_The more I learn of the beauty and intricacy of this system the more I am overwhelmed both by how amazing it is and by how little we are doing to protect it. However, when I hear about people getting together to stand up for a gum tree in Bulleen, I think that maybe there is room for hope. _
—Patricia Piccinini
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery is delighted to present a highly anticipated solo exhibition with one of Australia's most acclaimed contemporary artists, Patricia Piccinini. The Gardener's Eye features an iconic hyper-realistic life-size sculpture, an assembly of smaller mechanical sculptures, her signature Panelworks, and a suite of drawings. Woven within this exhibition are new works that investigate the notions of nature and its relationship with the contemporary world. Her work reveals a deep awareness, both intellectual and sensory, of how people might re-imagine our relationship with nature. This exhibition describes both the resilience of the natural world and the seemingly dissonant fragility of this system as it interacts with the built environment. This new body of work continues the artist's long-term interest in the tensions between the natural and the artificial, the aesthetic and the deformed, and the familiar and the strange. With a note of hope, The Gardener's Eye represents fertility in the most expanded sense: life, abundance, diversity, fecundity, reproduction, and parenthood.
Patricia Piccinini (b. 1965, Freetown, Sierra Leone. Lives and works Melbourne, Australia) is one of Australia's most celebrated artists, she is best known for her mutant life-like creatures rendered in silicone and hair. Piccinini was Australia's representative at the 2003 Venice Biennale, her interdisciplinary practice encompasses digital photography, video, installation and sculpture. From the start of her career in the early 1990s, her work has combined the cute and the grotesque, pitting our impulse to nurture against our revulsion, and encouraging us to see the beauty of all created forms, however monstrous, deformed or artificial.
The most ambitious survey exhibition of work by Piccinini titled Curious Affection was held at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane in 2018. In 2016 Patricia Piccinini: Consciousness at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro was ranked the most visited contemporary art exhibition in the world with a record of 1.4 million visitors. In 2003 Piccinini represented Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale with her solo exhibition We are Family.
Piccinini has exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas. Recent notable solo exhibitions include A World of Love, Arken Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark (2019); Patricia Piccinini and Joy Hester: Through Love..., TarraWarra Museum of Art (2018); Curious Imaginings, Vancouver Biennale, Patricia Hotel, Canada (2018); Inter-natural, Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, USA (2018); Patricia Piccinini: Curious Affection, QAGOMA, Brisbane (2018); Patricia Piccinini: The Comforter, University of Michigan Museum of Art, USA (2018); Conscienceness, Kibla Portal, Slovenia (2017); The Struggle and the Dawn, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (2017); ComSciencia, CCBB Rio De Janiero, Brazil (2016); Patricia Piccinini, Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art, Taiwan (2016).
The Gardener's Eye will be Patricia Piccinini's tenth solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.
Press release courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.
8 Soudan Lane
Paddington, NSW
Sydney, 2021
Australia
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