News

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

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

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

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

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.

 

 

Hugo Michell Gallery Opening: Kate Just | Fiona Roberts


Please join us for the launch of Kate Just’s ‘50 Rules for Making Art’ and Fiona Roberts’ ‘Hereafter’ at Hugo Michell Gallery on Thursday 23rd May from 6-8pm, with an artist talk with Kate Just at 6pm to launch her accompanying publication.
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Kate Just
50 Rules for Making Art

‘50 Rules for Making Art’ is a series of 50 brightly coloured, hand knitted, square panels of text. About this series, Kate shares: “The rules look like knitted post-it-notes or reminders to self. The texts are in my own handwriting. I drew each text onto a knitting grid before stitching each panel. This series was made during the year I turned 50. While knitting, I reflected on the number of years I’ve lived and the many lessons I’ve learned about making art.”
Artist talk with Kate Just at 6pm to launch her accompanying publication.
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Fiona Roberts
Hereafter

‘Hereafter’ explores humanity's eternal quest for psychological and physical safety, manifested through the interplay of symbolism, superstitions, rituals and belief systems. Drawing upon symbolic representations of life and existence beyond, Roberts explores the profound existential inquiries that have plagued human consciousness throughout history.

Selected work by Fiona Roberts in her solo exhibition 'Hereafter', 2024.

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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.

Kate Just selected for the 2024 Contemporary Textile Biennial: CONTEXTILE in Guimarães, Portugal

We are delighted to share that Kate Just has been selected as one of 50 artists across 29 Countries for CONTEXTILE 2024, the 7th Contemporary Textile Biennial in Guimarães, Portugal, with her Self Care Action Series.

About this body of work, Kate shares: “My Self Care Action series explores the radical roots of self care and its origins in community organising. I knitted it to remind myself and others of the ways we have learned to sustain ourselves and support each other through grief, global upheaval, family stress, and life changes. The touch and tactility in each work seeks to translates a message of love and care.”

This edition of CONTEXTILE 2024, proposes a reflection on Touch. ‘We believe touch is the foremost sense capable of repositioning people in relation to the world and from a less ocular-centric perspective. Touch is a powerful tool for fostering closer, collaborative, and healthier human relationships. Touch, when used with respect, consent, and consideration, can create environments where people feel more connected to each other, a fundamental aspect in building stronger communities and more cohesive societies. Ethical touch goes beyond the physical aspect, representing, above all, an expression of recognizing humanity in one another.

CONTEXTILE 2024 will be presented from September to December 2024.

Pictured: Kate Just with ‘Self Care Action Series’, 2023, hand knitted acrylic yarn, canvas, and timber, 55 x 40 cm each.

Gallery closure for Anzac Day Public Holiday

GALLERY CLOSURE
Please note that Hugo Michell Gallery will be closed on Thursday 25th April for the Anzac Day Public Holiday.

The gallery will be open during usual hours from Friday 26th April onwards with Sally Bourke's 'Silence is just a sound' and Bridie Gillman's 'The Bend'.

Enquiries to mail@hugomichellgallery.com

Hugo Michell Gallery Opening: Sally Bourke + Bridie Gillman

Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to the opening of Sally Bourke's 'Silence is just a sound' and Bridie Gillman's 'The Bend' on Thursday 18th April, 6-8pm.

Sally Bourke
Silence is just a sound

In Sally Bourke's exhibition 'Silence is just a sound', abstracted portraits serve as portals to the depths of memory. With a deft hand and keen introspection, Bourke captures the essence of silence—not as absence, but as a profound presence. Through her evocative paintings, she invites the viewer into a realm where silence reverberates with the echoes of the past, offering a nuanced reflection on the complexities of human experience. Her paintings beckon us to listen, to immerse themselves in the quietude where memories echo softly.


Bridie Gillman
The Bend

This exhibition has been made in response to a specific moment experienced while walking in Washpool National Park, NSW, on Gumbaynggirr, Bundjalung and Ngarabal Country. A dramatic shift in light and atmosphere on a bend of the track that called us to pause. From within the bend – hanging, holding vines connect trees to each other, drawing lines to follow from one point to another, left to right, light to dark. This experience and the observations made, act as the starting point for the paintings, translated through colour and line.

Collected field recordings blend seamlessly with Reuben Schafer's instrumentation to create a captivating soundscape.

Bridie Gillman, The Bend I, 2024, oil on linen, 168 x 213cm


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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.

 

Gallery closure over the Easter long weekend

GALLERY CLOSURE
Wishing you all as safe and fun filled Easter long weekend!

Please note Hugo Michell Gallery will be closed across the long weekend and will reopen on Tuesday 2nd of April with exhibitions by:

Marc Etherington | My Old Heart
Jeremy Blincoe, Jodie Di Natale, Ella Dunn | The artist
is always alone

Exhibitions continue until 13 April 2024. 

Enjoy the break, drive safe!