Pat Brassington is one of Australia’s most highly respected and influential artists working in photo-media. Through her ongoing practice, informed by Surrealism, Brassington’s work delves into the uncanny and the provocative effect ambiguity has on interpretation. Seemingly innocent, her images open up like a flower, gorgeous and dreamlike, then morph into a psychological Rorschach. In her work the endless possibilities of our complex inner states - narratives of sex, memory and identity - run quietly rampant. Brassington’s work is provocatively ambiguous, an arresting beauty underscoring its superbly loaded connotations.
Read MoreIn 2013 Brassington won the prestigious Monash Gallery of Art Bowness Photography Prize and was included in the NEW13 exhibition of selected recent acquisitions at the University of Queensland Art Museum. In 2012 the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s major survey exhibition of Brassington’s work, Pat Brassington: A Rebours, continues to tour around Australia and New Zealand and concludes later in 2014. Brassington’s work has also featured extensively in major exhibitions, including the Adelaide Biennial: Parallel Collisions (2012); Feminism Never Happened at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2010); the Biennale of Sydney (2004); World Without End - Photography and the 20th Century at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2000) and Fotokunst Aus Australien, Berlin (2000), curated by Bernice Murphy. Selected solo exhibitions include: Pat Brassington, Ten Cubed, Melbourne (2014); In Search of the Marvellous at CAST Gallery, Hobart (2013); a survey exhibition at the Lonnstrom Art Museum, Finland (2008); Pat Brassington at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2007); a major solo retrospective at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne (2002) and Gentle at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2001).
Pat Brassington’s work is held in many public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Queensland Art Gallery; National Gallery of Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart; ArtBank, Sydney; Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne; Cologne Museum of Contemporary Art, Germany; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; Murdoch University, W.A.; Devonport Art Gallery, Tasmania; University of the Northern Territory, Darwin and La Trobe University Art Collection, Melbourne.
