A Celebration of The Still

A Celebration of the Still brings together six Australian luminaries of contemporary still-life painting in a vibrant and varied paean to the genre’s enduring vitality and its power to instil even the simplest inanimate objects with life, storytelling, small moments of grace and meditations on the human experience.

Launching an exciting program of group exhibitions featuring some of Australia’s most important and celebrated contemporary artists, this beautifully curated collection presents exquisite, original works by India Mark, John Honeywill, Kaspar Kägi, Mirra Whale, David Bongiorno and David Griffith.

With their distinct styles, perspectives, and painterly approaches, these artists each engage with the ideas and themes that have captivated still-life painters for centuries while awakening the genre to fresh and dynamic possibilities. Their work represents a pure expression of that elusive magic sparked somewhere between the eye and the hand of the artist, where meticulous observation of an object’s form, colour and interaction with light is channelled through the creative mind and expressed with extraordinary skill and precision.

The elegant collection of florals, object studies and tablescapes that make up A Celebration of the Still reflects many of the classic tenets of still-life painting. Here, a profusion of delicately unfolding flowers and ripened fruit maps nature’s cycles of life and death onto the quieter, quotidian contours of the domestic sphere. But for all its storied lineage, still life’s attention to our ever-evolving material world lends the genre an inherent contemporaneity. The visionary artists assembled for our still-life showcase seem less weighed down by notions of mortality than in thrall to the joys of living, observing and creating.

For Mirra Whale, the elegiac quality of wilting magnolias – that most prehistoric of floral specimens, whose soft, crêpe-like petals melt from gnarled and craggy branches – is balanced by a fabulous sense of play as her fading subjects are given a second life by the dancing shadows cast by her studio’s cool light. John Honeywill’s paintings eschew narrative altogether, focusing instead on an object’s innate luminosity, spatial dynamics and the interplay between its physical presence and the artist’s perception. Kaspar Kägi’s flowers and fruit come flickering into view through a soft, pointillistic haze, drawing attention to his medium’s mechanics and materiality as fine, aggregated strokes coalesce on a flat pictorial plane and imbue the ephemeral with an elegant gravitas.

Each artist delights in the potential for still life to freeze a fleeting moment of beauty and quietude. Celebrating the alchemy of things artfully arranged, serendipitously set together, or appearing quite inexplicably like tiny theatres amid the din of the every day, they share their affinities and offer snippets of refracted autobiography through the objects they choose to immortalise. A Celebration of the Still invites us to take a closer look at the objects that furnish our domestic lives while delighting in the quiet power and visual poetry of these petite and perfectly formed paintings.

“For the viewer, the artist’s visual language might evoke a jolting memory – an object acting as a portal to another place or time. It might allow a beautiful, quiet moment in which to rest one’s eyes in the midst of an otherwise frenzied life. It might be the unidentifiable atmosphere suggested in its rendering of a subject … still life offers to us a subjective glimpse into our very existence.” – Amber Creswell Bell, Still Life, 2021.

All works from the exhibition are available to view and acquire at the gallery and online. To discuss works from the exhibition, please email southernhighlands@michaelreid.com.au