PATRICIA PICCININI

—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 worksthat investigate the notions of nature and its relationship with thecontemporary world. Her work reveals a deep awareness, both intellectualand sensory, of how people might re-imagine our relationship withnature. This exhibition describes both the resilience of the naturalworld and the seemingly dissonant fragility of this system as itinteracts with the built environment. This new body of work continuesthe artist’s long-term interest in the tensions between the natural andthe artificial, the aesthetic and the deformed, and the familiar and thestrange. 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 celebratedartists, she is best known for her mutant life-like creatures renderedin silicone and hair. Piccinini was Australia’s representative at the2003 Venice Biennale, her interdisciplinary practice encompasses digitalphotography, video, installation and sculpture. From the start of hercareer in the early 1990s, her work has combined the cute and thegrotesque, pitting our impulse to nurture against our revulsion, andencouraging us to see the beauty of all created forms, howevermonstrous, 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 mostvisited contemporary art exhibition in the world with a record of 1.4million 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.