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August
Announcing Georgia Spain
Tolarno Galleries is delighted to announce representation of Georgia Spain (b.1993 UK), a visual artist and musician currently living and working in Sandford, Tasmania on palawa land.
In the same week of June this year, Spain’s paintings won the 2021 Sir John Sulman Prize for Getting down or falling up, and the Women’s Art Prize Tasmania for Six Different Women. In 2020 Spain was the recipient of the prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship.
Spain’s paintings explore the complexities of human behaviour; using narrative and storytelling to examine the cultural, political and personal. Her work frequently looks 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. Georgia Spain will present her first exhibition at Tolarno Galleries in 2022.
For her first work available through Tolarno Galleries, Georgia Spain is auctioning a brand new painting You, me and the weight 2021. All proceeds will go to the For Afghanistan fundraiser, organised by Ben Quilty. Click here to view the auction, running until Thursday 2 September 2021.
August
Brent Harris
The Stations 2021, online exhibition featuring a Q&A between Jane Devery and Brent Harris about The Stations project.
Brent Harris is well known for haunting imagery that drifts between abstraction and figuration. For more than four decades, the artist has engaged in a sustained investigation into the human condition, producing paintings, prints and drawings that address universal themes such as intimacy, desire, spirituality, sexuality and mortality.
More than thirty years ago, Harris produced a series on the Stations of the Cross for which he received widespread critical acclaim as a young artist.
In 2020, Harris returned to the subject with The Stations 2021, a new body of work comprising 14 polymer gravure etchings with watercolour. The series was printed and editioned at Viridian Press, Benalla by John Loane.
This project was generously supported by Paul Walker and Patricia Mason.
August
Tolarno Galleries closure
Melbourne lockdown: Update 17 August 2021
Tolarno Galleries is closed during the extended Melbourne lockdown.
We look forward to reopening as soon as possible.
In the meantime, the current Ben Quilty exhibition The Beach is available to view online.
Contact us via mail@tolarnogalleries.com for enquiries while we are working from home.
Image: Ben Quilty Peanut Eaters no.2 2021 oil on linen 142.5 x 188 cm. Installation image by Andrew Curtis.
August
Announcing Kieren Karritpul
Tolarno Galleries is delighted to announce representation of Kieren Karritpul (b. 1994), a Ngen’giwumirri artist who lives in the small community of Nauiyu (Daly River) southwest of Darwin.
A 2021 Ramsay Art Prize finalist, Karritpul won the inaugural Youth Award at the 2014 Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. In 2020 he won the National Indigenous Fashion Award for Textile Design, resulting in a collaboration with Country Road Homewares.
As a Ngen’giwumirri man, Karritpul is not permitted to weave, instead he paints magnified views of woven objects and fibres. Weaving Myself: the Landscape and the Land, on view until 22 August at @agsa.adelaide as part of the Ramsay Art Prize 2021 exhibition, was painted using two brushes, one made with his own hair. He uses the weaving process as a visual metaphor for land and landscape. The painting is a magnified view of the woven surface that stands for the breathing lands of his Country. Karritpul feels he was born woven into the land. Using repetition and line he creates a surface that moves like human breath.
Tolarno Galleries will present a Kieren Karritpul solo exhibition in 2022.
image: Kieren Karritpul with his paintingWeaving Myself: the Landscape and the Land. Photo by Saul Steed, courtesy Art Gallery of South Australia.
August
2021 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize Finalists
Congratulations to Danie Mellor (artwork pictured) and Justine Varga on their selection as finalists in the 2021 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize.
Visit the Monash Gallery of Art from Thursday 9 September – Sunday 7 November 2021 to view this year’s Bowness exhibition. Award announcement Thursday 16 September 2021.
The winning work will be awarded $30,000.00 and will be acquired into MGA’s nationally significant collection of Australian photographs.
Image: DANIE MELLOR Jindagaa [ancestor]: at the fall of night 2021, chromogenic print, 124 cm (diameter), edition of 3 + 2AP.
July
Ben Quilty ‘The Beach’
31 July – 28 August 2021.
Ben Quilty’s newest exhibition, The Beach, is a culmination of works made in the lead-up to the last American Presidential Election and then continued through recent pandemic times and lockdown.
During that time, he was given a book about the American Realist painter, George Bellows, and it has not left his studio since. Bellow’s paintings of men boxing illegally in early 20th century fight clubs was the starting point for this exhibition.
Taking multiple screen shots of UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) fighters locked in deadly and bloody combat, and hosting a team of local boxers, Quilty poses questions about contemporary humanity.
Named after famous beaches around Australia, the fighting men also evoke memories of the Cronulla Riots and continue Quilty’s exploration of Australian cultural identity and the darker sides of Island Life. “To make paintings of men punching the life out of each other feels like an apt response to being alive in 2021,” Quilty says.
