Figure Holding Ground

Marion Abraham, Mia Boe, Jo Chew, Sam Field, Brent Harris, Pat Hoffie, Helen Johnson, Jelena Telecki and Nicole Zhang

Curated by Fernando do Campo and Michael Edwards

Opening: 5.30pm, Friday 9 August

Artist talk led by Fernando do Campo: 5.00pm, Friday 9 August

10 August – 21 September 2024

Contemporary Art Tasmania

Figure Holding Ground brings together new paintings by Australian artists who push the speculative and critical possibilities of figurative painting today.

While there is an accepted global return to figuration and market forces repeat and sustain the genre’s commercial presence, there are also exciting new ways that contemporary painters are negotiating the potential of figuration, and particularly how figurative painting is being negotiated in this country. Artists borrow from multiple histories of painting to give sense to a subject, they experiment across diverse material approaches, they situate the figure within socio-political contexts and speculative pasts and futures. Ultimately, the nine painters in Figure Holding Ground unsettle both viewers and subjects through the endless potential of how a figure can ‘hold’ a ground.

The global shift away from a predominantly white male art domain towards embracing diverse artists and subjects has reignited figurative painting’s potential to tell stories, ask critical questions, and represent history, society, community. Figure Holding Ground asserts that any painting – particularly those holding the human figure within a pictorial space proposing a real-world imaginary – is loaded with politics.

Marion Abraham lives and works in lutruwita, Tasmania. She undertook art education in Sydney and Melbourne and graduated with a BA, Fine Arts, RMIT, Melbourne in 2021.

Abraham conjures embodied, and often charged human and sometimes animal subjects through the bold manipulation of paint made alive through material, gesture and blur. Substantiated in landscapes enriched by senses of history and home, her figures and their ground are often closely weighted, and where each would be lost without the other.

Marion Abraham is represented by Sullivan & Strumpf, Sydney/Melbourne/Singapore. marionabraham.com

Mia Boe lives and works in Naarm, Melbourne. She was awarded a Bachelor of Art from the University of Queensland in 2020.

Boe’s paintings are informed by her Butchulla and Burmese ancestry, her identity and from growing up in Brisbane with awareness of its active and politically acute contemporary Aboriginal art scene. Her practice is known for its exploration of and reference to First Peoples’ histories and key C20th Australian painters.

Across 2022-2024 Boe has exhibited at, amongst others: Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane; Sutton Gallery, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Gertrude Contemporary and the National Gallery of Victoria, all Melbourne; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; and Penny Contemporary, Hobart.

Mia Boe is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

Jo Chew lives and works in Nipaluna, Hobart. She completed a PhD at the School of Creative Arts and Media, University of Tasmania in 2022

Jo Chew’s images of shelters often act as metonymic absent figures (people) while retaining enough narrative weight to explore ideas of loss, hopefulness or vulnerability. Her use of collage as process can activate competing intensities within the organisation of her images, and subtly disrupt a Gestalt reading of the background in her paintings.

Jo Chew’s paintings have been included in HATCHED, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA); The Churchie Emerging Art Prize, Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane; and in 2023 she was the winner of the Glover Prize for Landscape, Evandale.

Jo Chew is represented by Despard Gallery, Hobart. jo-chew.com

Sam Field lives and works Lutruwita, Tasmania. He was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania and received the 2016 Contemporary Art Tasmania Prize for his submission.

Field’s practice is both larrikin and incisive in its assessment of the refashioned or fabricated histories, legends and lores that provide a narrative base for populist illusions of Australian culture and identity. His fictive observations are positioned in contexts overwhelmed by landscape, taken from histories of Australian painting and imaging, and are charged by his experience of country.

Sam Field is represented by Despard Gallery, Hobart.

Brent Harris lives and works in Naarm, Melbourne. He graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1984.

Harris’s corpus of enigmatic images regularly create slippages across abstraction and figuration and between the figure and ground. A repertoire of familiar symbols, compositions and colour palettes, used with reference to life’s painful truths, are made pleasingly attractive by the artist through his playfully absurd figuration and his impeccable paint surfaces.

His major survey exhibition Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch was co-developed and presented at the Tarrawarra Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of South Australia across 2024. Brent Harris is represented by Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, and Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington.

Pat Hoffie lives and works in Meanjin, Brisbane. Trained as a painter, her expansive practice as an artist working across experimental practices, as an educator and a writer, reaches back to the 1970s.

Hoffie has broadly analysed value and power in relation to feminism and labour, alongside engaging in inter-cultural exchange and in understanding the importance of ‘place’ in her practice. More recently, she has turned towards chronicling everyday life in a chaotic world of personal and global catastrophes.

Hoffie’s major exhibition This Mess We’re In, was mounted by QUT Art Museum, Brisbane across 2023-2024. Professor Emeritus Pat Hoffie AM has been recognised for her contributions to the visual arts and to scholarship. pat-hoffie.com

Helen Johnson lives and works in Naarm, Melbourne. She was awarded a Doctorate in Fine Art from Monash University in 2014 and has since completed a Master of Art Therapy at LaTrobe University in 2023.

Johnson’s exhibition activity has reached across 15 countries, working across institutions as vital and varied as Hell Gallery in Melbourne to the Tate Modern in London.

Her recent paintings are made in a space located between her established studio and her nascent therapeutic practice where the processing the unconscious offers new ways to comprehend human subjectivity and social relations. Johnson’s long use of figuration to reposition social, political and historical subjects has shifted inwards and towards a practice of embodied, intuitive exploration.

Helen Johnson is represented by Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles and Pilar Corrias, London. helenjohnson.net

Jelena Telecki lives and works on the traditional lands of the Gadigal People, Sydney.

Telecki is interested in representations of the familial, the personal and the political. Recalling a childhood lived through the Yugoslav Wars, her paintings are figured with soldiers, nurses, family and dictators infused with transgression, absurdity and power. Telecki’s people often either dominate their pictorial frame or they inhabit murky, unknowable atmospheres.

Recent exhibitions include: Mothers, Fathers (2024), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Stupid As (2024) at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Free/State – Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (2022), Art Gallery of South Australia; the pleasurable, the illegible, the multiple, the mundane at Artspace, Sydney (2021)

Jelena Telecki is represented by 1301SW, Melbourne. jelenatelecki.com

Nicole Zhang lives and works on the traditional lands of the Gadigal People, Sydney. She was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Art with Honours from UNSW Art and Design in 2022.

Zhang’s practice centres on genre and figurative painting’s capacity to document the complexity of everyday life. Her work references the pictorial vernacular of modern and contemporary figurative painting. She uses recurring symbols and motifs, patterning and composition to depict both the mundane and the spiritual as conjured through the rhythms and syncopations of daily rites and actions.

Since graduation, Nicole Zhang’s paintings have been included in HATCHED, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) and was a 68th Blake Prize finalist at the Casula Power House, Sydney. More on her art practice can be found at @its.a.picnick