ADRIENNE GAHA | ARCADIA | 15 OCTOBER - 8 NOVEMBER 2020

© Martin Browne Contemporary © All images copyright Adrienne Gaha This catalogue is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission.

COMPILER: Ally Russell-Floyd PHOTOGRAPHER: Geoff Boccalatte COLOUR SEPARATIONS: Spitting Image, Sydney Cover Image: Bacchus (after Velazquez), 2020, oil on linen, 110 x 100 cm

ADRIENNE GAHA Arcadia 15 October - 8 November 2020

MARTIN BROWNE CONTEMPORARY 15 HAMPDEN STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021 TEL: 02 9331 7997 FAX: 02 9331 7050 info@martinbrownecontemporary.com www.martinbrownecontemporary.com GALLERY HOURS: TUESDAY - SUNDAY 10:30AM - 6PM

ADRIENNE GAHA Arcadia I first encountered Adrienne’s work as a young curator at the NGV. We had purchased three huge charcoal figure drawings through the Michell Endowment for contemporary art, and my colleague Ted Gott included them in his brilliant exhibition, Backlash: the Australian drawing revival in 1986. They were unforgettable. I didn’t know at first whether they were of naked flesh or bronze, but then I learned that they’re based on close-up photographs of a fascistic 1920s neo-classical statue that Adrienne had taken in Düsseldorf. To me, they combined her total awareness of the newest art—the European transavantgarde of the ’80s—with traditional centuries-old dedication to technical perfection.

She’s a fabulous draughtsman.

The ever-present push and pull, exploration and play, between old and new is absolutely compelling in Adrienne’s art.

While the draughtsmanship I so admired in her early drawings is still there, her oil paintings are subsumed in veils of colour. They’re exquisitely beautiful, emotionally powerful, often dreamlike. She suggests narratives but never allows them to hold a course.

Adrienne’s painting process reveals itself in these works in a way that seems quite performative: at once controlled and risking everything (I believe she trained in modern dance, and I imagine her moving in the studio like a dancer).

She combines glazes and solvents with passages of impasto, working with rags as well as brushes, so that images emerge and yet remain ungraspable. The paintings function as portals into a timeless, beguiling other-world of liquid light and colour.

I’m an art historian-curator at heart, and I just love the way Adrienne takes elements from historical paintings—usually by male artists—and makes them her own. Sometimes she declares her sources: Diana and her black servant, in close embrace, are lifted out of Titian’s narrative into a semi-abstraction of luscious flesh and watery tropics; Echo is taken from John William Waterhouse, who had taken her in turn from Ovid. Elsewhere, observed realities—intimate glimpses of a family lunch or a holiday walk in the park—are made surreal. Adrienne is very much an artist-citizen-ofthe-world in both time and space. Her paintings can be situated in a direct line of descent from the Old Masters (including the female Old Masters who managed successful professional careers while raising a family). And yet they are utterly contemporary. The way they evoke universally human emotions through colour and dreamlike mise-en-scènes is extraordinary.

To me, Adrienne’s paintings are a reminder of the oneness of everything. The way landscapes and people, animals, trees and vines, water and air, past and present are dissolved together seems to me a potent reflection of the new Earth System Science. This transdisciplinary approach sees Earth as one single, complex, adaptive system driven by constant interactions and feedback loops between energy, matter and living organisms. We know, but we need to really feel, that human activities have increasingly destabilised this system over the last two hundred years or so. We need to cherish that oneness and we ignore it at our peril.

Jane Clark

LIST OF WORKS Handmaiden [after Titian], 2020, oil on linen, 123 x 97 cm Echo (after Waterhouse), 2020, oil on linen, 110 x 100 cm Bosque de Chapultepec, 2020, oil on linen,168 x 122.5 cm Broken Swing (after Fragonard), 2020, oil on linen, 136 x 111 cm Orpheus (after Hans-Beu), 2020, oil on linen, 153 x 117 cm Lion Hunt (after Vernet), 2020, oil on linen, 141 x 135 cm Alizarin Landscape, 2020, oil on linen, 102 x 130 cm Oriental 2, 2020, oil on linen, 152.5 cm x 109.5 cm Shade, Borghese gardens, 2020, oil on linen, 95 x 88 cm Venus yellow, 2020, oil on linen, 102 x 92 cm Water and Shade, 2020, oil on linen, 91 x 86 cm Albert Park, 2020, oil on linen, 153 x 110 cm Good Fairies 2, 2020, oil on linen, 168 x 153 cm Monstera [yellow}, 2020, oil on linen, 153 x 113 cm Bacchus (after Velazquez), 2020, oil on linen, 110 x 100 cm

