22 – 25 February 2024
BOOTH H1
Despard Gallery is thrilled to be returning to the Melbourne Art Fair for 2024, hosting a solo exhibition by early career Tasmanian artist Sam Field.
Acknowledged as Australia’s longest running art fair, the Melbourne Art Fair (MAF) has built a reputation around stimulating significant critical and commercial success for contemporary artists and galleries nationally. Carefully curated down to only the most respected galleries, MAF is regarded as a key innovative platform to view iconic works of art by Australia’s leading contemporary practitioners.
The Back Of My Own Head sees Sam Field return to his poignant examination of human fallibility and the hardened, and sometimes questionable, characteristics steering todays social trajectory. With a bold aesthetic that is distinctively vibrant and restless, Field’s new body of 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. From exiled couples and religious effigies, to fabled figures and mythological creatures, Field conjures unexpected encounters, connecting history with proverb, nature with the manmade, past and future. Each composition becomes a powerful blend of playful and solemn, naive and cynical, and despite often charged with dry humour, they never shy away from uncomfortable truths. This includes critiquing the many cultural narratives that underpin contemporary Australia, unpicking the fabric of recorded history by subverting the narratives of colonialism and its merciless cycle of expansion, expulsion and occupancy.
Click here to register your interest for Sam Field at Melbourne Art Fair.
