UPCOMING: Deborah Klein: Rückenfigur
‘I like a view, but I like to sit with my back turned to it.’ Gertrude Stein 1874-1946
“The representation of the feminine personae has long been a subject of art history. The female visage has featured in various depictions in this history – obscured, averted, deformed, glorified, domesticised, dehumanised. In her latest exhibition, artist Deborah Klein builds on this artistic canon of the feminine, offering us the idea of Rückenfigur – “the figure seen from behind”.
Weaving together sewing iconography derived primarily from handmade doilies inherited from her late Aunt Eileen, and motifs of knots and braids, Klein stitches together a story that is as complex as the knots that she depicts; a story of the perpetual outsider where our current state of disconnection – from ourselves, each other and the natural world – is rendered palpable.”
Deborah Klein is a Ballarat based artist whose body of work includes paintings, drawings, prints, artist books and applied sculptures. In the over forty years that she has been practising, she has presented in regular solo and group exhibitions in both Australia and internationally. Hidden histories and ideas related to the elusive nature of the feminine personae are central to Klein’s work.
Deborah Klein grew up in St. Kilda in Victoria. She lived and worked in London during much of the 1970s.
Since 1987 she has held regular solo exhibitions and has been included in numerous curated exhibitions in Australia and overseas.
Exhibition dates: Jun 23 – Jul 17, 2022
Join us: Sun Jun 26, 2022 from 2pm – 4pm
Event information
Exhibition preview
CURRENT: Carolyn Graham & Lucinda Tanner
Synchronicity – perhaps of place, perhaps of time – connects Lucinda Tanner’s and Carolyn Graham’s latest bodies of work. Tanner’s most recent prints have emerged from walks through her local forest, where she spent time reflecting on ideas of caring – who cares? What is cared for? What is the value of care? Marbled ink flows around woodcut leaves, intertwining and connecting in multi-process, multicolour works that signify the combinations and collaborations in which we require each other.
Graham’s predominantly hand printed animals and birds sit quietly, but not passively, alongside these connective webs. Bears, hares and cassowaries stand proudly in Graham’s lino and woodcuts, inviting us to marvel at their natural beauty. In her portrait-like depictions of animals and birds, Graham captures a rare moment of stillness. Shortly, we expect to see her creatures rummaging through or flying above environments not dissimilar to those created by Tanner.
Exhibition dates: May 26 – Jun 20, 2022
Exhibition online
Virtual tour
QG Present Susan Wald’s Mungo at fortyfivedownstairs
Those familiar with Mungo will know that it is a place of discovery. Home to the oldest skeletons ever found in Australia, it is also a place of history and transformation, a national park infused with the beauty and pain of Australia’s first people and their stories. It is both a burial site and museum, a natural wonder and record of a moment in time that we look to to make sense of our time.
Named after this sacred piece of land, Susan Wald’s latest body of work records her personal feelings and responses to Mungo. Her monochromatic monotypes, sometimes coloured with ochres, browns and mauves, along with her paintings, are monumental in presence – the low vantage point from which Wald paints and prints making Mungo’s Mars-like terrain of sand and mud pinnacles seem larger than life itself. Somehow, with just a plate and some ink, with just a palette of paint, Wald both captures the historical gravitas of a place that marks the beginning of the Australian landscape and its people whilst also foreshadowing its dry, desolate and barren end.
As Christopher Heathcote notes, “there is no way to discuss [Susan Wald’s paintings and drawings] without confronting a genuine psychological weight.”
Exhibition dates:19th – 30 July
Official opening: Jul 19, 2022 from 6pm – 8pm
Location: fortyfivedownstairs 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, 3000
