Adrienne Gaha’s mirage-like dreamscapes are an emotional and intuitive response to the world, constrained by her formal understanding of painting, surface, and form. Working with glazes, she layers and rubs colours into each other in a process of putting on and wiping off, letting the drips of paint and turpentine create interesting details in the surface. While doing so, she allows her mind to wander and contemplate life and the rhythms of the world around her.
Inspiration might come from mysticism, popular culture, politics, or art history, with Gaha often returning to the same source images over and over again - how these images are reinterpreted with each iteration highlights how she herself is changing over time. The combination of the first two colour layers in a painting are considered rather than spontaneous, often conveying a sense of nostalgia.
Gaha appears to work quickly, with many paintings on the go at one time. But integral to this process is a period of separation from the works - physically putting them away until she is ready to resolve them. This period of waiting is as much a part of the process as the physical act of painting.
The result is ethereal works that collapse the socio-political, emotional, and technical into a single space. Like a Troxler’s fade, tangible moments disappear into the background, figuration breaks down into abstraction, and light fades to shadow. Yet despite this elusiveness, an essence stays for the audience to respond to and recast through their own personal narrative.
Adrienne Gaha’s mirage-like dreamscapes are an emotional and intuitive response to the world, constrained by her formal understanding of painting, surface, and form. Working with glazes, she layers and rubs colours into each other in a process of putting on and wiping off, letting the drips of paint and turpentine create interesting details in the surface. While doing so, she allows her mind to wander and contemplate life and the rhythms of the world around her.
Inspiration might come from mysticism, popular culture, politics, or art history, with Gaha often returning to the same source images over and over again - how these images are reinterpreted with each iteration highlights how she herself is changing over time. The combination of the first two colour layers in a painting are considered rather than spontaneous, often conveying a sense of nostalgia.
Gaha appears to work quickly, with many paintings on the go at one time. But integral to this process is a period of separation from the works - physically putting them away until she is ready to resolve them. This period of waiting is as much a part of the process as the physical act of painting.
The result is ethereal works that collapse the socio-political, emotional, and technical into a single space. Like a Troxler’s fade, tangible moments disappear into the background, figuration breaks down into abstraction, and light fades to shadow. Yet despite this elusiveness, an essence stays for the audience to respond to and recast through their own personal narrative.
Adrienne Gaha is a Sydney-born artist now living and working between Australia and Europe. An alum of the Sydney College of the Arts and the National Art School, Sydney, her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia as well as New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Mexico. A finalist in the Grace Cossington Smith Painting Award (2015, 2014) and the Geelong Contemporary Painting Prize (2014), her work is held in public, university and private collections through Australia.
Carrie McCarthy 2021
Adrienne Gaha
Born 1960 in Sydney, Australia
Lives and works in Australia and the UK
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2023
'Two Autumns', EDWINA CORLETTE, Brisbane
2021
'Verdure', EDWINA CORLETTE, Brisbane
2020
'Arcadia', Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney
2018
'Recent Work', Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney
2016
'Recent Work', Kalli Rolfe Contemporary at Neon Park, Melbourne
'Snake dance', Greenwood Street Projects, Melbourne
2014
'Vestiges', Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Sofitel Melbourne on Collins
2013
'New Paintings', Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney
2009
'Recent works', Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne
2006
'London Paintings & Drawings', Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne
'Recent Works (with Brooke Fitzsimmons)', Hewer Street Studios, London
2004
'Recent Works (with Brooke Fitzsimmons)', Hewer Street Studios, London
1999
'Recent Drawings', Mori Gallery, Sydney
1998
'Drawings & Photographs', Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne
1994
'Adrienne Gaha', The Merchants House of the National Trust, Sydney
1993
'Recent Work', Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne
1990
'A Merchant Sailors Gift',Chameleon, Hobart (Artist in Residence that year)
'The Camels Hump', Mori Gallery, Sydney
1987
'The Crossing', First Draft Gallery, Sydney
1986
'Cockles and Muscles', Mori Gallery, Sydney
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2019
'Spring 1883', Kalli Rolfe Contemporary, Sydney
'Side by Side', 2 person show, Piers Feetham Gallery, London, UK
'Auckland Art Fair', Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Auckland, New Zealand
Adrienne Gaha is featured inArt Collector issue 94, October to December, 2020.
What drives Adrienne Gaha’s latest work is the myriad different interpretations waiting to be discovered in paint.
Gaha’s work reaches into art history with oblique references to narrative painters like Titian, Rupert Bunny, Bouguereau. The images are rubbed out, painted over, and heavily abstracted, conjoined with contemporary references. Their aesthetic contains touchstones, a sense of familiarity that is hard to pin down but speaks to our recognition of well-known historical paintings and their tropes, juxtaposed with pop culture references (cartoons, the Disney image) and animals. This method of working, where Gaha paints, wipes back with turpentine, glazes, builds, drips and pools paint is, as artist Brooke Fitzsimons suggests, a space where figuration coexists with abstraction in such a way as to address the maxims of modernism.
