Abbreviated Gestures | Simon Degroot

Abbreviated Gestures | Simon Degroot

5 - 23 September, 2023

In these works, I am interested in amplifying hand-drawn gestural marks and minor details. Like tending to a garden or keeping a visual journal, the paintings are a space for thinking. Each mark operates as both a reference to the tactile movements of a finger across a touch screen as well as to the history of gestural abstraction.

The colourful touches are like an enlarged dissemblant tending, which is simultaneously automatic and considered. The painted monochrome foliage supports these gestures while also suggesting that this cropped image is only a fragment of something much larger and ongoing in my practice. Imagery of fast-growing rhizomatic plants, which are often used in spaces for domestic screening, alludes to our combined search for a private locus amoenus, a ‘pleasant place’.

When resemblance meets the abstract in this shallow pictorial space there is a conflation of marks and a layering of interactions. This body of work captures sectioned moments of abbreviated gestures. — Simon Degroot, 2023

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New Works 2023 | Joseph Daws

New Works 2023 | Joseph Daws

15 August - 2 September, 2023

New Works 2023 presents a combination of practice by Joseph Daws, with a debut into sculptural pieces. The exhibition includes new paintings that continue Daws’ interest in landscape and still-life, presented alongside an abstract body of work which examines pixelated imagery and digital processes. The new sculptures are an extension of Daws recent Resolution paintings, where the artist sampled pixels from digital images of his work, enlarged the grid, and recreated the correlating hues in oil paint. Of this process, Daws states:

“I was interested in how the pixels operate as a pictorial space on this scale, and how the viewer reads this space. There is a minimalist, optical quality to them at times, and they sometimes read more or less so abstracted from actual associations with the real world.”

Daws’ plywood sculptures leave the nature of the substrate unhidden, highlighting a tensity within their materiality:

“It creates a tension between the ‘boxiness’ of the work and any illusional/pictorial space it presents—akin to the white primer of an unfinished painting disrupting the pictorial plane.”

Together, this new body of work integrates a continuous thread of practice and shares insight into the artist’s iterative processes, combining a physical and digital studio. The diversity in styles throughout this exhibition highlight a multitude of compositional play and a conversation between two-dimensional and three-dimensional perspectives.

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Wanderlust | Dylan Jones

Wanderlust | Dylan Jones

Online from 22 June 2023

Jan Manton Gallery is proud to present Wanderlust by Dylan Jones, an online exhibition. This new series of works sees an evolution of Jones’ en plein air approach to painting, as the artist adapted his modes of making to suit a more incidental engagement with time, place and subjects.

“Earlier this year, my partner, our child and I were fortunate enough to spend two months together exploring the UK and Ireland. The circumstances of travel required that I reduce my studio to an ultra-small scale. My painting box could only accommodate small works, even though the views in front of me were so large and expansive.

Travelling with an infant also meant I was limited in the amount of time I could paint each day. There were short windows of opportunity to paint during her naps, and in the evening after she had gone to sleep. This routine encouraged a more imaginative response to the landscape, painting from memory rather than from life. Portraits also began to emerge, inspired by simply looking at myself in the mirror or catching glimpses of my partner having some down time.” — Dylan Jones

The resulting body of works draws an interesting parallel between the method of making and the resulting compositions. As the expansive vistas of new places are rendered in a restricted scale, so too is the artists’ time, expanding and contracting against the novelty of travel and exploration.

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Squaring the Circle | David Fenoglio

Squaring the Circle | David Fenoglio

25 July - 12 August, 2023

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present our first exhibition with newly represented artist David Fenoglio. Squaring the Circle will be on display between 25 July - 12 August 2023.

David Fenoglio is a Brisbane/Meanjin based artist and 2011 graduate of Queensland College of Art. Fenoglio has exhibited nationally and internationally, having spent a year in Europe following graduation. His travels abroad included researching works in Italian museums, studying painting at the Grand Central Atelier in New York, and drawing studies while working on farms. Fenoglio has now returned to his home town to focus on pursuing a representational art practice through oil painting and drawing.

“The time spent looking and contemplating through painting is a meditative experience. I hope for this experience to be held in the paintings and offered to the viewer to experience some calm and contemplation." - David Fenoglio

Fenoglio's works are inspired by the natural world and art history, but situated in a contemporary context. Fenoglio is known for his restrained and contemplative still life compositions, based in the historical and technical study of painting. His approach references natural realism—depicting organic and mineral surfaces in their natural state. But his contemporary practice pushes the objects beyond their materiality with its hyperrealistic rendering. The uncanny ability to make simple spaces and objects, not only look, but feel natural is achieved through Fenoglio's technical exploration and extensive study of oil painting.

