Living between Sydney and South West France for family reasons affords Adrienne Gaha the benefit of avoiding a full winter in either location. “I never have a whole summer, either, but I do have two whole autumns, one here and one in Quercy,” Gaha says of the rural area situated 90km north of Toulouse. “But they are such different worlds and I’m always trying to reconcile them.”
Balancing those two worlds in her mind feeds into her method of art making, which seeks to achieve a harmony between ‘painting as subject’ and ‘painting about paint’.
Often, Gaha will begin a work in Quercy during the French automne, leave it, then bring it back here and finish it in her Rosebery studio over the antipodean autumn. It’s the harvest season, after all, and two autumns provide the Sydney-born artist with a bounty of creative energy and visual food for thought. “I keep returning to the same source images – Titian’s Worship of Venus 1518-19 and Fragonard’s The Swing
c.1767-68 are two examples – so it’s like the same ground producing different crops,” she muses.
In her new series of paintings, Two Autumns, Gaha has, on top of Titian and Fragonard, also included motifs and passages drawn from works by Antonie Waterloo, François Boucher and Henry Fuseli, as well as from photos taken by herself and others. Fluently traversing the art-historical traditions of landscape, genre and history painting, Gaha pulls what she needs from each to construct richly hued fever dreams whose multi-layered compositions seem to float before our very eyes.
Partially erased figures glow like revenants. Clouds part, trees close in. Around them, the atmosphere is a heady nebula of striations overlaid with tiny rivulets of dripping colour. “I like my figures to be rubbed out,” Gaha says. “It’s as though they’ve been blasted by light or weather; the environment is stronger than them. But they can be read as ghosts, too. Are they a memory or vestige of something? The ambiguity is quite nice.”
Melding figurative and abstract elements, Gaha complicates the process of visual recognition by manipulating paint in idiosyncratic ways. Gravity is employed in the service of drip work; pigment is mixed with varying amounts of medium to produce a range of glazes, from thin to jelly-like; a panoply of tools enables her to smear and scratch into wet or semi-dry paint. The aim is to effect a dynamic tension between ‘looking through’ and ‘looking at’ by empowering the viewer to hold both approaches in their mind at the same time.
“It’s about letting the paint do something interesting without controlling it too much,” Gaha says, before adding: “Really, in the end, these paintings are all about light, and how light describes the world.”
Tony Magnusson
May 2023
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.
![Adrienne Gaha - High Key Worship [after Titian]](https://img.imageboss.me/edwinacorlette/cover:inside/1200x1200/quality:80,format:webp/artworks/76799_adrienne-gaha-two-autumns/Adrienne-Gaha_High-Key-Worship-after-Titian_2023.jpeg?bossToken=c48ac57d904cad7f3e3851477caf9c897426c1f9de4fc6e6433aa02cacaa0aae)
![High Key Worship [after Titian]](https://img.imageboss.me/edwinacorlette/cover:inside/2400x2400/quality:80,format:webp/artworks/76799_adrienne-gaha-two-autumns/Adrienne-Gaha_High-Key-Worship-after-Titian_2023.jpeg?bossToken=35385a0eb512524e8a1f26b0a139f2ab1e34054769f2887a366c4fc378ec8334 "High Key Worship [after Titian]")
![Adrienne Gaha - Rough Swing [after Fragonard]](https://img.imageboss.me/edwinacorlette/cover:inside/1200x1200/quality:80,format:webp/artworks/76799_adrienne-gaha-two-autumns/Adrienne-Gaha_Edwina-Corlette_Rough-Swing-after-Fragonard_2023_oil-on-linen_130x100cm.jpg?bossToken=59ee44c23ab232a195ef3d36388ce96a9a0c5806f0d84e5ad91d1e3996e968c0)
![Rough Swing [after Fragonard]](https://img.imageboss.me/edwinacorlette/cover:inside/2400x2400/quality:80,format:webp/artworks/76799_adrienne-gaha-two-autumns/Adrienne-Gaha_Edwina-Corlette_Rough-Swing-after-Fragonard_2023_oil-on-linen_130x100cm.jpg?bossToken=f32e06e6a9199bbe803d57e94ba7a169598fe4264136274edd43a0c2afa428bd "Rough Swing [after Fragonard]")
