Click for exhibition catalogue

Nick Santoro’s universe might be a strategy for figuring out the dimensions of capitalism. In an offhand way, the expression Libidinal Hymnal certainly suggests that. And it is a state the late punk thinker Mark Fisher proposed as a kind of entrapment: a political model that leaves little room to dream beyond its own consumptive desires. Acquisition and personal expression might be paramount, but it’s pretty fun right? And Santoro offers us a populated grab bag where outcasts and winners launch into speculative encounters in a slippery dimension between local realism and the internet realm. (For example, TESLA’s cybertruck confronts the Bindle Bros in a George Soros network of grey pipes located in youtube’s blind spots.)…Read more

In Aquacurl Power Station, Henry Jock Walker has stitched wetsuit material into abstractions that memorialise time spent in the ocean. The neoprene surfaces carry the weathering of their former use with a method that brings together pattern making and painting. In the studio you can see it: mounds of used wetsuits like discarded skins, collected by Walker in parallel with his mobile performance practice. The fabric is organised according to colour and texture, a kind of process integrated into a studio engagement. Read More here…

Featuring work by Aaron Fell-Fracasso, Julia Flanagan, India Mark, Georgia Spain, and Christopher Zanko.

Please view each artists works in seperate exhibition catalogues here…

Mignon Steele paints to understand painting. This paradox compels her to search for an unfamiliar arrangement of colour and mark, a shifting expanse. She feels these current works are a reflection of who we might be in the world right now, further apart yet tethered to home. Her “night drawings”, contained and delicate meanderings under lamplight, reveal this domestic tethering. The larger works in Nearer By Far are informed by these drawings. In the studio, Mignon further describes how her recent paintings “unfold like vines and stand up by themselves”. She plays painterly tricks to find something new, “edging up to it … catching a glimpse, losing it in the bushes”. She enacts surface disturbances to ensnare “ubiquitous pre-verbal shapes and voids that skulk from recognition”.

At the beginning of a new sequence there are always a few works kicking around with early potential before an emergent sensibility presents itself. An obliteration phase occurs then where previous work is cancelled through active methods of applying paint and rebuilding the surface. A partial clean ground might emerge, aiming for a state of potential with something promising coming through.

There is an essential searching quality in Mignon’s practice. This depth of experience is like walking along a well-known bush track but discovering new elements each time, ambient sounds, shifts in weather and moisture levels, always pushing away from the habitual. In a conversation about art, our resolutions stutter. Mignon wonders, “We’re not in nature asking it to explain itself”. There’s an unknowable element here, and discourse and writing can’t meet it.

Based in the Illawarra, Mignon Steele’s recent exhibitions include shows in Melbourne and Sydney. She shifts effortlessly from her well-established painting practice to work as a colourist and mural painter with design duo Barnacle Studios.

- Melody Willis

Please click here for exhibition catalogue

YOUR FUNNY MOODS investigates the layering of process and play of light in the works of Rob Howe and Gabrielle Adamik. Transparency, change and fluidity playing against solid/static form, process and observation. Each artist starts at opposite ends, with the works meeting here in the middle.

Exhibition Catalogue released Thursday 27 August. Click here…

The Egg & Dart presents new works by Nick Santoro at Melbourne Art Fair, Online Viewing Rooms.
June 3 - 7 2020 and February 2021

HOLDING PATTERN / TREADING WATER has been drawn from our Stockroom and showcases the strength of The Egg & Dart artists and associates. We thank them all for their contribution and helping shape what we present. The exhibition will evolve as the month passes.

In Georgia Spain’s painting our complex physical interconnection is explored through bodies in groupings. Each work touches at an instinctual engagement between people in crisis or communion. As figures emerge in the paint through gesture and layer, their dependence on one another is palpable. These are expressive bodies, human and animal, in relation.

Spain’s studio lies in the bush near Hobart, Tasmania. The Beginning in blue (left in red) paintings were made there during Australia’s most recent bushfire season. I found a clue to the show’s title on her studio wall: blue = known, red = the unknown. This seems both an observation on the puzzle of painting and a note on the shifting colour of a bushfire sky. Pinned to the studio wall are a few pictures documenting the recent fires. Read more…

Amy Cuneo’s subjects link us to essential and reassuring elements in our lives. Flowers, food, a window framing the sky, these are images that bind, as clearly as their colours shift under changing light. Her everyday assemblages weave with lived experience and the natural world. Begun in December 2019, the comforts of home are pictured here in their intimate objecthood. Cuneo’s colour is instinctive and wonderfully surprising. Tinted complementary pairings describe shadows cast by the moon. The shimmer and optical mixing connects her to the modernism of Pierre Bonnard but her acrylic painting is more planar. This leaves her gestures intact as she moves across surfaces.

Catalogue available. Read more…

Now & Then shows Frank Nowlan’s eclectic thinking through his distinctive painting style. Nowlan treads lightly with heavy subject matter, addressing attempted political assassinations and a series on a local bushranger gang. The straight presentation leads to a wry assessment of these encounters and their settings.

Frank Nowlan is always looking, whether at historical images or the work of other painters. For the current landscapes he is looking from a train window as it travels across the Nullarbor. He is also reinspecting his knowledge of events as a history teacher. This exhibition shows divergent interests but the title Now & Then reveals an absurdist’s approach to the repetitions of history.

In low light the eye preferences blue tones. Madeleine Peters latest show uses a phthalo blue to bring us into a dusky environment of indeterminate time. She presents paired images that contemplate human impacts on the landscape and the strange stories associated with them. Geological formations are used as substitutes for standard architecture – the cave is an opera house; the hill is a crypt. She continues her connection with the landscape around the Shipwreck coast in Victoria but this time follows leads on colonial stories.
Read more…

Julia Flanagan’s work is colour and shape colliding across painting and sculpture. Forms instinctively vibrate like a Broadway boogie-woogie. Her tightly packed paintings and constructions reference essential forms of architecture – the arch, the turret. Dazzle is her first solo show at the Egg & Dart, an opportunity to see the dynamic interaction between her paintings and cut out sculptures. Drawing pattern ideas from her own textile library, she multiplies and layers these up, working outward in a search for harmony in colour.