Benjamin Armstrong made his Tolarno debut in 2008 and was lauded by critic Sebastian Smee as "the most dazzling show of the new gallery season... among the strangest, most beguiling works of art produced in Australia in the past 10 years."
Significant recognition followed swiftly thereafter, with invitations to show as part of NEW 09 at ACCA and New Acquisitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2009); Adelaide Biennial (2010); Melbourne Now at National Gallery of Victoria (2013) and Biennale of Sydney (2014).
International galleries also beckoned, with showings in Rome, Beijing, Gwangju and New York. Acquisitions came from the British Museum, London, Monash University Museum of Art, University of Queensland Art Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, MCA Sydney, Art Gallery of South Australia and Art Gallery of Western Australia.
Just this year, Armstrong's 2008 linocut series The shape of things to come was included in and inspired the title of the inaugural exhibition at the newly opened Buxton Contemporary in Melbourne. So it is with great anticipation that Benjamin Armstrong returns with his first solo exhibition since the sculpture and drawings included in Conjurers at Tolarno in 2012.
Invisible Stories: Meditations on Port Essington is Armstrong's new series of linocut prints - an intense, complex and highly nuanced sequence of imagery. The work relates to the Australian historian and multi-award winning author Mark McKenna's book From the Edge: Australia's Lost Histories (2016). McKenna's book explores the central drama of Australian history: the encounter between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.
From this account Armstrong's imagination lit up with visions of scenes that began to take hold...
Benjamin Armstrong’s glass and wax sculptures slide between the homely and the uncanny. Writing about Conflict (Monash University Collection), 'in which a pair of eyeballs shaped from wax sit at the edge of an egg shaped table top supported by impossibly thin legs', Dr Kyla McFarlane noted that Armstrong triggers both an emotional and intellectual response in viewers … an ‘involuntary physical shudder of horror and delight registers deep in our own bodies’. Dr Kyla McFarlane, Swells and Shudders, Before the body - Matter 2006
Tolarno Galleries has been at the cutting edge of contemporary Australian art for many years. Four artists have represented Australia at the Venice Biennale and the exhibition program attracts the attention of collectors, curators and critics from around the globe.
