, entitled Theatre of Trees, which brings together the last decade of Laurence’s research into plants, their medicinal and healing powers, and trees.

This exhibition has evolved from two decades of collaboration between Janet Laurence and MCA Chief Curator Rachel Kent, who curated Laurence’s exhibition Muses at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne in 2000.

Janet Laurence 
After Nature
1 March – 10 June 2019
MCA: Gallery Level 1

Key Links:
Purchase Catalogue
Read the Curatorial Essay by MCA Chief Curator Rachel Kent
MCA behind-the-scenes short film

Press Coverage:
Talking with Trees event series listed in UNSW Newsroom
Review in The Age
Review in The Australian
Review in Art Guide
Review in Art Almanac
Review in the Sydney Morning Herald

Justine Varga, Julia Robinson, and Kenny Pittock all feature in the current issue of Art Collector magazine.

Kenny Pittock, who first exhibited at the Gallery in 2018, is profiled by Jane Sullivan. Titled Word Play, the piece covers Pittock’s recent exhibitions at MONA FOMA and MARS Gallery, and his upcoming exhibition at Hugo Michell Gallery:

Pittock often lights on objects that are kitsch in the sense that they are valueless or disregarded, but he draws out unexpected lateral associations that give them new meaning.
There’s sincerity in the way he tried to replicate these everyday objects, from the graphic design details of logos to the crumpled packaging, but he’s not interested in hyperrealism. “I grew up watching Wallace and Gromit. I really like seeing things slightly wonky with a thumbprint in them,” he says.
This associative mode of working means a studio packed with small pieces and ideas in development, all waiting for their opportunity. “I’m always working pretty solidly,” Pittock says. Part of what he most enjoys is assembling these individual items into exhibitions and longer narratives. He compares it to the way stand-up performances take their 10-minute sets and draw them together into a longer show with a narrative arc. “I really like the way that comedians are able to tell big jokes while telling little jokes that keep you interested throughout,” he says.

Julia Robinson features in the issue as one of five South Australian artists we need to pay closer attention to, as selected by Liz Nowell:

Her recent work, as seen in Long Ballads at Sydney’s Artspace in 2017 and The National 2019: New Australian Art, features elaborately-adorned gourds. This peculiar, phallic vegetable – that the artist surrounds in Tudor-era ceremonial attire – reflects Robinson’s growing interest in fecundity, growth, and European fertility rituals, some of which are still practiced today. With their overt phallic and seed-spreading references, Robinson’s gourd works draw strong links between nature and sexuality, doing so with a sense of candour, oddity, and playfulness.

Justine Varga’s Areola, which exhibited at the Gallery from February 7 to March 16, is reviewed by Andrew Purvis for One Sentence Reviews:

Amongst exquisitely-framed rectangles of colour, the image of a window repeats, signalling the reintroduction of representational imagery to Justine Varga’s photography; a return that coalesces with the artist’s ongoing investigations into the materiality of the photographic process to stunning effect.

Grab your copy of Art Collector today!

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.

Press Coverage

Art Guide

ArtsHub

Hugo Michell Gallery welcomes the addition of Julia Robinson to our represented artists!

Julia Robinson is a South Australian visual artist whose work reflects an interest in religion, the afterlife, death, and how humans address these concerns through ritual. Drawing on established belief systems and a multitude of sources including myths, fairy tales, and European superstition and folklore, Robinson examines our discomfort with sex and with the finality of death. Blurring the boundaries that separate the man-made, the natural, and the spiritualistic, Robinson’s impish sculptures and installations surprise and intrigue. Recent works draw on depictions of harvest, fertility, and resurrection rituals in folk horror films, such as The Wicker Man (1973) and Wake Wood (2011).

Julia has exhibited widely across Australia, and has been the recipient of a number of grants and awards. Upcoming exhibitions include The National 2019: New Australian Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent exhibitions include: Open House, a touring exhibition and the Tamworth Textile Triennial; Versus Rodin: Bodies across space and time at the Art Gallery of South Australia; Long Ballads at Ideas Platform Artspace; Sensual Nature at the Fremantle Arts Centre; Structure for navigating an unknown afterlife at Art Pod; and Psychache at Holy Rollers Studio. Julia is currently lecturing at Adelaide Central School of Art. Her work is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of South Australia and Artbank, and in private collections across Australia.

Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to the opening of Ildiko Kovacs’ ‘Both Ways’ and Gerry Wedd’s ‘Pot Songs’.

ldiko Kovacs’ abstract works revel in the rich and sumptuous possibilities of paint and its ability to evoke different thoughts, emotions, and sensations. Across the course of her career, Kovacs has created paintings that are intuitive and raw, the result of a process of experimentation, and of applying and removing pigment until a sense of cohesion is achieved. Working directly…without a preconceived outcome, painting for Kovacs is process-driven and instinctive – an “intuitive line of thought or belief”. Her practice over 40 years has been shaped by a series of artistic shifts and developments that, as she says, are “somehow always connected with what is happening in my life.”
– Megan Robson

Kovacs’ early career ‘void’ paintings were succeeded by her experimentations with reintroducing forms to the pictorial space. These abstracted forms coalesced into lines, structured and fluid. In recent years, Kovacs has worked with wide, rolling lines that twist, turn, curve, and loop over themselves. In ‘Both Ways’, Kovacs presents four such works. In contrast, Kovacs also presents ply-mounted works on card in which her gestural line narrows, sharpens, and becomes almost sculptural, carving through the two-dimensional space. In both styles, Kovacs draws on abstract expressionism’s focus on process and gesture in mark-making, as she builds up, excavates, and builds again thick layers of lines and shapes which follow the movements of her body as she works. From the process-based similarities and the drastically different styles of the works in ‘Both Ways’ emerges a dialogue about line and gesture, colour and movement, and internal and external landscapes.

Since the 1980s, Kovacs has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, and has the recipient of major awards including the Bulgari Art Award in 2015. Her work is held in major national and international collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artbank, and the World Bank.

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Gerry Wedd is a South Australian artist known for his ceramics as well as his long-term contribution to the iconic Mambo brand, beginning in the late ’80s and ending in 2006. Wry and witty, his classical ceramic forms draw on surf culture, politics, and cult music in their surface decoration. Blue and white willow pattern plates might sport the face of Paul Kelly or Dolly Parton, or barrelling surf à la Hokusai.
– Varia Karipoff

In ‘Pot Songs’, Wedd presents a series of ceramic works he views as fan art, or suburban folk art, in that they are homages to their subjects. Wedd sees the works as covers – as tributes of a sort, but more importantly, as reinterpretations, that, like musical covers, focus on the lyric content, melodic aspect, or rhythm of the original. Wedd pays homage to the sources of the images, text, and lyrics that adorn his vessels, but also pays homage to the canon of his chosen medium, as he engages with and subverts its traditions.

Wedd has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Havana Biennial, the JamFactory, and the Ian Potter Museum of Art. He has been the recipient of several major awards, and is held in private and major public collections across the country, including the National Gallery of Australia and the Powerhouse Museum.

Please join us in celebrating the launch of these two incredible 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.

Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to the opening of Justine Varga’s ‘Areola’ and Kate Just’s ‘From China with Love’.

Justine Varga’s artistic practice demonstrates a sustained interrogation of what we assume photographs to be, and what we expect them to do. Utilising physical manipulations of the material surfaces she works with, Varga touches, smears and inverts negatives, she layers and overlaps exposures, she retains the visual residue of their processes of becoming.
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Etymologically speaking, the word areola has its roots in Latin, originally referring to a small, open space. Areola also refers to those ‘small spaces between lines or cracks on a leaf or an insect’s wing’.
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Made without a camera to act as intermediary, these images are manifestations of physical contact, visual traces of skin on skin. As she presses the pigment-smeared flesh of her hand onto the negative’s surface, Varga repudiates the lens’s definitive frame. Exploiting the tension between negative and positive, Varga’s tactile manipulations of her materials make evident the physicality of her process…Stripping the mechanistic reproductive power of the camera from the process of making a photographic object, Varga posits instead a method of bodily creation. The spatial and conceptual distance between maker and object is collapsed. Particles of skin and saliva mark the photographic skin, the body of the artist pervading the body of work. Stretching the picture’s frame beyond its conventional limits, these works complicate the certitude of the border which they both occupy and expand.
—Kirsty Baker

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Kate Just is an established artist who works with sculpture, installation, neon, textiles, and photography to produce artworks that promote feminist representations of the body and experience. Just is well-known for using textile crafts including knitting as both narrative devices and unwitting political tools. In addition to her highly-crafted solo artworks, Just often works socially and collaboratively within communities to tackle significant social issues including sexual harassment and violence against women.

‘From China With Love’ is a series of hand-sewn textile hangings and a photograph produced during a residency at Red Gate in Beijing in 2018. ‘From China With Love’ is inspired by images and ideas of love, relationships, and feminism in China.

Please join us in celebrating these two incredible exhibitions and the launch of our 2019 exhibition program!

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.