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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.

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New Paintings | Angela Brennan

New Paintings | Angela Brennan

13 June - 1 July, 2023

The gallery is pleased to present Angela Brennan's debut exhibition New Paintings on display between 13 June - 1 July 2023. Brennan's paintings lie predominantly with lively colour and abstraction, depicting elements of an inner world. The artists' evolving practice consists of humming, floating forms and surfaces—a process which allows for dreamt imaginings to spill out and thrive. 

Essay writer Serena Bentley states, "To view an Angela Brennan painting is to be embraced by colour. The artist’s iconic combinations of radiating hues and soft forms are atmospheric, an effect enhanced by their often immersive scale. It is almost as if you can breathe them in. To be in their presence is to be acutely aware of your own body in relation to the work and a lively invitation to the eye and, indeed, the heart. For Brennan's world is deeply shaped by emotion and intuition."

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Filter | Jacinta Giles

Filter | Jacinta Giles

23 May - 10 June, 2023

In a world where filters are omnipresent, Jacinta Giles’ exhibition Filter asks us to reflect on the ways in which we interact with and interpret the visual world around us. In using coloured filters— both physically within the work and as the conceptual theme behind the series— Giles also explores the filtering process as a creative technique, revealing how artists select and manipulate elements to generate a distinctive visual language.

Giles’ use of photographs of the moving images that fill our screens, as the content for these artworks, reflects her ongoing interest in the relationship between screens, filters, the photographic apparatus, and our everyday lives. Ultimately, this series of photographic collages echoes our daily navigation of the digital landscape and considers how filters shape our collective perceptions of reality.

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LEGACY | Dadang Christanto

LEGACY | Dadang Christanto

2 - 20 May, 2023

Dadang Christanto, widely known for his works surrounding Indonesia’s 1965-66 genocide, returns to Jan Manton Gallery in his new exhibition LEGACY with a continued rigour and commitment to voicing the stories of the countless victims.

Christanto grew up in Tegal, Central Java where he lived with his family during the 1960s. When Christanto was 8 years old, his father was forcefully removed from his home in the middle of the night by a group of militants. He was never to be seen or heard from again. The events of 1965-66 motivated Christanto’s art practice as a way to not only express his pain caused by the atrocities but to share stories of suffering.

In his new body of work, Christanto illustrates violent acts of mass murder, with severed heads seen crashing into bodies of water and limbs sinking further below. ‘Plung’, the title of 3 works, is an Indonesian onomatopoeia to describe the sound made when an object drops into water. “It is a poetic word which carries a quietness - a sound you may hear in the night,” says Christanto. “Violence is a reality in our lives and is an inherent part of human nature. Whether we like it or not, we must be brave enough to oppose violence.” Alongside the ‘Plung’ series is the artist’s self-portrait ‘One Day in K’, which provides a glimpse into his life amidst the COVID pandemic. The increased isolation experienced by Christanto inflicted a deep sense of longing for another place, specifically the Yangtze River in China.

The exhibition’s titular piece ‘Legacy’ was previously shown in a 2007 exhibition in Jan Manton Gallery where it was formerly titled ‘Such a Beautiful Morning, The Sun Rose and Its Light Did Stab in the Back’. Since its first showing, the work has undergone the addition of new layers with the last being a caricature of Indonesia’s past leader Suharto. Christanto’s intent to revisit the large-scale work was prompted by the first layer’s portrayal of the mass casualties caused by the 2004 Indian earthquake and tsunami, which devastated the west coast of northern Sumatra. “Tsunamis are a natural disaster and by adding these new layers, I wanted to show there also exists ideological and social disasters,” states Christanto.

LEGACY acknowledges that although the artist has healed from personal wounds, issues of socio-political injustice and discrimination within Indonesia remain unresolved.

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TIMES TIDE | Andrew Browne

TIMES TIDE | Andrew Browne

11 - 29 April, 2023

The exhibition TIMES TIDE emerged out of a long period of painterly and formal experimentation in subjects drawn from both the anecdotal close at hand and underfoot, as well as the more expansive arena of the mutable river landscape, privileging gesture alongside the constraints of the geometric.

Ostensibly, these are pictures of silhouetted structures and ambiguous shadows juxtaposed against watery realms. A primary intent is locating the image within an emblematic phenomenal field and to invite the viewer to see the world, as if in a glimpse, through my eyes. The series acknowledges Samuel Beckett’s paraphrased statement “...the task of the artist is to find a form that accommodates the mess (of the world)” as each of the images isolate a fraction of that ‘mess’. The momentarily stilled phenomena of the images - apparitions in effect – create a contrasting encounter with our world’s usual flurry of sensory overload.

