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
28 November - 20 December, 2023
“As the force of Gravity pulls all animate and inanimate beings towards the earth it perhaps, inversely and paradoxically, that which connects us to something beyond.
These recent paintings have been created working under the direct inspiration of the Mediterranean light and the warmth that falls directly into the studio from above. I have tried to exploit the material qualities of paint and surface to create a cosmos of colour, rhythm, gesture – a territory held between stillness and movement.
Sometimes on the wall, sometimes on the floor, these new works are made through a process of combining solid and liquid layers of paint. Paint is not passive but rather an active participant, responding to the forces of gravity, gesture and climate.
Many of the paintings contain reflective pigments that create multiple chromatic variations depending on the ambient light and the position of the viewer - things will appear and disappear.”
— Miles Hall, 2023
31 October - 25 November, 2023
Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Judith Wright's new exhibition Second Thoughts on show between 31 October - 25 November 2023. Second Thoughts sees Judith Wright pair her favourite medium, large scale works on paper, with new materials.
Wright has created her own chipboard substrate, infused with her signature sepia metallic pigments, set in playful found frames. These new works accent Wright's interest in gestural mark making, with a particular intuition for finding movement in the material.
Wright's unique approach to installation art, which combines sculptural elements with paintings in dynamic movement-focussed ways, is informed by her experience as a performer with the Australian Ballet.
3 - 28 October, 2023
Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Kellie O'Dempsey's debut commercial exhibition Wish You Were Here on show between 3 - 28 October 2023. Wish You Were Here is an immersive installation of collaged works using paper, drawing, tape and video that transports the viewer into an uncertain landscape. Begun throughout the early days of the pandemic, worked and refined in 2023 during post-covid living, Wish You Were Here began as a response to lockdowns and has continued to develop with transforming elements of humour and oddity.
In this site-specific installation, uncanny household objects collide with uncertain landscapes. In search of progress, multiple figures attempt to travel, yet go nowhere in this oddball world. Their figurative and abstract forms gently smash together as we all fumble for connection. Through repetitive rhythm, monotonous loops, neon lights, remnants of billboard posters, collaged objects and an unspecified time, Wish You Were Here blends the physical and the psychological for a moment of hypnotic but joyful reprieve.
Wish You Were Here is an ongoing project and has previously been exhibited at: Redlands Art Gallery, Cleveland; Northsite Contemporary Art Space, Cairns; Outer Space; Brisbane and Bundaberg Regional Gallery. It has been selected for the 2022 Queensland Regional Art Award. O’Dempsey’s other past performances and works have also been shown at: Art after Dark; Pier 2/3; 18th Biennale of Sydney; MONA FOMA, Hobart; White Night Melbourne; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; City of Brisbane’s Botanica 2019 & 2021; as well as the interactive exhibition 'The Storytellers' at the Museum of Brisbane.
The exhibition is accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Mick Dick.
Fish animated by Helena Papageorgiou.
“…The artist’s projected outlines, which multiply, repeat, and gently loop, can be interpreted as visualizations of her shattered sense of subjectivity. The work is both literally and pictorially an attempt by O’Dempsey to maintain an artistic identity while also filling the shifting roles of daughter, nurse, sibling, administrator.”
Online from 13 September 2023
Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present DISSEVER by Miles Hall, our latest online exhibition showing from 13 September. Hall’s paper works capture the process of combining graphite pigment with an oil binder to create gestural qualities and forms. Each piece has been torn into two seperate pieces and is then recombined on the opposite side to reveal its tear.
“These works question the distinction between drawing and painting aiming to blur the boundaries habitually made between the two techniques,” states Hall in an exhibition essay by Jonathan McBurnie from Perc Tucker Regional Gallery in 2022. “This process allows me to create a physical encounter between colour and gesture where drawing and painting function as one.”
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
Exhibiting artist Simon Degroot joined Alain Guillemain in the space to explore the theme of ‘Gestural marks as being' in Abbreviated Gestures (5 - 23 September).
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.
Exhibiting artist Joseph Daws joined Alain Guillemain in the space to explore the theme of ‘Flux and Identity' in New Works (15 August - 2 September 2023).
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.
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.
Exhibiting artist David Fenoglio joined Alain Guillemain in the space to explore the theme of ‘The meditative in art' in Squaring the Circle (25 July - 12 August 2023).
The act of human selection, where stones, wood or paper are chosen for their symbolic significance, consciously arranged on a table for artistic contemplation, holds its origins in the Dutch and Flemish tradition of stilleven.
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.
Exhibiting artist Natalie Lavelle joined Alain Guillemain in the space to explore the theme of ‘Erotics and the rupture of reason' in Flesh for Fantasy (4 - 22 July).
“How do we reflect on art? And how do we reflect on the sensuous in art? Painting for some is an art activity, others a profession, some a hobby, and for a few it is a life—or life force. Natalie Lavelle is one of the latter. For Lavelle, painting is so central to her personhood..”
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."
“Recently, Brennan has been listening to cosmology and astrophysics podcasts while painting and she has described the way in which the study of space – its structure, the history of
the universe – is rooted in mathematics and science despite its overarching bizarreness and ultimate unknowability. “
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.
Exhibiting artist Jacinta Giles joined Alain Guillemain in the space to explore the theme of ‘Minimal and Overfull' in Filter (23 May - 10 June).
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.
Exhibiting artist Dadang Christanto joined Alain Guillemain in the space to explore the theme of ‘Memory and Forgetting' in LEGACY (2 - 20 May).
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.
Exhibiting artist Andrew Browne joined Alain Guillemain in the space to explore the theme of ‘the glimpse and self–divergence' in TIMES TIDE (11 - 29 April).
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.
Exhibiting artist Jonathan Kopinski joined Alain Guillemain in the space to discuss the theme of ‘discontinuous – how the mind imposes meaning upon fragments’ in Nervous. Solid. Nothing. (21 March - 8 April).
Assembled figure towers over,
made of whirlwind figure submerged,
tears two colours shredded stream pulls down,
half head, shrapnel floats fast,
centered in mirror image insect, woman centered in stream…
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.
Exhibiting artist Saffron Newey joined Alain Guillemain in the space to discuss ‘relationality’ and the connection between sorrow and joy in Pools of Sorrow; Waves of Joy (28 February - 18 March).
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
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)
