Show displays vulnerability
LOCAL and regional displays include a huge retrospective exhibition accompanied by new work and a commissioned installation, the first exhibition for a reinvented art space, project initiatives, and artworks liberated from incarceration.
The new big exhibition at Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery Of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane is a solo show by renowned Australian artist Patricia Piccinini. Curious Affection is the largest exhibition of Piccinini’s work to be held in this country.
It combines retrospective pieces and new creations as well as a specially commissioned inflatable work suspended above the atrium.
Piccinini comes to Brisbane fresh from a block buster show in Rio de Janeiro where more than 1.4 million people saw her exhibition making it the most visited contemporary art show in the world.
Hybridity, metamorphosis, and genetic engineering shape zoomorphic motor scooters, and strange, sometimes confronting creatures that look like escapees from a Frankenstein laboratory.
Piccinini works with a cohort of talented artisans to create her ‘wunderkammer’ of transgenic mutations.
The mothers and offspring, children and strange beasties can be visually challenging, yet they are fascinating and impressive.
After an initial gasp of disbelief, the feelings that sneak up on the viewer are those of warmth, vulnerability, a trusting innocence, and love.
The blend of art, mythology, science, and technology offers an experience to remember. The exhibition continues until August 5.
First Coat Studios, formerly No Comply Gallery and Kontraband Studio, 6 Laurel St, is presenting its inaugural exhibition “Again and Again,” a show comprising the works of fourteen artists.
Each explores the notion of “again” as a means of re-thinking material values through recycling old work, reinventing imagery, and altering the original function of objects through the choice of media, and the interpretation of terms like “discard” and “renew.”
Those particularly fulfilling the brief include pieces by David Usher, Ian McCallum, Peta Berghofer, Kirsty Lee, Bronte Naylor, and Jennifer Anne.
The Project Space at First Coat Studios is showing Globs of Past Tense an on-going postal art collaboration between Kristian Glynn and Natasha Wills.
The works form a visual dialogue between the locations of Toowoomba, Melbourne, and North America.
The feisty, funny, clever, and articulate illustrations steeped in takes on popular and streetwise culture are a delight to explore.
The Lockyer Valley Art Gallery in Gatton is hosting the annual Southern Queensland Correctional Centre exhibition.
This year’s title is Hope, a state of mind here tinged with sadness and regret as well as positive expectations.
The works are predominantly Indigenous in style and technique, and while predictable, they are also impeccable in their attention to detail.
The paintings shares stories, histories, and family associations through colour and imagery that reaches out for understanding and acceptance.
The exhibition includes leather work, ceramic vessels, wood work, and decorative objects many of which are produced in the Murri Art Room.