November

Andrew Browne’s ‘silver’ launches Gallery 2

Andrew Browne‘s exhibition silver launches Gallery 2, our new intimate space on Saturday 19 November, from 1pm-4pm.

Following our recent move to Level 5, we are pleased to launch Gallery 2 with Andrew Browne’s exhibition, silver.

The shimmering surfaces of Andrew Browne’s paintings, encased in specially designed aluminium frames, are complemented by the airy, light filled gallery and echo the original modern steel framed windows.

Designed by Peter Elliott AM, Gallery 2 is an intimate space allowing us to present a range of creative projects in tandem with our annual exhibition program.

Responding to the original features of the1930s Art Deco building, Peter Elliott uncovered a wall of east facing windows. Gallery 2 reveals a view of several Melbourne landmarks: The Windsor Hotel, St Patrick’s Cathedral, the Melbourne and Lyceum Clubs, Peter McIntyre’s 1960s car park, as well as a secret city garden.

Image: Gallery 2, photography by Andrew Curtis.

November

A&A: Winners at the Dezeen Awards 2022 🏆

Congratulations to A&A on winning Furniture Design of the Year at the Dezeen Awards 2022 for Mother and Child.

Chosen from over 5,400 entries from 90 countries around the world, Adam Goodrum and Arthur Seigneur’s Mother and Child cabinet was first exhibited at Tolarno Galleries in March 2022, and was a highlight of this year’s Melbourne Design Week.

Click here to read more about the design winners at the Dezeen Awards.

Dezeen noted: Design duo Adam and Arthur decorated Mother and Child with straw marquetry, a craft technique that uses flattened ribbons of straw to embellish furniture. The undulating monochromatic cabinet references the silhouette of a mother and child, a recurring motif in art history. “Contemporary design is required to maintain craftmanship and this incredible piece of work demonstrates a fantastic use of ancient technique in a modern and sustainable way,” said the design master jury. “The cabinet is also beautiful and extremely elaborate.”

Click here to read more about Mother and Child at Dezeen.

Image: A&A Mother and Child cabinet 2021-22. Custom dyed rye straw, birch ply, 200h x 140w x 35d cm. Unique.

October

Ben Quilty at Bangkok Art Biennale

Congratulations to Ben Quilty on presenting a major new collection of Rorschach paintings at the Bangkok Art Biennale, opening 22 October 2022 – 23 February 2023.

Ben’s work is on view at the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Centre, alongside the APY Art Centre Collective.

Image: Ben Quilty The After – party (Perry) 2022, oil on linen, 202 x 265 cm

October

NGV Melbourne NOW 2023 – Martin Bell, Hannah Gartside and Amos Gebhardt

Tolarno Galleries congratulates Martin Bell, Hannah Gartside and Amos Gebhardt on being selected by the National Gallery of Victoria for Melbourne NOW 2023.

Celebrating new and ambitious local art and design, Melbourne NOW 2023 will cross a range of contemporary disciplines including fashion and jewellery, painting, sculpture, architecture, ceramics, video, performance, printmaking and publishing.

The exhibition will mark the ten-year anniversary of the inaugural 2013 exhibition which was an unprecedented survey of some of the most exciting local contemporary practitioners.

Bold in scale, Melbourne NOW 2023 will be displayed throughout all levels of The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, including permanent collection galleries, showcasing new works and commissions by emerging, mid-career and senior practitioners as well as local collectives. 

October

Amos Gebhardt wins the 2022 Bowness Prize

Huge congratulations to Amos Gebhardt who was announced as the Winnerof the 2022 Bowness Photography Prize at the awards presentation last night at Monash Gallery of Art.

Selected from a shortlist of 54 works, Gebhardt is awarded $30,000 and their work Wallaby 2022 will be acquired into MGA’s nationally significant collection of Australian photographs.

As Gebhardt says:

In this new series, native animal x-rays from medical archives are interwoven with elemental forms to investigate colonial violences on both land and water creatures.

The wallaby died from a suspected gun shot wound, and is depicted here as a form of haunting, merging with constellations specific to the place they were found. The image pushes bounds of traditional photography by using a range of light frequencies to reflect the fractal interiority beneath the skin and within outer space, revealing possibilities of perspective beyond the human eye.

By enhancing the luminosity of these once animated bones, the work suggests the entangled lines of entropic connection between cosmology, trauma & sentience.

Gebhardt’s sustained and continued practice of producing work that is visually rich is epitomised by a courageous commitment to agitate dominant narratives around marginality, representation, queerness and human ecologies.

Recent acclaimed series include There are no others (2016), which features gender diverse people floating in celestial space; Evanescence (2018), which depicts human collectives suspended in contested landscapes; Night Horse (2019) examining the powerful currents between horses as they negotiate consent and desire during mating season, capturing the undeniable force of non-human narratives and Small acts of resistance (2021), which celebrates queer familial entanglement.

Over the last 17 years, the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize has emerged as an important annual survey of contemporary photographic practice in Australia and one of the most prestigious prizes in the country.

This year’s judges were artist Rosemary Laing; Hannah Presley, Director of Agency and Senior Curator, Museums and Collections at University of Melbourne; and MGA Director Anouska Phizacklea.

Tolarno Galleries will exhibit Night Horse for the first time in Melbourne in April 2023.

Image: AMOS GEBHARDT Wallaby 2022, chromogenic print (light box), 76 x 95 cm. Edition of 5 + 1AP. Install photo by Amos Gebhardt.

September

Judy Watson & Helen Johnson: the red thread of history, loose ends

10 September – 12 November 2022

Monash University Museum of Art

Two leading Australian artists explore complex and varied perspectives on colonisation, with an emphasis on the experience of women.

