Julie Rrap has been a major figure in Australian contemporary art for over three decades. Since the mid-1970s, she has worked with photography, painting, sculpture, performance and video in an ongoing project concerned with representations of the body. She has responded to studies on the development of cancer cells by creating moulds of her breasts using frozen milk, and then photographing her breasts and placing the frozen moulds on top of those images. This is an example of her exploration of the relationship between science and art, and how, from her position as an artist, she can bring to our attention serious medical issues.
In 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney held a major retrospective of Rrap’s work titled, Body Double (curated by Victoria Lynn), and in 2011 the Lismore Regional Gallery held a solo show of her work, titled Julie Rrap: Off Balance. Rrap was included in the Australian Show (1988) which toured to the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany and major museums in Japan. Other significant group exhibitions include Systems End: Contemporary Art in Australia, which toured Japan and Korea in 1996; Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968 – 2002 at the National Gallery of Victoria (2002), Turbulence: the 3rd Auckland Triennial, Auckland, and Revolutions – Forms That Turn, the 2008 Biennale of Sydney (curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev).
Julie Rrap’s work is held in every major public collection as well as many corporate and private collections. Rrap was selected for the prestigious Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National Gallery of Victoria in September 2009.
She has won the Hermann's Art Award for her photograph Overstepping in 2001, the Redlands Art prize for a combined sculpture and photographic work in 2008 and the University of Queensland National Artists’ Self-Portrait Prize for her video work, 360 Degree Self-Portrait, in 2009.