Image: BEN QUILTY The Crowd, oil on linen, 180 x 202 cm
July
Bill Henson online
Although the gallery exhibition has closed, Bill Henson (24 June – 26 July 2021) is now available to visit online.
The online viewing space includes exclusive videos featuring Bill Henson sharing behind-the-scenes stories of creating the artworks, installation images and details of each of the 13 images in the show.
Image: BILL HENSON Untitled 1/5B B 1990-91. From the series Paris Opera Project. Archival inkjet pigment print, 127 x 127 cm (paper size)
June
Bill Henson: 26 June – 24 July 2021
Bill Henson‘s new exhibition is a glittering array of never-seen-before photographs. Some were commenced in the 1990s; all were completed during Melbourne’s long COVID lockdowns. The sense of deep time behind Henson’s images is a hallmark of his approach to photography – an attempt, as he puts it “to get closer to things.”
“It sometimes takes years for me to work out what I want to photograph, a rumination which gradually clarifies itself over a long period of time,“ he says. “I spend a lot of time thinking about things, daydreaming. It takes awhile for things to get to the point to say I know what I need. It’s a face, or a body or a landscape of a particular kind, or it’s the effects of the weather and how that changes the nature of the landscape.”
Bookings are not required, but please let us know in advance if you are bringing a group. Opening hours are 10am-5pm Tuesday – Friday and 1-4pm Saturdays.
If you can’t make it in person, visit the Bill Henson online viewing room.
Read more at The Age (26 June 2021) and Broadsheet (21 July 2021).
Image: Bill Henson Untitled 2016-17, CL SH816 N9, archival inkjet pigment print, 127 x 180 cm, edition of 5 + 2AP
Bill Henson‘s new exhibition is a glittering array of never-seen-before photographs. Some were commenced in the 1990s; all were completed during Melbourne’s long COVID lockdowns. The sense of deep time behind Henson’s images is a hallmark of his approach to photography – an attempt, as he puts it “to get closer to things.”
“It sometimes takes years for me to work out what I want to photograph, a rumination which gradually clarifies itself over a long period of time,“ he says. “I spend a lot of time thinking about things, daydreaming. It takes awhile for things to get to the point to say I know what I need. It’s a face, or a body or a landscape of a particular kind, or it’s the effects of the weather and how that changes the nature of the landscape.”
Bookings are not required, but please let us know in advance if you are bringing a group. Opening hours are 10am-5pm Tuesday – Friday and 1-4pm Saturdays.
If you can’t make it in person, visit the Bill Henson online viewing room.
Read more at The Age (26 June 2021) and Broadsheet (21 July 2021).
Image: Bill Henson Untitled 2016-17, CL SH816 N9, archival inkjet pigment print, 127 x 180 cm, edition of 5 + 2AP
May
Patricia Piccinini ‘A Miracle Constantly Repeated’ at Rising Festival
Congratulations to Patricia Piccinini who has just unveiled A Miracle Constantly Repeated, a world premiere commission for the inaugural Rising Festival. The multi-room installation takes over the mythical Flinders Street Station Ballroom and surrounding chambers in the heart of Melbourne.
Opening on 26 May 2021 and continuing for several months, this is Piccinini’s most extensive hometown exhibition in two decades. Described as “an eco-system of hyper-real silicone sculptures, video, sound and light… Australia’s foremost visual artist will augment the ballroom’s architecture with enormous dioramas, sentient saplings, nurturing marine mammals and enormous life-sustaining foliage.”
Read more at The Age and Broadsheet Melbourne.
Image: PATRICIA PICCININI La Brava 2021, silicone, fibreglass, hair, Ed 1 of 4 + 1 AP. Photograph by Tina Douglas.
May
Andrew Browne ‘Shoegazer 2.0’ exhibition
22 May – 19 June 2021
Meet the artist: Saturday 22 May, 1pm – 4pm
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
– Leonard Cohen
In 2020, Melbourne artist Andrew Browne spent the long COVID-19 lockdown developing Shoegazer, a series of drawings premiering online in August 2020. A playful allusion to Shoegaze, a 1990s subgenre of indie rock, the title refers more to subjects and prompts found close at hand… almost underfoot.
These drawings of modest subjects, rich in association, serve as touchstones for Shoegazer 2.0, Andrew Browne’s new collection of paintings: the accidental abstractions of foot-path repairs; a tenacious dandelion emerging from a crevice; a spill of obscure yet florescent liquid; a crazy-patterned mural, or so much carelessly discarded detritus.
As paintings, these introspective images now loom large and take on a heightened significance. Browne highlights uncanny juxtapositions, flashes of colour and discovers secret portals. In these fleeting street scenes, moments of humour, joy and reverie are captured.
Continuing Andrew Browne’s longheld interest in landscape and surreal natural phenomena, Shoegazer 2.0 shines a light on visions that reflect and connect us all.
Click here to view Shoegazer 2.0 online.
Image: Andrew Browne Rockaway 2021, oil & aluminium pigment on linen, 191 x 132 cm
