9 August – 21 September 2024
Despard Gallery is proud to share that contemporary painters Jo Chew and Sam Field will be presenting work in the exhibition Figure Holding Ground, hosted by Contemporary Arts Tasmania.
Curated by Fernando do Campo and Michael Edwards, Figure Holding Ground brings together nine Australian artist whose practice explore the boundaries of figuration in contemporary painting. Figure Holding Ground brings together leading artists who are refashioning the genre of figuration through the adoption of innovative painting approaches. The exhibition seeks to contrast the multiple ways that each artist is pushing the speculative possibilities of figurative painting, including its capacity to challenge expectations, tell stories, ask critical questions and offer original contributions to current socio-political conversations.
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. 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.
Click here for more information.
Jo Chew’s practice investigates how the painted collage can question social attitudes around the modern occupation of the landscape, including the use of dwellings as a metaphor for how the human condition makes us long for connection and a sense of place.
Sam Field’s current practice explores the many bizarre events steering today’s social trajectory. With a naive aesthetic that is distinctively raw and often restless, Field’s work maps a growing sense of global and domestic uncertainty. Strewn with religious symbology and mythological icons, Field describes a world seemingly hypnotised by religious fanaticism, ultra-capitalism and conspiracy theories.
Jo Chew will be presenting a solo exhibition with Despard Gallery, opening 18 September 2024.