News 2018


July

Amos Gebhardt

Tolarno Galleries is pleased to announce representation for emerging artist Amos Gebhardt.

Gebhardt’s works have a cinematic scale and incorporate collage and dance to create multi-screen video installations and photographs.

A recipient of the Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship in 2014, Gebhardt has created moving image works for exhibition, cinema and broadcast at AGSA, Samstag Museum, ACMI, MONA, Gertrude Contemporary, SBS and ABC.

Tolarno Galleries will present Amos Gebhardt’s first solo exhibition in 2019, a continuation of the horses project, Lovers, recently included in Divided Worlds, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 2018.


July

Patricia Piccinini

Last days to catch Curious Affection, the major Patricia Piccinini survey at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, closing on Saturday 5 August.

Read an interview with Patricia Piccinini at Ocula.

Photograph by Phoebe Powell.


July

Benjamin Armstrong

Comprising 11 new linocut prints, along with their metal-framed set of blocks, Invisible Stories: Meditations on Port Essington is Benjamin Armstrong‘s  most recent solo exhibition at Tolarno since Conjurers in 2012.

The linocut series relates to the Australian historian and multi-award winning author Mark McKenna’s book From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories (2016). McKenna’s book explores the central drama of Australian history: the encounter between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. The exhibition is part of the Melbourne Art Fair’s Melbourne Art Week program from Tuesday 31 July – Sunday 5 August.

Benjamin Armstrong is on view until 18 August.

Read more:
Blouin Art Info
Galleries Now
Ocula

Image: Courtesy Andrew Stephens and Imprint Magazine


June

Brook Andrew

Congratulations to Brook Andrew who has been appointed Artistic Director of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney to be held in 2020.

A participant in the 2018 and 2010 biennales of Sydney, Brook Andrew will draw on curatorial experiences including his groundbreaking TABOO exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012.

His distinguished 25-year career was recognised with a large-scale exhibition The Right to Offend is Sacred at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2017 and he is currently concluding a three-year-long Australian Research Council grant, Representation, Remembrance and the Memorial. This project responds to calls for a national memorial to Aboriginal loss during the Frontier Wars, a series of conflicts between Indigenous Australians and European settlers from 1788 to the 1930s.

Speaking to The Australian, Brook Andrew said he “doesn’t plan to include his own art at the 2020 biennale, saying he would be making a statement of sorts as artistic director instead. He will seek out artists and collections both locally and abroad, looking to present an exhibition that offers a snapshot of the world from an Australian perspective. He’s particularly interested in peripheral perspectives, or ‘ideas on the edge’. ‘I’m going to move the edge to the centre,’ he said.”

Brook Andrew has been represented by Tolarno Galleries since 2007. Read more at the Biennale of Sydney.

Image: Brook Andrew. Photograph: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy Biennale of Sydney.


June

Andrew Browne

Congratulations to Andrew Browne on winning the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize for 2018 for his work, The awakening. A biennial acquisitive award for contemporary painting with a cash prize of $30,000, the judging panel comprised Justin Paton (Head Curator of International Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales), Rebecca Coates (Director, Shepparton Art Museum) and Lisa Sullivan (Senior Curator, Geelong Gallery). 

The judges commented: “This was a work that drew us in immediately and kept drawing us back. The key to its power is the board at the centre with its staring black ‘eyes’, backlit by a haunting nocturnal glow. With its flicks, smudges and overruns of colour, the plywood board suggests a painted surface hidden to the viewer, sharpening our curiosity about what has been made – or is being made – on the other side. The object could be read in multiple ways: as a redundant protest placard tied against a tree, or an abstracted crucifix-like form with looming attendants on each side. Gothic and film-noir-esque, the painting’s moodiness and ambiguity are absolutely of our times. This may be an image of the fate of painting, or a broader evocation of a world where troubling events transpire on the edge of our awareness.” Read more at Art Guide.

Andrew Browne will present a floor talk at Geelong Art Gallery on Saturday 23 June at 11.30am. 

Image: Photographer Hails & Shine. Courtesy Geelong Art Gallery.


June

Andrew Browne

Spill is on view now until 7 July.

“The Melbourne artist builds on his enduring interest in natural phenomena by examining the suggestive ambiguities of water and the metamorphic effects of light. Developed from his large and ongoing archive of observational photography, Browne’s oil paintings are an ‘accumulation of glimpses’ knitting together fragments of landscape, light and form. He captures anthropomorphic lurkings and nuanced details in nature to conjure new realities.” – Artist Profile

Read more about Andrew Browne‘s latest work in the Spill exhibition at:
Artist Profile
Blouin ArtInfo
GalleriesNow
Art Guide
Ocula

Installation shot by Andrew Curtis.


May

Danie Mellor

Pleasure and Vexation – the strata and spectacle of history
27 May – 19 August 2018

Curated by Pātaka Art + Museum, this will be the first major exhibition of works by this award-winning contemporary Australian artist to be shown in New Zealand. Over 20 outstanding works, many large in scale, including some loaned from Australian museum and gallery collections.

A monumental mixed-media work on paper from 2010 entitled Fruits of labour provides the starting point for this selection of technically-astonishing drawings, paintings and digitally-manipulated photography, through which Mellor explores indigenous and Australian histories.

Mellor, with both indigenous and non-indigenous heritage, stresses the significance of both Indigenous Australians and colonial histories, the need to talk about their interaction, and the issues that arise from those two things being parallel.


May

Bill Henson

Book signing
Saturday 19 May, 2pm-3pm
Tolarno Galleries, Level 4, 104 Exhibition Street, Melbourne 3000

Bill Henson will make a rare public appearance for a book signing at Tolarno Galleries. He will sign your personal copies of books, and Tolarno will also have available for purchase on the day limited copies of otherwise sold out editions of Henson monographs, including:

Bill Henson’s exhibition of new works is on view now at Tolarno Galleries until 2 June.

Watch: Bill Henson on ABC TV The Mix

Listen: Bill Henson on ABC RN The Drawing Room

Read:
Art Guide
Broadsheet Melbourne
Galleries Now
The Guardian
The Art Newspaper
The Age
The Australian

ImageKindertotenlieder Image #17 1976 – 2016
Archival inkjet pigment print, framed
Image size: 44.8 x 37 cm Framed size: 69 x 60 cm
Edition of 10


April

Danie Mellor

Cairns Art Gallery
Proximity and Perception
4 May – 1 July 2018

Proximity and Perception focuses on a major new work by Danie Mellor commissioned by the Cairns Art Gallery Foundation, and places it within the context of his recent art practice and ongoing engagement with his matrilineal Country of the North Queensland rainforest region, south of Cairns.
Proximity and Perception spans the last decade of Mellor’s artistic practice and brings together highly detailed drawings rendered in Mellor’s signature blue pastel, alongside recent photographic works.

More information

Artist talk Friday 4 May, 6.00PM

Image: Danie Mellor, Bala dulga yubanday  2014, each panel 100 x 120 cm total size: 300.0 x 360.0 cm, on paper consisting of nine panels mounted onto aluminium and mdf.


April

Louise Hearman | Patricia Piccinini

2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art
3 March – 3 June 2018

Extending across Adelaide’s cultural precinct, North Terrace, the 2018 Adelaide Biennial will be presented at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art at the University of South Australia, JamFactory and Adelaide Botanic Garden including the Santos Museum of Economic Botany. Artists include Patricia Piccinini and Louise Hearman.

Image: Louise Hearman, ‘Untitled #1405’ 2015, oil and ink on canvas, 71 x 71 cm

More information