April

Announcing representation: Hannah Gartside

Tolarno Galleries is delighted to announce representation of Hannah Gartside (born 1987, London, UK; lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne).

Gartside is currently on view at Primavera 2021: Young Australian Artists, the annual Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney showcase of Australian artists aged 35 years and under.

Her installation of five kinetic textile sculptures each represent an iconic female figure of the past – dancer Loïe Fuller (1862-1928), painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c.1654), Tarot card illustrator Pamela ‘Pixie’ Colman Smith (1878-1951), Biblical ur-woman Lilith, and actor Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923).

Made from 19th and 20th century clothes and fabric, the works were designed with their subjects’ personal histories in mind – splays of red velvet evoke the violent scenes of Artemisia Gentileschi’s renowned 17th century paintings, a sail of pink silk crêpe honours Loïe Fuller’s pioneering stage lighting designs and moving fabric costuming.

The suspended forms assert their bodily presence, choreographically revolving and whirring. These works highlight the erasure of women from the canon of art history, and ongoing gender inequality more broadly.

Embedded in feminism and material culture, Gartside uses vintage and found textiles to create installations, sculptures and costumes. Skills of dress-making, patchwork quilting and fabric dyeing accrued during her former career as a theatre costumier at Queensland Ballet are elevated to the conceptually rigorous. Both deeply personal and fiercely communal, Gartside’s works engage fundamental experiences and emotions of our human condition: longing, tenderness, connection, desire and wonderment.

Hannah Gartside is a finalist in the upcoming Ellen José Art Award at Bayside Gallery, Victoria, a $15,000 non-acquisitive award to a female visual artist aged 18-35 years, on view from July 2022. She will next exhibit in the June 2022 group show Text Tile, a showcase of textile based practices of over 50 artists within Australia and New Zealand, at Caves Gallery in Melbourne.

Tolarno Galleries will present a solo exhibition by Hannah Gartside in 2023. Visit her artist page for more information and images of her work.

Image: Hannah Gartside with her sculptures Lilith, Pixie and Artemisia at Primavera 2021: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Photography by Louis Lim.

March

A & A at Melbourne Design Week

A & A
Mother and Child exhibition
17 Mar – 9 Apr 2022

Tolarno Galleries is delighted to announce participation in Melbourne Design Week 2022, premiering another breathtaking, innovative new work by A & A, the collaboration between industrial designer Adam Goodrum and straw marquetry superstar Arthur Seigneur. 

The exhibition is part of Melbourne Design Week 2022, an initiative of the Victorian Government in collaboration with the NGV. Join Adam and Arthur in conversation 1.30pm on Saturday 19 March at Tolarno Galleries.

Explore more than 350 events including talks, tours, films, exhibitions and workshops that celebrate the diverse ways design can help create a better future. Visit designweek.melbourne to view the full program. 

Image: Arthur Seigneur and Adam Goodrum with the Mother and Child cabinet 2021-22, custom dyed rye straw, birch ply, 200h x 140w x 35d cm. Photography by Andrew Curtis

March

Now representing Wanapati Yunupiŋu

Tolarno Galleries is thrilled to announce representation of Wanapati Yunupiŋu(born 1989, homeland Biranybirany; clan Gumatj, Rrakpala group; moiety Yirritja). Wanapati recently presented his debut solo exhibition at the 2022 Melbourne Art Fair.

Wanapati works on found and discarded street signs and metal forms, etching his sacred Gumatj clan designs and narratives into their surface using a rotary tool. In 2021 Wanapati was included in the ground-breaking and sell out exhibition Murrŋiny – a story of metal from the east at the Northern Centre of Contemporary Art (NCCA) in partnership with Salon Art Projects.

Wanapati was a finalist in the 2021 NATSIAA award with his works on discarded baking trays. He was selected to hold a solo exhibition as part of the 2022 Melbourne Art Fair Indigenous Art Centre Program, a new initiative supporting the participation of Indigenous-owned contemporary art centres at Melbourne Art Fair.

