Elizabeth Newman Untitled (detail) 2019, oil on linen, 40 x 30cm. Image courtesy the artist, Damien Knight Gallery, Sydney, and Neon Parc, Melbourne.
Elizabeth Newman: Is that a ‘No’?
8 September - 21 November 2020
Melbourne-based Elizabeth Newman (b.1962) occupies a singular place in Australian contemporary art for her use of familiar materials presented in a minimalist way and inflected with an anti-authoritarian approach to art history.
This exhibition of nineteen works is drawn from three decades of practice, from 1989 to 2019, and includes early text paintings through to recent works of non-objective abstraction.
Newman's paintings, cut-fabric pieces, collages, sculptures and constructions engage with voids and frames, offering encounters between words and wordlessness.
Is that a 'No'?’ focuses on the way in which refusals, negations, disavowals and articulations of space function throughout Newman's art as a type of existential thinking.
A practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst since 1996, Newman’s forms also convey a deep interest in linguistics, emotion, and mystery.
Elizabeth Newman: Is that a ‘No’? is accompanied by a full colour exhibition catalogue including new scholarship by exhibition curator Naomi Evans.
- Elizabeth Newman Untitled 2016. Oil and tape on linen, 100 x 80cm.
- Courtesy the artist, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, and Neon Parc, Melbourne
installation images
