Holdings 2023 | Group Exhibition
Holdings 2023 | Group Exhibition
28 November - 20 December, 2023
Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Holdings 2023, a group exhibition of selected works celebrating the exhibiting artists of 2023. We welcome you to our gallery stockroom for viewing.
Exhibiting Artists:
Andrew Browne
Angela Brennan
Dadang Christanto
David Fenoglio
Ian Friend
Jacinta Giles
Jonathan Kopinski
Joseph Daws
Kellie O’Dempsey
Miles Hall
Natalie Lavelle
Simon Degroot
Flesh for Fantasy | Natalie Lavelle
Flesh for Fantasy | Natalie Lavelle
4 - 22 July, 2023
For Natalie Lavelle, painting is a life force. So central to her personhood, her works act as proxies for her—embodying her energy, enthusiasm, and spirit. Her latest body of work, Flesh for Fantasy, contemplates Sontag’s question, ‘how can we experience art in a direct, unmediated manner?’. Compelled to deal sensuously with art—to achieve this unmediated experience—Sontag approached art as an exercise in reconnecting the mind and the body, concluding that an art practice could be ‘a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness, and organising new modes of sensibility.’
Throughout this body of work, Lavelle is inviting us to reconnect with our bodies, our sensors, and use them, to experience the pure joy of painting. Take a moment to abandon the habitual nature to extract meaning from the symbolic, iconic, or historic significations in imagery. Flesh for Fantasy is an invitation to just revel, in the immediate, sensuous, physical reality of what is in-front of us—a painting.
Artist Talk
Exhibition Essay
Ways of Being | Natalie Lavelle
Ways of Being| Natalie Lavelle
9 - 27 March, 2022
Jan Manton Gallery is proud to show Natalie Lavelle in her latest solo exhibition Ways of Being on display from 9 - 27 March, 2022. Lavelle's recent work shifts its gaze to the natural world by evoking both curiosity and nostalgia in layers, bleeds and sweeps of white, brown and blue. Each work expands beyond the canvas to suggest a vista of colour, light and material — seemingly both contained and spacious.
Exhibition essay writer Louise Mayhew states, “Thinking of these paintings as transformations of nature operates in two spatial directions: as an endless spilling out and an almighty gathering in. If you stand close to Lavelle’s larger canvases, so they fill your field of vision, you might imagine their washes of colour stretching forever, echoing the vastness as the Earth.”
Natalie Lavelle is an artist whose practice wavers between human and material concerns where abstraction and monochrome paintings have become the foundation of a personal pursuit to re-blur the limitations and boundaries of the traditional easel painting. Natalie has completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours Class I) from the Queensland College of Art (QCA) in 2020, and a Diploma of Visual Art from Southbank Institute of Technology (SBIT) in 2016.
Rekindle | Natalie Lavelle
Rekindle | Natalie Lavelle
21 April - 9 May 2021
Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Natalie Lavelle in her latest exhibition Rekindle, on show from 21 April – 9 May 2021. This exhibition explores the luminosity and weight of colour in a ‘rekindling’ of the mid-century art movements of colour field abstraction and minimalism.
Rekindle demonstrates Lavelle’s playful edge as an artist through her minimalist aesthetic, attention to detail, and love for colour, which she washes over or stains onto the canvas in thin, successive layers. Her washes create bleeds which, against the overtly rectangular compositions of her works, revel in the uninformed movement of colour.
“At the centre of Lavelle’s work lies a simple delight in the very substance of paint. Washes of colour are pulled across her works to create thin layers of pigment, which she gradually layers on top of one another. Each semi-translucent layer forms new formal relationships, blends, and associations with the next,” writes curator Zali Matthews. “Throughout this process, Lavelle openly acknowledges the space occupied by each layer and the innate bodily weight of paint.”
Natalie Lavelle | Deliberate Pictures
Deliberate Pictures | Natalie Lavelle
17 July - 9 August, 2020
Deliberate Pictures is part of a continuing inquiry into concepts that explore surface relationships where visual perception prompts a tangible awareness of painting’s object hood in relation to our own body and the natural world.
These works retain a connection to the ‘thereness’ and ‘thingness’ of a painting, instead of contemplating it as ‘neither being nor nothingness’. They request viewers to comprehend the reality of art, the medium, and the materials that is presented to them. Paintings that offer their own medium as subject point, both, inward to themselves and outward to their relationship with other things. In turn, we become conscious of a recognisable common physicality between object and Self and ultimately our space amongst all things.
Working in spontaneous and investigational methodologies, the paintings navigate constructed forms and space through various brushwork and stitching embedded together in abstract and monochromatic compositions.