The recent Shoegazer series was close in their fidelity to urban subject, taking detailed cues from the weathered, incidental surfaces of pavement and hoarding. In this parallel series of paintings, a deliberately more stylized and blurred painterly touch has allowed the imagery to hover obliquely. The painted borders that enclose each image act as a deliberate distancing device, in their sly nod to framing and to the photographic. In occupying some temporal yet indeterminate zone, the images point to our experience of a wider landscape as transitional and often disorientating, but also episodic.

The title TIMES TIDE acknowledges the passage of time and attendant mortality. But it underlines a contradiction, between the Western concept of ‘times-arrow’, the state of perpetual movement forward with its inevitable elegiac undertone and the cyclical nature of tides forever-return, inherent in multifarious aspects of the natural world.

As such, these new paintings should be placed within the cyclical continuum in my practice where they embrace an evident return to an earlier organic, quasi-naturalist subject, via a suturing of landscape elements and a monochromatic saturation of colour. Implicit is the acknowledgement of their engagement with space and time where fractional and fleeting sensations are often most resonant when we delve back into memory. As simply stated by the painter Alex Katz, any concept of objectivity, order or realism, is “variable”.

— Andrew Browne, 2023.

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Nervous. Solid. Nothing. | Jonathan Kopinski

Nervous. Solid. Nothing. | Jonathan Kopinski

21 March - 8 April, 2023

Jonathan Kopinski’s latest offering Nervous. Solid. Nothing. continues the artist’s exploration into psycho-scenographic imagery. Eschewing overt didactic arcs in favour of fragmentary and often incongruous motifs and images, Kopinski’s compositions present scenes severed from reality, with trace elements of it. The strange blend of visual language across photorealism, abstraction, collage and hand renderings give an initial hint of solid recognition, followed by a nervous apprehension that, although you may feel it, what you are looking at is unknowable, nothing. 

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Pools of Sorrow; Waves of Joy | Saffron Newey

Pools of Sorrow; Waves of Joy | Saffron Newey

28 February - 18 March, 2023

Weaving a capricious path through five centuries of western painting, Pools of Sorrow; Waves of Joy visits upon histrionic moments. The works pay homage to movements such as Australian mysticism, the Italian, Dutch and Spanish Baroque, Preraphaelitism, Norwegian Romanticism and even banal stock imagery.

A series of eight oil paintings feature new collaged narratives; figures appear in unfamiliar landscapes, conjuring atmospheres that are at once magical and alien. Nymphs, animals, pastoral scenes and night skies have been summoned from historical artworks and online archives. Their new union in these works evoke curiosity and polarised emotions. Gratuity, melodrama, melancholy and the mundane all congress from divergent points. Together, in a cacophony of lost voices, scenes of sublime joy and inky darkness coexist.

Accompanying the paintings is a series of palimpsests - each artwork consists of layered mono prints, silverpoint and ink drawings which likewise, source historical images but also automatic drawing and imaginary motifs.

Like a cloud of cyphers, an incongruent constellation Pools of Sorrow; Waves of Joy imagines the lost details of history, floating, clashing and moving ever distantly apart and together again.

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Medicine Clay - Gidjarr | Simone Arnol & Bernard Singleton

Medicine Clay - Gidjarr | Simone Arnol & bernard Singleton

7 - 25 February, 2023

One way to preserve our cultural knowledge is to share it. 

To ensure the transmission of knowledge from one generation of family to the next, we must embed the knowledge systems practiced by our old people’s into our own cultural and spiritual routines. To feel the earth beneath our feet and to feel it through our hands allows us to ground ourselves, which was a subconscious practice of our old people. 

Through a new series of photographic works, our exhibition ‘Medicine Clay – Gidjarr’ continues the use of the medicinal clay with the red ochre to adorn four generations of family and to document the continued connection with our people, place, and practices. 

— Simone Arnol & Bernard Singleton, 2023

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Lux Æterna | Ian Friend & Robyn Daw

Lux Æterna | Ian Friend & Robyn Daw

17 January - 4 February, 2023

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Lux Æterna by Ian Friend & Robyn Daw showing between 17 January - 4 February, 2023. 

There will be a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that it is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are. 

- Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (New York: Grove Press, 2014)

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Holdings | Group Show

Holdings | Group Show

6 - 21 December, 2022

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Holdings 2022, a group exhibition curated by Gallery Assistant, Sarah Meehan. Holdings is informed by the spectrum and relationships of colours commonly identified in the colour wheel. Featured works by our represented artists have been thoughtfully selected from the stockroom. Through a kaleidoscopic display of artworks, The exhibition highlights and celebrates the diversity of our artists and their practice. 

Featured artists include Adriane Strampp, Arryn Snowball, Carl Warner, Dai Li, Denise Green, Dylan Jones, Ian Friend, Jacinta Giles, Joachim Froese, Joseph Daws, Judith Wright, Karla Marchesi, Miles Hall, Natalie Lavelle, Robyn Stacey and Saffron Newey.  

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Recent Works 2022 | Dai Li

Recent Works 2022 | Dai Li

6 - 21 December, 2022

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Recent Works by Dai Li showing between 6 - 21 December, 2022. Recent Works continues Dai Li's interest in quirky, humorous, and inquisitive characters inspired by everyday life.

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Rising Tide | Dylan Jones

Rising Tide | Dylan Jones

8 November - 3 December, 2022

Jan Manton Gallery is proud to present Rising Tide by Dylan Jones showing between 8 November - 3 December, 2022. Rising Tide revisits Jones’ fondness for Moreton Island (Mulgumpin); a place that is home to many childhood memories. In his youth, Moreton Island was a frequent camping spot for Jones and his family. The minimal and subdued gouache paintings reference the more dismal days where dark clouds loomed over the island.

Portraying Moreton Island from the perspectives of both sea and land, Jones captures the vastness and ruggedness of landscape whilst inducing a sense of calm and stillness.

“The island itself is dense in vegetation yet the ocean is so vast. I wanted to capture this juxtaposition and contrast. The paintings are constructed from re-imaginings of my childhood years visiting the island by boat or standing on the island looking out to the endless horizon.” — Dylan Jones

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Video Documentary

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Simultaneous Disguise | Simon Degroot

Simultaneous Disguise | Simon Degroot

28 September - 15 October, 2022

“In Simultaneous Disguise, all the works reveal evidence of their history through close examination of the painted surface. I’m fascinated by the possibilities of a flat surface. How can we use layering to better understand ideas of concealing and revealing? What happens when the most visible, anterior, or frontal form is hiding something that is behind? What does this tell us about visibility and appearances? How can painting help us understand more about the politics of seeing versus not seeing?”

— Simon Degroot

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Studio photo by Charlie Hillhouse.

In our latest From the Studio interview, Jan Manton Gallery visited Simon Degroot’s studio to learn more about the references, influences, and layers embedded within the artists’ paintings for his new exhibition Simultaneous Disguise.

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Moon Spill | Arryn Snowball

Moon Spill | Arryn Snowball

7 - 25 September, 2022

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Arryn Snowball's latest exhibition Moon Spill showing between the 7 to 25 September, 2022. While firmly committed to abstract painting, Snowball seeks an open practice, where process is fluid and visible, embodied and reciprocal. Exploring line, colour, shape, and how they create rhythm, the artist uses simple formal structures that open onto complexity, intimacy and vulnerability.

“I’m interested in movement and light, structure and change, uncertainty and ambiguity. I’m into the basics: triangles, circles, lines, colour. I try to keep things simple, yet complexity naturally builds up. I don’t want to disguise any aspect of the process. I prefer a hand painted edge. If a line is awkward, it is my awkwardness. If a line is wobbly, it is more alive." — Arryn Snowball

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If I were taller | Aaron Perkins

If I were taller | Aaron Perkins

29 August - 4 September, 2022

Reflecting the persistent engagement with literature throughout his painting practice, Aaron’s PhD defines criteria for the classification of a painting as fiction. Drawing upon the literary autofiction of Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk, Aaron argues that this shift away from painting’s art-historical preoccupation with ‘truth’, through the explicit use of fiction as a method, allows a visual knowledge of the fictions woven throughout everyday reality to be gained through painting. If I were taller exhibition is the final outcome of Aaron’s PhD research.

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Just Light | Robyn Stacey

Just Light | Robyn Stacey

10 - 28 August, 2022

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Just Light by Robyn Stacey on show between 10 to 28 August, 2022. In the new photographic series Just Light, Stacey focuses on the elemental qualities of photography - light, colour and shadow to create luminous photographs.

“Luminosity in images suggests the infinite and for Byzantine and Classical spectators, the foremost aspect of colour to be appreciated was its value as light. Colour and light are suggestive and sensual, they stir emotions and associations, making the perception of both subjective and irrational, something whose effect cannot be grasped intellectually.” — Robyn Stacey

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