17 September – 11 October 2025
OPENING EVENT Friday 19 September 5:30 pm
Despard Gallery is proud to announce Abstraction 3, featuring new work by four leading contemporary artists. Now in its third iteration, Despard Gallery’s Abstraction exhibition series celebrates the importance of unencumbered creative expression within art, showcasing new work by Anthea Boden, Julia Castiglioni Bradshaw, Julienne Harris and Ian Parry.
Within their practice each artist embraces the freedom and independence that is offered through the visual language of abstraction, where intuition and fortuity equally inform their creative directions. With a broad range of aesthetic styles and processes, each artist is connected by a firm commitment to explore the endless possibilities of paint and its unique ability to capture new modes of self-expression.
Behind this exploration of materials, techniques and expression, is a desire to answer to their immediate environment. Here, gesture, movement and form take on more than a representation of place, but instead becomes a complex account of all the unseen elements that define its significance.
Overall, the exhibition demonstrates how abstraction remains a critical form of contemporary communication, helping to share complex feelings, enigmatic ideas and deeper personal meanings.
Click here to register interest for Abstraction.
Anthea Boden is an established Tasmanian artist with a professional career spanning over three decades. Her mixed media paintings often reference conventional objects, such as boats, drinking vessels and baskets, symbolising a tether that links our modern and ancient worlds, as well as understanding and human purpose.
Julia Castiglioni Bradshaw is a contemporary artist currently based in Sydney, New South Wales. Her intuitive based paintings are inspired by native flora and the inherent abstract qualities that characterise the natural world, echoing our environmental systems, where loose painterly marks suggesting both a sense of pattern and entropy.
Julienne Harris is a contemporary artist based in Blackheath, New South Wales. Harris’ practice explores how paint can become a visual language, using its trace and natural fluidity to visualise memory and knowledge. Embracing the freedom of abstraction, each painting becomes an archive of creative exploration, manifest across a surface that appears to dissolve and resynthesise simultaneously.
Ian Parry is an established Tasmanian artist based in Gardners Bay, Tasmania, with a professional career spanning nearly forty years. Parry’s work is defined by his commitment to explore the rituals, processes and techniques that underpin the aesthetics of the painted image. Through multiple layers of glazes and scumbles, each painting appears to exude its own light, which continues to rise and fall in intensity.
