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.
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.
Michael Taylor mimics the immediate and expansive nature of the drawing process in order to develop scenes and characters in his painted work. Removed from its purely observational qualities, drawing becomes a projection of the artist’s intuition, imagination and memory. Representational and figurative elements in Taylor’s paintings create narrative frameworks that are unravelled to varying degrees through abstract marking.
Nemo Jantzen, born 1970 in The Haque, studied art, design and photography at the RTO Art Academy in Rotterdam. After his studies, he moved to Antwerp to work as a graphic designer and bill-board artist while further developing his technique and style as a fine artist. Finally, after several years in Belgium and some worldly travels, he settled down in Spain where he dedicated his career to fine art.
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.
8, 15 – 19 Boundary Street
Darlinghurst, Sydney
NSW, Australia
Email: gallery@mcontemp.com
