December

Program 2020 announced

Tolarno Galleries’ Program 2020 includes:

Ben Quilty 150 years  8 – 29 February
A&A Exquisite Corpse / Cadavre Exquis 12 – 28 March. Part of Melbourne Design Week 2020, an initiative of the Victorian Government in collaboration with the National Gallery of Victoria, 12 – 22 March 2020
Justine Varga Tachisme 4 April – 9 May. An official exhibition of PHOTO 2020 International Festival of Photography, 23 April – 10 May 2020.
Benjamin Armstrong 16 May – 20 June
Amos Gebhardt Night Horse 27 June – 25 July
Danie Mellor 1 August – 29 August
Tim Johnson 5 September – 3 October
Caroline Rothwell 10 October – 7 November
Judy Watson 14 November – 12 December

Image: Justine Varga Influence 2018-19, chromogenic photograph, 131.5 x 110 cm (image including halo border). From the upcoming exhibition Tachisme.

November

Announcing Skywhalepapa!

The National Gallery of Australia unveiled its 2020 program this week, including the spectacular news that Patricia Piccinini has been commissioned as part of The Balnaves Contemporary Series to create Skywhalepapa, a new companion to Skywhale (2013), which returns to Canberra after six years touring Australia and the world.

Together they form a skywhale family that will be launched near the Gallery and take flight over Canberra eight times during the exhibition period. The sculptures will then float across the skies of Australia as a National Gallery travelling exhibition.

Skywhales: Every heart sings is an NGA #KnowMyName project celebrating the work of Australian women artists, and the third instalment of The Balnaves Contemporary Series.

Patricia Piccinini’s current exhibition Chromatic Balance is on view now at Tolarno Galleries until 14 December 2019.

Read more at The Guardian, ABC News, AFR, The Age, The Australian and Canberra Times.

Image: Patricia Piccinini Skywhalepapa 2019/20 (artist’s sketch)

November

Patricia Piccinini ‘Chromatic Balance’

Tolarno Galleries is pleased to present Patricia Piccinini‘s latest exhibition, Chromatic Balance.

Available works include The Balance, a major new sculpture, together with a striking series of unique Panelworks and Shoeforms exploring the naturalisation of technology through form, colour and surface.

On view from 16 November to 14 December 2019.

Tolarno Galleries welcomes visitors of all ages, however some exhibitions such as this one cannot accommodate prams and strollers.

Image: Patricia Piccinini The Balance 2019. ABS plastic and automotive paint, 230 (h) x 187 (w) x 150 (d) cm, edition of 3 + 1AP

September

teamLab

Thanks to the 24,000+ visitors who attended teamLab: Reversible Rotation between 5 October – 2 November 2019!

Presented by Tolarno Galleries, in association with exhibition partners Martin Browne Contemporary and Melbourne International Arts Festival, teamLab: Reversible Rotation, included four mesmerising screen works: Waves of Light (12 screens), Reversible Rotation – Black in White (7 screens), Enso – Cold Light (single screen) and Reversible Rotation – Cold Light (single screen), exploring the concept of Spatial Calligraphy and the movement of waves in water.

More information at teamLab, or read more at Broadsheet, The Age and Surface Magazine or listen to an interview with teamLab founder Toshiyuki Inoko on ABC RN The Art Show.

Download media release in English or 下载普通话展览信息 .

September

Elizabeth Willing

Through the Mother 10 September 2019 – 18 January 2020
University of Queensland Art Museum

Elizabeth Willing‘s multi-sensory solo exhibition embraces how touch, taste and smell, inform our most poignant and powerful memories. The architecture of the space invites viewers to enter into a fragmented narrative that is pieced together by the artist through things that are familiar—a table, a stool, tea, wallpaper, a shed—but rendered strange by wax and bush, grease and hibiscus, valerian and patchouli.

Throughout the exhibition, tea is served for the audience. A mixture made by the artist and her mother, is a calming blend of valerian, passionflower, hibiscus, rooibos, and cinnamon; each ingredient possessing its own medicinal benefits, from the soothing of anxieties to the ceasing of inflammation. The artist has sought to give both physical and ephemeral form to memories of her mother, conveyed through smell, taste, and texture.  Tea served daily 10.00–11.00am, 2.30–3.30pm

Image: Elizabeth Willing Through the Mother 2019 installation. Photograph courtesy UQ Art Museum and Simon Woods

September

Amos Gebhardt

Tolarno Galleries will premiere Amos Gebhardt’s new photography series, Night Horse at Sydney Contemporary 12-15 September 2019, Booth E16, Main Hall.

The works examine the powerful currents between horses as they negotiate consent and desire during mating season. We are drawn inside the kinetic swirl of the herd where hooves, flicking tails and outstretched limbs offer an intimate encounter across the species divide. Shot in the heat of a February summer’s night, on the artist’s birthday, the charged atmosphere is palpable.

Night Horse (2019) continues themes explored in Gebhardt’s recent video installations Lovers (2018) and Evanescence (2018), both selected for the 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, and There Are No Others (2016) presented at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne. They thread a trajectory of connected ideas concerning nakedness as the barest form of identity and deep time cycles of matter – life, death, decay.

ARTIST TALK
Amos Gebhardt presents Spooky Action: An Encounter between Poetics and Science
A Writing & Concepts lecture for Talk Contemporary
4.30pm Sunday 15 September 2019
Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks
RSVP here

Image: Amos Gebhardt Parallax 2019, archival inkjet pigment print, 122 x 163 cm

August

Patricia Piccinini

Life Clings Closest
Cairns Art Gallery
22 August – 8 December 2019

Bringing together works from the last twenty years of Patricia Piccinini’s practice, Life Clings Closest also debuts a new group of works inspired by the unique environment of Far North Queensland. These works celebrate the wondrous ecology of the area, but also questions how we can cope with the overwhelming challenges facing it.

Patricia Piccinini will close this year’s Tolarno Galleries program with an exhibition of new automotive works, 9 November – 14 December 2019. More information soon!

August

Danie Mellor

Matter Matters by Danie Mellor was unveiled in August 2019 as the fourth Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney’s Loti Smorgon Sculpture Terrace Commission.

The Museum works with artists to realise new, temporary artworks that respond to the unique site overlooking Sydney Harbour. Mellor said, “The drama of natural forms is something I find captivating, and the shapes of the bronze mangrove stilt roots is a reminder of the beauty of natural architecture…It’s important to be aware just how deeply we are connected to natural spaces: mangrove colonies are essential for ecological balance and health along our coastlines.”

Read more in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Picture Steven Siewert via SMH.

Details: Danie Mellor, Matter Matters, 2019. Bronze.

August

Bill Henson

August

Nicholas Folland at Adelaide Central School of Art

In this hugely ambitious new exhibition, South Australian art superstar Nicholas Folland imagines a world in which cosy notions of domestic security are thrillingly destabilised. Combining installation with kinetic sculpture, Other Homes and Gardens inverts the idea of the Anthropocene, depicting humankind at the mercy of dangerous and implacable natural forces. Simultaneously uncanny and darkly humorous, this never before seen exhibition is not to be missed.

Nicholas Folland Other Homes and Gardens
Wednesday 31 July – Friday 30 August 2019
Adelaide Central School of Art Gallery

Image: Nicholas Folland, Other Homes and Gardens 2019, installation view, mixed materials, dimensions variable