Two Rooms
Sydney Contemporary 2019

Two Rooms showcases the work of five eminent women artists, Gretchen Albrecht, Anne Noble, Jude Rae, Elizabeth Thomson and Robin White, all who have recently secured commercial and critical achievements both within New Zealand and abroad. The artists are diverse in their media of choice, with Albrecht producing large scale abstract painting, Rae presenting new still life painting, White creating traditional Pacific art forms on masi, Noble and Thomson working in photographic series and installation art. Their approach to their practice is an accumulation of visual and physical sensations resulting in artwork that examines the effects of bodily presence, movement, space and colour.

Anne Noble’s contribution to the Sydney Art Fair are 4 long scroll-like, beautifully elegiac photograms of bee wings. Reiterating her ongoing fascination with bees, and her concern with their declining global numbers, Noble’s images encourage the viewer to rethink how they perceive the natural world, and how they respond to it.

Robin White will present a wholly unique, large-scale, painted masi that will be completed in Fiji in August 2019. Furthering such pictorial concerns, Robin White’s painted drawing on such an ambitious scale offers a hybrid mix of historical and contemporary iconography, patterns and references that range from the Pacific to Western Europe and the Middle East. She honours tradition but explores current political issues, taking on the familiar framework of the unstretched painting to produce work that has a strong spatial treatment and a philosophical/social and ecological equilibrium.

Gretchen Albrecht exhibits a new previously unseen work which pays homage to gestural abstraction. Albrecht continues to be one of very few New Zealand artists working on a large scale and in a wholly abstract language of paint. Albrecht’s approach to painting involves “a ‘felt response’ to the world.” Good painting according to Albrecht, involves “the body as well as the mind,” which is born out in her work where vigorous physical involvement is evident.

Jude Rae applies a rigorous process of analysis, assembly and configuration in her painting. She demonstrates a high level of control of the medium as she challenges the conventions of still life, playing with scale, density, proportion and surface. Her practice of incorporating unconventional imagery allows the viewer to dwell on the formal and material aspects of representational painting, encouraging a more reflective and considered approach to the complexities of visual experience.

Elizabeth Thomson has developed a remarkable ouevre working across large scale installations and exquisitely crafted small sculptural works that explore the complex visual interplay between art and science. Specifically referencing biology and physics, Thomson’s work investigates the representation of scientific knowledge through her work with the languages of pattern and abstraction. She will be installing as many as 75 bronze moths individually painted and flocked above a large singular white artwork.