Wanapati was awarded the $10,000 First Nations Commission Supported by Bennelong Funds Management for Gurtha. The artwork will be gifted to Shepparton Art Museum.

Tolarno Galleries will present a solo exhibition by Wanapati Yunupiŋu in February 2023, in partnership with the Indigenous art centre Buku Larrŋgay Mulka located in Yirrkala, North East Arnhemland, NT.

Image: Wanapati Yunupiŋu with recent artworks. Photograph courtesy Buku Larrŋgay Mulka.

March

Amos Gebhardt – finalist, National Photography Prize 2022

Congratulations to Amos Gebhardt, a finalist in the National Photography Prize 2022 on view at Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) 26 February – 5 June 2022.

Inaugurated in 1983, the National Photography Prize brings together twelve artists from across Australia who are challenging and extending photographic language and techniques. Three of Amos Gebhardt’s triptychs are on display: House of Slé (2021), Eric (2020) and Family Portrait (2020).

The National Photography Prize 2022 forms part of PHOTO 2022 international festival of photography, activating sites across Melbourne and Regional Victoria, including Albury-Wodonga, with the most inspiring photography from Australia and around the world.

Image: Amos Gebhardt Eric archival inkjet pigment print, trifold hinged triptych. Overall 94 x 246 cm framed, edition of 6 + 2 AP

February

Benjamin Armstrong extended to 12 March 2022

Benjamin Armstrong Pictures for Thinking exhibition has been extended until Saturday 12 March 2022.

The making of these artworks is akin to a chemical spill. It is an accident with an unpredictable result, but one in which chance and intuition coalesce. The entangled methodologies that bring these pictures to fruition include, in no particular order or hierarchy, the conventional mediums of print, drawing and painting. – Benjamin Armstrong

Pictures for Thinking can also be viewed online here.

Image: Benjamin Armstrong Examination, Night 2021, pigment & binder on polyester, 123 x 138.5 x 4 cm

Benjamin Armstrong Pictures for Thinking exhibition is supported by the City of Melbourne Arts Grants.

February

Christopher Langton at Melbourne Art Fair

Bad Biology

Melbourne Art Fair, MCEC, Booth E1

17–20 February 2022

It is perhaps no coincidence that the graphic representation of the Coronavirus that we have become familiar with through news reporting over the course of the pandemic is startlingly like the strange, globular forms of Christopher Langton’s new installation Bad Biology, 2022. With its orb-like anatomy and tufts of cellular material, COVID-19 and its various mutations would be perfectly at home amongst the strange, and strangely appealing ‘creatures’ that populate Langton’s newly-created world. While based on real-life knowledge and study of the virus, the ‘image’ that we are now overly familiar with and recognise as Coronavirus also shares the 1950s Pop sci-fi sensibility of Langton’s brightly hued asteroids and mutant forms, along with the way in which their seemingly organic or ‘natural’ components manifest in terrifyingly ‘unnatural’ and unknown lifeforms. – from the essay by Kelly Gellatly.

Download the Bad Biology PDF catalogue

Click to view the Bad Biology online exhibition

Image: Christopher Langton Zitball 2021, Thermoplastic polymer, silicone, pigment, 116 x 118 x 115 cm

February

Melbourne Art Fair 2022

Tolarno Galleries presents Bad Biology, a solo exhibition by Christopher Langton at Melbourne Art Fair, 17-20 February 2022. The immersive sculpture installation continues themes the artist has explored in his 2019 Tolarno exhibition Colony and the 2021 show Colonies at Hazelhurst Arts Centre, NSW.

As part of the invitational BEYOND sector, Caroline Rothwell will present the 6 channel video installation Infinite Herbarium accompanied by several suspended sculptures. Visit Tolarno Galleries to view the related paintings.

Click to view the Online Exhibition and available works.