Handmaiden [after Titian], 2020, oil on linen, 123 x 97 cm

Echo (after Waterhouse), 2020, oil on linen, 110 x 100 cm

Bosque de Chapultepec, 2020, oil on linen,168 x 122.5 cm

Broken Swing (after Fragonard), 2020, oil on linen, 136 x 111 cm

Orpheus (after Hans-Beu), 2020, oil on linen, 153 x 117 cm

Lion Hunt (after Vernet), 2020, oil on linen, 141 x 135 cm

Alizarin Landscape, 2020, oil on linen, 102 x 130 cm

Oriental 2, 2020, oil on linen, 152.5 cm x 109.5 cm

Shade, Borghese gardens, 2020, oil on linen, 95 x 88 cm

Venus yellow, 2020, oil on linen, 102 x 92 cm

Water and Shade, 2020, oil on linen, 91 x 86 cm

Albert Park, 2020, oil on linen, 153 x 110 cm

Good Fairies 2, 2020, oil on linen, 168 x 153 cm

Monstera [yellow}, 2020, oil on linen, 153 x 113 cm

Bacchus (after Velazquez), 2020, oil on linen, 110 x 100 cm

ADRIENNE GAHA Born Sydney, Australia Lives and works in Australia and the UK SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

COLLECTIONS

ArtBank 2020 Arcadia, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney National Gallery of Victoria 2018 Recent Work, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney Art Gallery of Western Australia 2016 Recent Work, Kalli Rolfe Contemporary at Neon Park, Melbourne Monash University Museum of Art 2016 Snake dance, Greenwood Street Projects, Melbourne University of Tasmania 2014 Vestiges, Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Sofitel Melbourne on Collins Private & Corporate collection in Australia, 2013 New Paintings, Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney France, UK & USA 2009 Recent works, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne 2006 London Paintings & Drawings, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne 2006 Recent Works (with Brooke Fitzsimmons), Hewer Street Studios, London 2004 Recent Works (with Brooke Fitzsimmons), Hewer Street Studios, London 1999 Recent Drawings, Mori Gallery, Sydney 1998 Drawings & Photographs, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne 1994 Adrienne Gaha, The Merchants House of the National Trust, Sydney 1993 Recent Work, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne 1990 A Merchant Sailors Gift, Chameleon, Hobart (Artist in Residence that year) 1990 The Camels Hump, Mori Gallery, Sydney 1987 The Crossing, First Draft Gallery, Sydney 1986 Cockles and Muscles, Mori Gallery, Sydney SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2019 Spring 1883, Kalli Rolfe Contemporary, Sydney 2019 Side by Side, 2 person show, Piers Feetham Gallery, London, UK 2019 Auckland Art Fair, Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Auckland, New Zealand 2018 Couplings, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney 2018 All We Can’t See, Yellow House, Sydney 2018 Condo, Mexico City 2018 Spring 1883, Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2017 10, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney 2017 Sydney Contemporary, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney 2017 Spring 1883, Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Sydney 2016 Spring 1883, Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2015 Spring 1883, Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Sydney 2015 Grace Cossington Smith Painting Award Exhibition 2014 Spring 1883, Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2014 Grace Cossington Smith Painting Award Exhibition 2014 Geelong Contemporary Painting Prize Exhibition 2002 Sweet Spot, Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne 2002 Savill Contemporary, Savill Galleries, Melbourne 2002 The Human Portrayed, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne 2001 Male Nude: A Private View, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne 1998 Erotic, Melbourne Fine Art Gallery 1998 Spring Exhibition, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne 1998 Australian Contemporary Art Fair, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne