Pat Brassington – News
PAT BRASSINGTON in VERSUS RODIN: BODIES ACROSS SPACE AND TIME
4 March – 2 July 2017
Art Gallery of South Australia
Coinciding with the centenary of the great French sculptor’s death, Versus Rodin includes over 60 modern and contemporary artists whose works will be brought into a vivid conversation with the works of Auguste Rodin.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON in MAD LOVE
6 June – 1 September 2017
Arndt Art Agency (A3), Berlin, Germany
"mad love" is part of the Australia-Germany bi-lateral cultural initiative Australia Now 2017, supported by the Australian Government.
This group exhibition provides a contemporary image of current Australian art within the context of Germany and Europe. Curated by leading Australian artist Del Kathryn Barton, this group show features eight Australian visual artists who engage with ideas surrounding instinct, innate urges and the corporeal.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON THE BODY ELECTRIC
19 August 2017 – 11 February 2018
Art Gallery of New South Wales
This exhibition from the Gallery’s collection considers the haunting presence of the body in Brassington’s photographs and her particular use of visceral and allegorical imagery.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON in MCA COLLECTION: TODAY TOMORROW YESTERDAY
Musuem of Contemporary Art
Australia, Sydney NSW
Drawn entirely from the Museum’s Collection, Today Tomorrow Yesterday considers the impact of the past and the influence of history on artistic practice today.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON in ‘The Waiting Room’
12 May – 6 August
Artbank, NSW
People watching, window shopping, magazine browsing, Facebook updating are just some of the ‘involvement shields’ we erect to maintain solitude while waiting.
The Waiting Room
reflects on time, memory and desire to draw attention to the way we understand and perform this taken-for-granted facet of everyday life.
Image: © Pat Brassington
RECENT ACQUISITION
Stills is delighted to announce the recent acquisition of Pat Brassington’s The Branching (2015) by Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Image: © Pat Brassington
WINNER
2016 REDLANDS KONICA MINOLTA ART PRIZE
Stills is delighted to congratulate Pat Brassington on winning the 216 Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize. The judges for this year's Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize – John Kaldor AM, Judith Blackall (NAS Gallery curator) and Mark Harpley and Fabian Byrne (Visual Art Department, Redlands School) - decided unanimously to award Pat Brassington the $25,00 established artist category prize.
Pat Brassington is on of Australia's most respected and influential artists, revered for her photography and digital media works of art. Since the mid 1980s when her work came to prominence, Brassington has continued to surprise and beguile audiences with images that are pitched, in her words, 'just of the verge of normality, into those dense patches where the commonplace goes awry.'
Brassington’s winning work Pair Bonding (2015) is a playful visual montage composed of three elements - a face, a shirt and a bench-top with pear. In writing about the work, Brassington says
I utilise combinations when I discover elements that interact in strange ways in my 'minds eye'. Here, the compression of space may have something to do with my fascination.
Mark Harpley, Head of Visual Arts Redlands School says
The striking imagery seen in Pair Bonding, like much of Brassington's practice, reflects her astute understanding of digital media and her mastery of composition. The dream like quality of the image challenges the audience's perception of reality…
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON in ‘PUBLIC IMAGE, PRIVATE LIVES: FAMILY, FRIENDS and SELF in PHOTOGRAPHY’
5 February – 3 July 2016
Art Gallery of South Australia, SA
This exhibition highlights the often close connections between the photographer and subject, whether they be friends, family members or the photographers themselves.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON À REBOURS
28 November – 10 April 2016
UQ Art Museum, QLD
This a major survey of one of Australia's most important and influential photo-based artists demonstrates Brassington as one of the first artists to recognise the potential of the digital format which she has used it to create an enormous body of work over the last 30 years.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON in 'LURID BEAUTY'
9 October 2015 – 31 January 2016
National Gallery of Victoria, VIC
Pat Brassington is included in 'Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes'. This exhibition juxtaposes historical and contemporary works. Artists include Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, and James Gleeson.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON À REBOURS
6 June – 19 July 2015
Western Plains Cultural Centre, NSW
This a major survey of one of Australia's most important and influential photo-based artists demonstrates Brassington as one of the first artists to recognise the potential of the digital format which she has used it to create an enormous body of work over the last 30 years.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON: THE BRASSINGTON AFFAIR
1 – 31 August 2014
Plimsoll Gallery, TAS
This exhibition is a celebration of Pat Brassington's long association with the Tasmanian School of Art (now the Tasmanian College of the Arts), including an installation of her 2002 series Fragments of/from Memory.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON in DANGER WILL ROBINSON!
27 June – 29 June 2014
Airspace Projects, NSW
This unofficial satellite exhibition coincides with the final days of the Dr Andrew Frost curated show 'Conquest of Space: Science Fiction and Contemporary Art' at UNSW Galleries. Pat Brassington is represented by Fresh Fruit (2006).
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON & POLIXENI PAPAPETROU in SEVENTH SKIN
18 June – 2 August 2014
Hatch Contemporary Art Space, VIC
'Seventh Skin' features artists who play with makeup, costume, adornment and theatre in art to explore themes of identity/disguise, gender and culture. Other participating artists include Shaun Gladwell, Christian Thompson and Anne Zahalka.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON À REBOURS
30 May – 14 September 2014
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, TAS
À Rebours' is a major survey of one of Australia’s most important and influential photo-based artists, bringing together significant works from Brassington’s thirty-year career. Brassington was one of the first artists to recognise the potential of digital photography, all the while referencing the tradition of surrealist photogrpahy.
This touring exhibition curated by Juliana Engberg was first shown as part of ACCA’s ‘Influential Australian Artist Series’, which celebrates the works of artists who have made a significant contribution to the history of Australian art practice.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON À REBOURS
1 March – 27 April 2014
Horsham Regional Art Gallery, VIC
À Rebours' is a major survey of one of Australia’s most important and influential photo-based artists, bringing together significant works from Brassington’s thirty-year career. Brassington was one of the first artists to recognise the potential of digital photography, all the while referencing the tradition of surrealist photogrpahy.
This touring exhibition curated by Juliana Engberg was first shown as part of ACCA’s ‘Influential Australian Artist Series’, which celebrates the works of artists who have made a significant contribution to the history of Australian art practice.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON ARTWORKS ACQUIRED BY ART GALLERY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA
The Art Gallery of Western Australia has recently acquired a selection of Pat Brassington’s artworks, ranging from her early black and white works to her later large-scale pigment prints. Brassington’s works are also in the University of Western Australia art collection.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON in ‘MCA COLLECTION: NEW ACQUISITIONS IN CONTEXT 2013’
12 December 2013 – 23 February 2014
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, NSW
Pat Brassington’s artworks The Wedding Guest, Rocket, Topography in Pink, and Crush (all 2005) will be included in this exhibition which continues the tradition of exhibiting recently acquired works in dialogue with existing artworks from the MCA Collection and JW Power Collection. ‘New Acquisitions on Context’ will feature the work of over 28 emerging and established artists from across the country, celebrating the diversity of art making in Australia.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON, MARK KIMBER & WILLIAM YANG in IMAGES FOR LIFE FORCE 2013
17 November 2013, 3-6pm
Stills Gallery, Paddington
Life Force Cancer Foundation will fold their annual fundraising event for 2013 at Stills Gallery. Donated works by artists such as Pat Brassington, Mark Kimber and William Yang are up for auction, which will be conducted by well known art auctioneer Andrew Shapiro. All proceeds go to the Life Force Cancer Foundation, a not-for-profit charity providing emotional and psychological support to people dealing with the experience of cancer.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON WINS the 2013 BOWNESS PHOTOGRAPHY PRIZE
4 October – 3 November 2013
Monash Gallery of Art, VIC
Congratulations to one of Australia’s most celebrated artists, Pat Brassington, who has won Australia’s most prestigious photography prize, the $25 000 Bowness Photography Prize.
The Hon Heidi Victoria MP, Minister for the Arts announced Brassington as the winner of the Bowness Photography Prize at a cocktail party at Monash Gallery of Art on Thursday 3 October 2013.
Pat Brassington‘s winning photograph Shadow Boxer, 2013 from the series Quill is a visually striking, strange and contradictory picture. Typical of the artist’s work, the monochromatic image brings together a series of fragments that create a strange and ambiguous world.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON ARTIST TALK, ART GALLERY of NSW
25 September, 2013 @ 6:00pm
Centenary Auditorium, Art Gallery of NSW
Pat Brassington is invited to talk at the Art Gallery of NSW as part of the Photography talks series.
One of Australia's foremost photo-based artists, Pat Brassington has been exhibited and collected extensively in Australia and overseas for the past 20 years. Deeply informed by surrealism and psychoanalysis, Brassington's practice is also influenced by contemporary art and black-and-white cinema.
Brassington's talk is one of the event highlights of Party After Hours! Celebrate 10 years, a special night to celebrate 10 years of Art After Hours at the Art Gallery of NSW.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON 'IN SEARCH OF THE MARVELLOUS'
30 August – 6 October 2013
CAST, TAS
With 'In search of the marvellous', Pat Brassington has mined her personal archive and revisited images that were either unfinished or unsatisfactorily resolved. Across her career, her oeuvre has consistently delved in ideas associated with Surrealism: dreams, psychoanalysis, the uncanny, sexuality, and the abject. In this context, the marvellous is an enchanted and unexpected encounter when the ordinary suddenly becomes extraordinary. Using both her own and found photographic source material, her often strange juxtapositions are worked and reworked into a state of ‘unresolve’ where any meaning or intention in an image can never be fully grasped and only ever be 'sensed'.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON ‘À REBOURS’
1 June - 18 August 2013
Australian Centre for Photography, NSW
'À Rebours' is a major survey of one of Australia’s most important and influential photo-based artists, bringing together significant works from Pat Brassington’s thirty-year career.
Brassington was one of the first artists to recognise the potential of digital photography, all the while referencing the tradition of surrealist photography.
Her body of work is hauntingly beautiful, deeply psychological and sometimes disturbing. Recurring motifs usually include interior and domestic spaces and strange bodily mutations that take place within the human, predominantly female, form.
The exhibition was first shown as part of ACCA’s ‘Influential Australian Artist Series’, which celebrates the works of artists who have made a significant contribution to the history of Australian art practice.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON in 'LOUISE BOURGEOIS AND AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS'
13 October 2012 to 14 April 2013
Heide Museum of Modern Art, VIC
This exhibition looks at relationships, both real and imagined, between the art of renowned French-American artist and sculptor Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) and that of ten Australian artists. Bourgeois has been influential in using the abstract human body as a vehicle for self-expression. Other Australian artists included in the exhibition are Del Kathryn Barton, Patricia Piccinini and Brent Harris.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON, IT'S JUST A HEARTBEAT AWAY, MGA
21 November 2012 - 3 February 2013
Monash Gallery of Art, VIC
This is the first chancefor Victorian audiences to view Pat Brassington’s major work A heartbeat away, which was commissioned for the 2012 Adelaide Biennale and was exhibited at Stills earlier this year. Spatially dramatic and disconcerting in content, 18 images hang from on high, their starkinteriors, odd characters and distorted objects immersing us in Brassington’s signature surrealism and claustrophobic atmosphere. Featured alongside are key works by the artist taken from the MGA’s permanent collection.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON & JUSTINE VARGA in FLATLANDS
15 September 2012 - 3 February 2013
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Flatlands: photography and everyday space is a selection of works drawn from the AGNSW’s permanent collection of 20th century and contemporary photography. It will feature Pat Brassington’s In marble halls #1-#5 and Justine Varga's Empty studio #1 & #7 alongside photographs by Australian and international artists including Simryn Gill and Fiona Hall.
Justine Varga's first exhibition at Stills Moving Out opens on Saturday 13 October 3-5pm
Image: © Pat Brassington
ROGER BALLEN & PAT BRASSINGTON in CONFOUNDING: CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY
5 October 2012 - 24 March 2013
National Gallery of Victoria
Confounding: Contemporary Photography explores how photography can challenge our perceptions by transforming the strange and implausible. The exhibition draws from the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection of contemporary Australian and International artworks, including work by Pat Brassington and recently acquired work Terminus by Roger Ballen.
Image: © Pat Brassington
MAJOR SURVEY - PAT BRASSINGTON: Á REBOURS
11 August - 23 September 2012
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne
Á Rebours is a major survey exhibition of Pat Brassington’s oeuvre, gathering works from her 30 years of practice as one of Australia’s most important and influential photomedia artists. The ACCA’s extensive selection of Brassington’s imagery showcases her uniquely arresting visual world, which explores the surreal, uncanny and unconscious.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON SURVEY AT THE AUSTRALIAN CENTRE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MELBOURNE
ACCA, Melbourne
11 August - 23 September
A must see exhibition of influential Australian artist Pat Brassington which brings together a survey of work, showing her early to transition from analogue into digital photography.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON FEATURED AT THE ADELAIDE BIENNIAL 2012 IN PARALLEL COLLISIONS
2012 Adelaide Biennial of Australian art
Art Gallery of South Australia
Fri 2 March to 29 April 2012
Daily 10am to 5pm
An experiential proposition inspired by art, cinema and literature, the 2012 Adelaide Biennial explores the ways in which ideas emerge, converge and re-form through time. The Biennial considers the temporality of the present as it parallels and collides with the past. Parallel Collisions presents 21 commissioned works including that of Pat Brassington and some of Australia’s leading artists, 21 original texts, a designer, an architect, two curators and an institution, forming a connective tissue that attempts to understand our subjective experience of time.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON: THE DEVIL HAD A DAUGHTER EXHIBITION AT MONASH
4 August - 1 October 2011
Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield Campus
The Devil Had a Daughter reflects an enduring fascination with allegorical, theatrical and macabre imagery apparent throughout the history of printmaking. Pat Brassington is shown amongst a collection of artists including Mike Parr, Sally Smart, David Noonan and others, examining the definition of printmaking and understanding its role and form in contemporary art.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BARSSINGTON, PETRINA HICKS & ROBYN STACEY: SILENT FEATHERS
Maroondah Art Gallery, VIC
28 January - 5 March, 2011
Silent Feathers is an exhibition featuring the diverse range of representations of birds. Drawingupon the symbolism of birds and their role as companion animals, food source or as harbingers of environmental loss, 13 artists including Pat Brassington, Petrina Hicks and Robyn Stacey provocatively examine human complicity in the fate of the bird.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON, ROBYN STACEY & BEVERLEY VEASEY: A Generosity of Spirit - Recent Australian Women’s Art
Queensland University of Technology Art Museum
2 July - 3 October 2010
A Generosity of Spirit: Recent Australian Women's Art from the QUT Art
Collection exhibition presents some 30 key works acquired over the last four
years including Stills artists Pat Brassington, Beverley Veasey and Robyn
Stacey. Generosity of Spirit simultaneously acknowledges the generous
philanthropy of former Queensland artist and QUT alumnus Betty Quelhurst
(1919-2008), and the work of selected Australian women artists. The Betty
Quelhurst Fund was established in the acquisitions program enabling the QUT
Art Museum to purchase major works by leading Australian mid-career women
practitioners. The exhibition will travel to Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide
from 22 October to 17 December 2010.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON: DARK DREAMS AND FLUORESCENT FLESH
24HRArt, Northern Territory Centre for Contemporary Art
7 May - 12 June 2010
A selection of Pat Brassington's works will be exhibited as part of the group
show Dark Dreams + Fluorescent Flesh, which explores themes of female pleasure
and sexuality. Other participating artists are Bianca Barling, Jane Burton,
Mimi Kelly and Monicha Tichacek. The five artists present a world emanating
with a surreal and luscious aesthetic, a prism of dark dreams and fluorescent
flesh in a series of large-scale photographs and video installation.
Image: © Pat Brassington
PAT BRASSINGTON: FEMINISM NEVER HAPPENED
IMA, Brisbane
30 January - 27 March 2010
A selection of four works by Pat Brassington dating from 2001-2007 will
feature in this upcoming group exhibition at IMA. The title provocatively asks
us to view the selected works by artists including Del Kathryn Barton,
Jacqueline Fraser and Yvonne Todd "as if feminism never happened."
Image: © Pat Brassington
TWELVE AUSTRALIAN PHOTO ARTISTS
PIPER PRESS PUBLICATION
Pat Brassington and Brenda L Croft are featured in this recently published book, with text by Blair French & Daniel Palmer. With beautiful reproductions and insightful discussion investigating the work, this publication surveys each artist's unique contribution to forwarding contemporary Australian photomedia practices.
Image: © Pat Brassington
DARK DREAMS AND FLUORESCENT FLESH
South Australian School of Art Gallery
Adelaide
17 February - 13 March 2009
A selection of Pat Brassington's works will be exhibited as part of the group
show Dark Dreams + Fluorescent Flesh, which explores themes of female pleasure
and sexuality. Other participating artists are Bianca Barling, Jane Burton,
Mimi Kelly and Monicha Tichacek.
Image: © Pat Brassington