Watson, a Waanyi woman, based on Jagera/Yuggera and Turrbal Country of Meanjin/Brisbane and Johnson, a second-generation immigrant of Anglo descent based on Wurundjeri Woiwurrung Country in Naarm/Melbourne, have each developed new works that speak from their individual and Ancestral cultural experiences living in Australia. Originally commissioned by the National Gallery of Australia for the Know My Name program, and as part of the Balnaves Contemporary Series, at MUMA this exhibition is brought together with existing works by each artist that explore the significance of family and motherhood, the importance of matrilineal lineage, and the tensions between individualism and connectedness.

While the red thread of history, loose ends brings disparate histories and subject positions into proximity, it also celebrates the artists’ shared love of materiality. Watson and Johnson engage with the cultural and political significance of image and mark making, with both addressing the relationship between layering and memory, body and material. Working primarily across painting and printmaking, their works individually and in conversation draw on colonial archives, reclaiming female experiences and perspectives. Both artists acknowledge the ongoing nature and legacies of colonialism and the importance of making change.

At MUMA Judy Watson & Helen Johnson: the red thread of history, loose ends is accompanied by Judy Watson’s recent publication skullduggery (2020) and a new artist’s book by Helen Johnson made with MUMA and Negative Press.

July

Hannah Gartside at Bayside Gallery

Congratulations to Hannah Gartside, one of five finalists in the Ellen José Art Award, on view at Bayside Gallery, Brighton, Victoria 2 July to 28 August 2022

Gartside has created an installation of four sculptural works collectively called Gorgeous. Made with deadstock fabrics, vintage scraps and factory offcuts, Gartside says,

“I want to share the pleasure and delight that I feel in making art and in art being a form of communication and connection.

I think of my art practice as a lover, one that is consistent, generous, surprising and true. So in part this is a show of gratitude for this relationship.

These works consider the physical gallery space as an abstracted version of a lover’s body. The gate marks an opening, it contains a threshold and an invitation; to walk through is an active ‘yes’.

The sculpture Wall kisser is hand-cranked by the viewer. On turning the handle the wall receives the repetitive, kiss-thud, kiss-thud of the velvet hearts, padded with lavender from my garden.

The lamp light here is a way-finder, illuminating a rendezvous. The name for this imaginary place is ‘Gorgeous’. It’s spelt out in fabric, thread and paint, the font enlarged from a 1970s coat label.”

Installation image by Mark Ashkanasy, courtesy Bayside Gallery.

July

Elizabeth Willing – Judy Wheeler Commission at PICA

Congratulations to Elizabeth Willing who has just been awarded the inaugural Judy Wheeler Commission by Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) for 2023. The site-specific work responds to PICA’s entrance, defining how visitors engage with the space as they step in from Perth’s vibrant cultural centre.

With her practice’s strong connections to food and hospitality, Willing embraced PICA’s institutional entrance way as a meaningful gesture that acts both as a physical entrance and a space that performs the “welcome of hospitality”.
Willing will develop a large-scale textile work that delves into the Perth locale’s olfactory and sensory offerings, such as the nearby Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River), botanic gardens, and wine region. From these explorations she will create an inventory of symbols that form their own performative, multisensory lexicon.

The inaugural commission will be launched in February 2023 and will remain in place for a one-year period. Read more at PICA.

Image: Elizabeth Willing, courtesy Museum Of Brisbane, photo: David Kelly.

July

Judy Watson acquired by MCA and Tate

Congratulations to Waanyi artist Judy Watson (Queensland) who was announced this week by Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Tate as one of the five artists alongside Simryn Gill (Sydney and Malaysia), senior Gija artist Mabel Juli (East Kimberley, Western Australia), senior Yolŋu artist Noŋgirrŋa Marawili (East Arnhem Land, Northern Territory) and Kokatha and Nukunu artist Yhonnie Scarce whose works have been acquired as part of the International Joint Acquisition Program for contemporary Australian art.

memory scar, grevillea, mangrove pod (& net) (2020), pictured, first exhibited at Tolarno Galleries in 2020, is one of Watson’s most significant recent works. Whereas much of her practice engages with collections and archives, this painting is distinguished by its origins in the artist’s lived experience. Visually, it exemplifies Watson’s unique approach to building layered compositions on unstretched canvas by combining washes of pigment, transposed motifs and other forms of mark making – in this case intricately stitched line work that refers to scarring as a sign of trauma, but also of repair. Watson made this painting during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The organic materials were gathered from her garden and on walks. The red lines, meanwhile, are based on a graph that was circulating in news media showing the effect of Australia’s economic recession on household savings.

The jointly acquired artworks by Mabel Juli, Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce, will soon go on display for the first time at Tate Modern in London as part of their expanded rehang of the acclaimed collection exhibition A Year in Art: Australia 1992.

June

Judy Watson in conversation at NGA

Watch Judy Watson & Helen Johnson in conversation during Reconciliation Week at the National Gallery of Australia, talking about their exhibition the red thread of history, loose ends. Watson and Johnson each developed new works that explore complex and varied perspectives on colonisation, with an emphasis on the experience of women.

Hosted by Curator Elspeth Pitt with the National Gallery’s Head of First Nations Engagement, Cara Kirkwood, Mandandanji and Mithaka peoples.

Judy Watson & Helen Johnson: the red thread of history, loose ends is a Know My Name project and part of The Balnaves Contemporary Series.

The exhibition will tour to Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) in Naarm/Melbourne 10 September – 12 November 2022.