Exhibitions
May
The Kissing Cabinet
The Kissing Cabinet is an exhibition of a new work by A&A (Adam and Arthur). It is the first of a series that epitomises A&A’s exploration of sculptural forms that intentionally blur the boundaries between art, craftsmanship, and design. The cabinet is visually captivating, standing tall with sinuous, curvy shapes and a bold colour palette rendered in the centuries-old craft of straw marquetry. The Kissing Cabinet’s true enchantment unfolds as it gracefully turns inside out, revealing hidden forms and secret compartments. On closing, the shapes converge like abstracted kissing lips. This captivating blend of soft movement and hidden function elevates The Kissing Cabinet beyond furniture, transforming it into a poetic and sensual object.
Pictured: Adam Goodrum and Arthur Seigneur in their studio workshop. Photo: Pier Carthew 2023.
April
In memory of stars
Naarm/Melbourne, Australia: Tolarno Galleries is pleased to present Amos Gebhardt’s new exhibition, In memory of stars.
This exhibition expands on Gebhardt’s recent large-scale lightboxes from the same series installed along the Birrarung (Yarra River) for PHOTO 24. Notably, the work ‘Wallaby’, presented in this exhibition, also won the prestigious William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize in 2022.
“Western cosmologists say bones are made from material traces of incredibly rare, calcium-rich supernovas, which are the explosive death and afterlife of unique stars,” says Gebhardt.
“In memory of stars contemplates lost futures created by ongoing colonial impacts in the form of native animal bones sourced from veterinary and scientific archives.”
Gebhardt’s glowing images delineate the exquisite skeletons of seven native animals killed on Wadawurrung country and oceans off the coast of Australia.
They are arrayed as seven lightboxes on one wall of Gallery 1 in a spiralling sequence of ghost-likehauntings: wallaby, speckled maskray, possum, flounder, cockatoo, moray and dragonfish.
“These works interweave X-ray technology with elements including satellite and long exposure photography of the night sky on Wadawurrung country, where the land animals were found,” says Gebhardt.
“This involved the layering of light frequencies so small they pass through skin, and others so vast they began millions of light years away.”
Gebhardt’s detail-rich lightboxes invite close inspection, revealing information not visible to the naked eye as a way to speak to colonial violences that may be deliberately hidden or erased.
“The architecture of these skeletons are visually complex and wondrous,” says Gebhardt. “While some remain intact for the purposes of scientific exploration, others reveal injuries from technologies such as lawnmowers, fish-hooks, vehicles and firearms.”
“I’m interested in the way dominant societies are haunted by that which they attempt to erase. By enhancing the luminosity of these once animated bones with elements such as fire, smoke, stars and cloud, the work suggests the entangled lines of connection between cosmology, trauma and sentience,” says Gebhardt.
Amos Gebhardt would like to thank the Wadawurrung Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation and Dr Paola Balla for their generous time, knowledge sharing and consultation.
Thank you to Kane Wilson and the CSIRO for their support and generosity. Marine archival documents courtesy of CSIRO.
This series was supported by Arts South Australia.
Pictured above: Amos Gebhardt, Wallaby, 2023, detail
March
swansongs
In this exhibition, Laing prints on the materials of our renovated lives: acrylic used for splash backs and lightboxes; high end packaging used in retail displays; fluted cardboard used for packaging. This truth to recycled materials provides a further level of insight into swansongs: life’s waste coalesces with life’s losses. The time has come to work with what remains and that which survives.
Presented as part of
PHOTO 2024
GALLERY 1
February
2024
February
FLYING OUT (FIRECRACKER)
Flying Out (Firecracker)
featuring
Hannah Gartside
Guruwuy Murrinyina
Georgia Spain
Justine Varga
Elizabeth Willing
“… five distinct voices, but they share a quality found in the most special art, where the works exist in excess of themselves, overflowing with feelings, ideas, stories and desires. Yet the right to this aesthetic intensity for women was never a historical given. As art critic Jennifer Higgie makes clear in The Mirror and the Palette, for hundreds of years women artists fought for the space and time to fulfill their curiosities and drives—it’s a lineage that leads to exhibitions like Flying out (firecracker).”
Tiarney Miekus 2024
November
Hi-Fi, Lo-Fi
Hi-Fi, Lo-Fi is Tim Maguire’s 16th solo show with Tolarno Galleries, a partnership that celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.
Started in 2005 and re-visited in 2023, the earliest painting in the exhibition stands at the Lo-Fi end of the fidelity spectrum.
At the Hi-Fi end, is the exhibition’s tour de force: Untitled 20230201. Measuring 212 x 404 cm, it has a purity of colour and a clarity similar to computer screens and digital photography. This widescreen work is a stunningly detailed reproduction of a passage taken from Jan van Huysum’s Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, c. 1715, in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
I could never have painted this work based on the source imagery that was available in the 1990s, says Tim Maguire.
My early Dutch flower paintings were very lo-fi, in part because the reproductions I was relying on were poor, taken from postcards or books.
The new paintings are a product of the high-resolution reproductions now available. They are a far cry from the dimly lit, heavily varnished and poorly reproduced paintings that were my starting point in the 1990s.
Early on, I applied paint loosely with big brushes and splashes of solvent. Those paintings were about breaking down the image as much as they were about building it up.
Accompanying the paintings in Hi-Fi, Lo-Fi, are 24 prints from Maguire’s ongoing Dice Abstracts series, first shown at Tolarno Galleries in 2019 and in New Australian Printmaking at NGV in 2022.
October
This body is experiencing pleasure
GALLERY 1
Following on from her major installation Forest summons (for Lilith), included in Melbourne Now 2023 at NGV Australia, Hannah Gartside has created 11 wall-based, works for her debut solo exhibition at Tolarno Galleries, using secondhand sequinned dresses, skirts and tops collected by her over a number of years.
Meticulously constructed from the material relics of all yesterday’s parties, these surreal and sensuous works are informed by a short story Gartside wrote about a young woman who is transformed into a moth after making herself a cocoon-like cloak.
Gartside’s textile alchemy evokes the absent bodies that slipped on these slinky party clothes and the memories they might have made – the places they went, the people they met, the songs they danced to.
Gartside is drawn to found textiles because they retain the lived experience – “the energy, glamour and enchantment” – of those they once belonged to.
“I use worn clothes as stand-ins for bodies – they are objects that have travelled through time and absorbed it,” says Gartside.
“I believe that along with absorbing the physicality of our bodies … clothes absorb our emotional experiences: yearnings, pains and delights,” she says.
