News

Hugo Michell Gallery are excited to return to Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, located at Booth F14 from 7th -10th September, 2023.

Presenting:
Richard Lewer
Trent Parke
Justine Varga
Sera Waters
Tony Garifalakis [Installation Contemporary]

Our booth presentation this year creates four distinctive spaces, with an immersive grotto of embroideries and hand-crafted sculptures by Sera Waters that dwell within the gaps of Australian histories to examine settler-colonial home-making patterns and practices. Richard Lewer’s take on the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ - pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth - is loaded with historical reference and surface lustre. Trent Parke’s photographic series ‘Monument’ revisits over 25 years of his most iconic street photography, presenting a single filmic narrative capturing the last moments on earth. Justine Varga’s intimate analogue photographs will seduce with deep colours and gestural marks that writhe across the surface. Tony Garifalakis' 'Scum Suite' engages with the ways in which the meaning of images, signs and symbols might be ascribed, conveyed or transformed in contemporary culture, and how conventional notions of hierarchy and status might be undermined. 

Sydney Contemporary, Australasia’s international art fair presents the country’s largest and most diverse gathering of local and international galleries.

Sera Waters, Justine Varga, Richard Lewer, Trent Parke for Hugo Michell Gallery at Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, 2023. Photo by Document Photography. 

Register your interest to receive additional information regarding this presentation by emailing mail@hugomichellgallery.com

Trent Parke’s landmark publication Monument is a portal through which we bear witness to the disintegration of the universe over 294 expertly printed pages.

The monolithic publication is painstakingly hand-bound in leather bearing totemic coordinates to the planet Earth, blind stamped end sheets, black sprayed edges, and a loose steel plaque, that once removed, leaves the volume without language.

When Trent Parke moved to Sydney from a small Australian country town, his first impression was of the sheer volume of people. He would grab his camera and go out exploring at every opportunity, fascinated by the endless processions. 
At rush hour, he watched as the city workers moved in a great mass, all walking the great conveyor belt of life. In a trance-like state, treading the same path day after day, week after week, year after year… clocking on, clocking off, all under the spell of the city. Parke would stand on the edge of the wave, on the outside of a new world, looking in. As if watching a newly discovered species. 
 
 “At night I would watch the eclipse of moths, millions of them constantly circling the lights of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. At the same time, on my balcony, a miniature performance played out around the light above my head. The moths inevitably and without resistance were drawn to their ultimate demise. Spiralling out of control, like small spaceships caught in a tractor beam. Lured and blinded by the bright white light, they were taken out by hundreds of birds swooping in to snatch them from the air… spiders sat waiting on their webs. Built with precise coordinates across the face of the lights, they captured the hapless tiny creatures that slipped through. If any miraculously managed to survive that onslaught, they continued on, driven towards the flame, intoxicated by those burning hot light globes. Then suddenly an electrical charge in the still air. A small puff of smoke. Gone. Instant disintegration of a life form. Another blip in the universe. Another small spacecraft colliding with the blazing sun.” - Trent Parke

First edition copies of Trent Parke's 'Monument' is now available to purchase through the Hugo Michell Gallery Online Shop. 

Clara Adolphs has been featured in the most recent issue of Artist Profile magazine.

About Adolphs' painting practice, Susan Horsburgh writes: “Like old photos, Adolphs’ paints allude to a constancy, suggesting that our experiences aren’t so different from those of our grandparents. “The wider world and society might change but the human condition doesn’t.”.

Clara Adolphs’ exhibition ‘Silent Reply’ is showing at Hugo Michell Gallery until 20th May.

Enquiries to mail@hugomichellgallery.com

Pictured: Qantas ‘Travel Insider’ Magazine, May 2023; Cover to pp 131-135.

Hugo Michell Gallery welcomes the addition of Georgia Spain to our represented artists!

Georgia Spain is a visual artist and musician living and working in Naarm (Melbourne). She graduated with a BFA in painting from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne in 2015, where she was the recipient of the Lionel Gell Foundation Scholarship and a finalist for the Margaret Lawrence Gallery's Majlis Travelling Scholarship. In 2020, Spain was the recipient of the Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship administered by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 2021, Spain's work ‘Six Different Women’ (2021) won the Trawalla Foundation Acquisitive Prize in the Women's Art Prize Tasmania. In the same year, Spain was announced as winner of the Sir John Sulman Prize for her work ‘Getting down or falling up’ (2021).

Her work often explores the complexities of human behaviour; using narrative and storytelling to examine the cultural, political and personal. Her paintings frequently look at ideas around human spectacle, theatricality, ritual and ceremony. She is interested in the emotional and performative exchanges between people in social and psychological spaces and in her paintings physical connection is explored through bodies in groupings.

We congratulate Georgia on her achievements and look forward to her first solo exhibition at Hugo Michell Gallery in September 2023.

Register your interest at mail@hugomichellgallery.com

Georgia Spain, Hot wind, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 152 x 198 cm. Private collection.