Summer Group Show 2022
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SUMMER GROUP SHOW
December 13th – 24th.
Presale live on this page from Tuesday December 6th at 10am.
End of year celebration and opening night Tuesday 13th, 5 – 8pm, RSVP below.
A summer group show featuring a collection of new works by established gallery artists including;
Anya Pesce, Justing Dingwall, Rick Carlino, Ulla Stina-Wikander, Suzanna Vangelov, Waldemar Kolbusz, Agneta Ekholm, Hannalie Taute, Jane Guthleben, Luke Thurgate, Maria Jose Benvenuto, Mark Howson, Lisa Jones, Elefteria Vlavianos, Eloise Cato & Christopher McVinish.
I am an Australian born, Sydney-based artist.
“I do what I do for the love of new experiences. My imagery is not bound by language or culture. I want my work to speak for itself and for people to interpret it in their own way. I want people to be affected by my images… As long as someone is feeling something, I am achieving my goals.”
Born in Perth to Polish parents, Kolbusz has embraced the Eastern European work and life ethic. He is a risk-taker with tireless energy. His instincts drew him to art at an early age. But Kolbusz remains primarily self-taught, abandoning visual arts studies at the University of Western Australia to graduate with a Bachelor of Commerce degree.
Sydney epoxy resin artist Rick Carlino has been creating large scale works which explore the fluidity and viscosity of a notoriously rebellious medium for the last decade. Drawing on his diverse creative and professional career, which has included music composition and brand design, Rick creates vivid contemporary artworks which showcase his love of colour.
I grew up surrounded by makers, the men worked with steel and the women with fabric. My practise is a union of both. I begin with yards and yards of raw canvas that I prepare, hand paint, cut, shape and mould with the sharp cold blade of the metal scissor, in an act of dismembering and remembering.
Through still life paintings of Indigenous flowers, birds, and insects, Guthleben uses the traditions of vanitas and its messages of the transience of life to present a painted vernacular that spans humour, kitsch, historical and environmental themes.
Luke Thurgate is an artist living and working on Gadigal Land (Sydney). He teaches drawing and painting at the National Art School, where he graduated in 2021 with a Master of Fine Art. Luke has an extensive exhibition history including recent exhibitions at Grafton Regional Gallery, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, Backwoods Gallery, Burra Regional Art Gallery, National Art School and Adelaide Central Gallery. He was a finalist in the 2019 Dobell Drawing Prize, the 2020 Tom Bass Figurative Sculpture Prize and the 2022 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award.
In late 2018, Chilean Artist, Maria Jose Benvenuto, swapped her home city of Santiago, situated in a valley surrounded by mountain ranges, for the scrubby bush lands and oceanic horizons of Sydney’s Northern Beaches. For an artist whose practice had, up until that point, been informed by the imposing mountain peaks that looked down on her previous home, Benvenuto was struck by the endless vistas of Sydney’s landscape.
Mark Howson was born in Staffordshire, England and arrived Australia in 1969. He was a founding member of Roar Studios – one of Melbourne’s earliest (fiercest) artist-run-initiatives. Howson’s art practise encompasses drawing, painting and sculpture. His work is highly regarded for it’s meditative, cubist style, which developed from vigourous expressionism into avant-garde abstraction. Popular representations include simple, textural forms in carefully balanced, bright compositions.
Eloise Cato’s practice has embraced the plastic age and all its manufactured mannerisms in the context of the machine of the art world, how its machinations fascinate and inform. Cato works by hijacking injection blow moulding machines of mass production to manipulate polyethylene into unexpected monochromatic abstractions. Endeavouring through the guise of a natural form, a cloak of ebony charcoal, to mask the sins of the synthetic. This surface is gently painted in a highly laborious and time-intensive process that’s not evident through the counting of brushstrokes.
Lisa Jones is an artist, artist-curator and collaborator based in Sydney, Australia. Her art practice explores the relationship of cities with human interactions, activated through trace elements of associated hidden networks. Her multi-layered works make sense of incongruities, to reveal and merge incompatible ideas from the chaos and structures of everyday experience.
Elefteria Vlavianos was born in Zimbabwe of mixed Armenian and Greek heritage. She is an abstract painter who’s visual practice has developed through an ongoing investigation into the process abstraction, its vocabulary and conventions as a visual translation of a displaced cultural aesthetic. Her paintings draw on her multi-cultural Armenian and Greek heritage. Imagery in her paintings is derived from her current research of thirteenth century Armenian Manuscript Paintings and the tradition of Armenian textile crafts. Continued themes within her practice and paintings, are time, silence, presence and memory as they tie into a dialogue between representation, visibility and abstract painting. In this framework issue such a colour, structure, and mark making are key concerns as they translate across time, space and between two idioms in painting.
Hannalie Taute (b. 1977) started her life’s journey in a small town called Fochville in Gauteng, South Africa. In 2000, she obtained a National Higher Diploma in Fine Art at PE Technicon (now the NNMU). A decade ago she started working with rubber and particularly repurposed rubber inner-tubes, and in 2012 she added embroidery to her list of preferred media.
Finnish born, Australian based artist Agneta Ekholm’s work is by definition abstract and built entirely from imagination and engagement with her technical process. Each painting evolves on the canvas: no working drawings exist. The paintings result from the exploration and discovery inherent in a technique honed over the last 20 years.
South African artist, Marna Hattingh’s travels between a hybrid of fine art, literature and the complexities or contemporary life. She interrogates and articulates its collective emotions and has developed a highly unique and sought-after style, strongly influenced by an Asian sensibility and her experience as an illustrator, blending wry humour and social comment into playful palettes with a serious undertone. Drawing inspiration from an eclectic range including media, fashion, history and fictional novels, her finely drawn characters jump, dance and spin across timeless, patterned backgrounds. Each painting is extensively worked and contains its own complex narrative.
Contemporary Realist painter Christopher McVinish is a master of light. It is essentially this element of his work which invites us to see the commonplace as special and suffused with potential. McVinish’s urban and outback landscapes, parklands and garden paintings tell intriguingly oblique narratives revealing contemporary life as a kind of half-remembered dream.
Will Coles is best known for his defiant and accessible take on street art – sculptures that bring together pop and conceptual aesthetics. These familiar yet unsettling works surprise and delight people in cities across the world as they go about their day.
8, 15 – 19 Boundary Street
Darlinghurst, Sydney
NSW, Australia
Email: gallery@mcontemp.com