News 2021
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.
November
Caroline Rothwell ‘Horizon’
26 June – 28 November 2021
Hazelhurst Arts Centre, NSW
Sydney-based artist Caroline Rothwell explores the intersection of art and science. Through sculpture, collaged historical prints and digital animations, Rothwell invites viewers to consider our relationship with the natural environment. Commissioned for Hazelhurst Arts Centre, Horizon looks out from an immediate frame of reference to the infinite and considers future possibilities.
In recent years Rothwell has been making regular site visits to Kurnell in Sydney’s south, the site of first encounters between Europeans and First Nations people on the east coast of Australia. In the Untitled series of works Rothwell slices into several of Joseph Banks’ Florilegium – the original engravings of botanical specimens collected at Kamay (Botany Bay) in 1770. Into each engraving she has inserted a pink tongue painted in watercolour, where its sinuous form disrupts the pages and their historical significance. The tongue is a repeated motif, weaving it way throughout the exhibition.
The installation also comprises a series of sculptural works and found objects, large-scale, digitally manipulated photographs of morphed weed species and video works.
Caroline Rothwell’s most recent exhibition was Bloom Lab at Tolarno Galleries in September 2021.
Image: Caroline Rothwell Blue Cabinet 2019 sculpture with Untitled 2019 works on paper (watercolour on Arches paper collage, on Joseph Banks’ Florilegium a la pope print from copper plate engraving)
November
Christopher Langton ‘Colonies’
Hazelhurst Arts Centre, NSW
26 June – 28 November 2021
Christopher Langton is known for his sculptures and large inflatables that explore themes around pop culture, video gaming and science fiction. Colonies was commissioned for Hazelhurst, and follows Langton’s 2019 Colony exhibition at Tolarno Galleries.
The immersive installation explores ideas of space colonisation while considering issues around our shared ecology. With obvious reference to science fiction and biology, the gallery is filled with asteroids, meteorites and other celestial bodies along with real and imagined organisms in the shape of viruses, bacteria and fungi.
The sculptures in Colonies were 3D printed, using a machine designed by the artist and built using open source information and software. Three large inflatable works are constructed using patterns and PVC which are then painted and later inflated onsite.
The works are printed using polylactic acid or PLA, a sustainable thermoplastic polyester which is produced from corn starch and sugar cane and is biodegradable.
Image: Colonies installation view by Silversalt Photography, courtesy Hazelhurst Arts Centre
October
Danie Mellor ‘A History of Images’
21 October – 20 November 2021
Click to view the online exhibition.
Danie Mellor‘s new suite of paintings A History of Images provide an intimate glimpse into a pictorial past, a collection of experiences that lie in archival memory beyond our tangible reach.
‘A History of Images’ marks the first time I’m actively trying to convey the complexity of having Aboriginal and colonial settler ancestry. This is my past and our past; this is also our present. – Danie Mellor
Image: DANIE MELLOR Promises 2021, acrylic on board with gesso and iridescent wash, 40.5 x 30.4 cm
October
Rosemary Laing ‘poems for recent times’
Tolarno Galleries is pleased to release the first works from Rosemary Laing‘s new series poems for recent times 2021 as an online exhibition.
Rosemary Laing originally trained as a painter before moving to the medium of photography in the late 1980s. Her project-based photographic work is often cinematic in vision and generally created with real-time performance and physical installation.
Laing’s work is concept-driven, her projects forming an ongoing narrative that tracks periods of time and events that have had an impact on cultural consciousness. With interventions undertaken in situ or through the use of choreographed performance work, Rosemary Laing’s practice engages with the politics of place and contemporary culture.
Her work is currently on view in the following exhibitions:
This Mortal Coil at the Zuckerman Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, USA from 28 August — 11 December 2021 featuring a dozen useless actions for grieving blondes #5 2009 and a dozen useless actions for grieving blondes #12 2009.
Reversible Destiny: Australian and Japanese contemporary photography co-curated by Natalie King at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 24 August — 31 October 2021 featuring effort and rush #1 2015 and effort and rush #9 (swanfires) 2013-2015.
Rosemary Laing is represented by Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, Galerie Conrads, Berlin
and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
September
Caroline Rothwell | Bloom Lab | Virtual Exhibition
9 September – 2 October 2021
Caroline Rothwell’s Bloom Lab evolves from her recent digital project Infinite Herbarium which launched concurrently at Museum of Contemporary Art as part of The National 2021: New Australian Art (26 March – 22 August 2021) and at The Royal Botanic Garden Sydney (26 March to 31 August 2021).
Made in collaboration with Google Creative Lab in Sydney, Infinite Herbarium, is a series of six, 28 minute HD video works, featuring a score by Theodore Wohng.
Each video was created using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine-learning processes, drawing on data-sets of imagery from the open-source Biodiversity Heritage Library as well as a series of recently photographed plants.
The Bloom Lab exhibition comprises the Infinite Herbarium six-video installation, along with companion works: three suspended sculptures, and paintings that have also drawn their forms from her hybrid digital archive.
Rothwell’s practice often responds to archival material in museums, public collections and journals, and here she takes primary research to a bold and innovative new digital artistic space.
Image: Caroline Rothwell Bloom Lab. Installation image by Tina Douglas.
September
Melbourne lockdown update
Friday 3 September 2021
While Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdown continues, Tolarno Galleries remains temporarily closed.
Please contact the gallery via email: mail@tolarnogalleries.com
Browse our recent online exhibitions including:
Brent Harris The Stations 2021
Brendan Huntley Without Within (Sculpture and Painting)
Tim Maguire Old World, New World
Image: Bill Henson Untitled 2001-2021, CL-SH441-N17G, archival inkjet pigment print, 180 x 127 cm
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.