Image: Caroline Rothwell Red Picasso 2021, canvas, acrylic gypsum cement, stainless steel armature, paint, epoxy glass, hardware, 130 x 65 x 20 cm. Pictured with two Infinite Herbarium videos. Installation image by Tina Douglas

February

Benjamin Armstrong ‘Pictures for Thinking’

12 February – 5 March 2022
 
Tolarno Galleries opens the 2022 program on Saturday 12 February. Benjamin Armstrong will be in attendance from 1pm-4pm.

Pictures for Thinking has a wide breath of subjects: light, body, history, time, and measurement. Combinations of these subjects are used to elicit insights or to raise questions. In Bones III (pictured above) penetrating light becomes the source illuminating the shared structures of our varied bodies.
 
The making of these artworks is akin to a chemical spill. It is an accident with an unpredictable result, but one in which chance and intuition coalesce. The entangled methodologies that bring these pictures to fruition include, in no particular order or hierarchy, the conventional mediums of print, drawing and painting.  
 
– Benjamin Armstrong, February 2022

Image: Benjamin Armstrong Bones III 2021, pigment and binder on polyester , 174 x 143.5 x 4 cm

Tolarno Galleries is operating as normal while the building is undergoing restoration. Enter as usual at 104 Exhibition Street and take the lift to Level 4.

Benjamin Armstrong Pictures for Thinking exhibition is supported by the City of Melbourne Arts Grants.

December

TIM JOHNSON ‘Creed’

30 November 2021 – 6 February 2022
Sofitel Melbourne on Collins
Summer Salon Show
Sofi’s Lounge, Level 1
25 Collins Street, Melbourne 3000

Or click here to view the online exhibition.

In association with Tolarno Galleries, Sofitel Melbourne On Collins is delighted to present the exhibition Creed, comprising four new paintings by Tim Johnson. A distinguished senior Australian artist whose career started in the late 1960s, his artistic practices have seen him explore conceptual and performance art, live music, photography and decades of dynamic painting for which he is largely known.
In the early 1980s, with a dedicated focus on painting, Johnson spent time learning from and collaborating with Aboriginal artists from the Pintupi, Warlpiri and Anmatyerr communities at Papunya in the Western Desert – a profoundly influential period in his artistic development.
Johnson’s work draws on a diverse range of eclectic cultural references, combining iconography and various motifs from Aboriginal, Buddhist and east Asian, native American sources alongside his own unique personal imagery of such things as UFOs, views of his native Sydney and his family in an exploration of artistic and spiritual connections across cultures.

With thanks to Global Art Projects for curating and delivering this project. Entry to Sofi’s Lounge at the Sofitel Melbourne on Collins is free and open every day.

Image: Tim Johnson with his painting Thredbo Valley 2021 at the Sofitel Melbourne on Collins

November

BROOK ANDREW

seeing time
27 November – 18 December 2021
Opening hours: 1pm-4pm Sat, 10am-5pm Tue-Fri

Or visit the online exhibition.

seeing time is Brook Andrew‘s new body of work reflecting on and abstracting the concept of time and mark-making. That is, how one perceives and hopes to either manipulate, push against or fall into time.

These paintings were created during 2021 and centre on Brook’s alternative visions of time and mark-making outside the Western art canon. This is a contribution to current challenges and dialogues around decolonisation, which is for him, a progression towards a state of yindyamarra-gunhanha (ongoing respect).

yindyamarra-gunhanha is a term Brook has developed to deal with the often challenging space of museum research and repatriation. His signature black and white patterns are adopted from his Wiradjuri cultural heritage. By doing so, he reinforces the strength and cultural continuity of the Wiradjuri for himself and others.

Image: seeing time installation image (L-R) seeing time VIII, seeing time IX, seeing time X, seeing time VII all 2021, mixed media on linen, 235 x 235 cm. Photograph by Andrew Curtis.