Lauren O’Connor, Red Cedars/what I Want Back is What I Was Before, 2023. Acrylic on board, 90 x 121cm. Courtesy: the artist and Arthouse Gallery, Sydney.

Arthouse Gallery presents Brett Whiteley Scholarship Winner 2023, Lauren O’Connor and her new exhibition Two Moons.

Through layered colour, impulsive mark-making and erasure, O’Connor brings the transient into view, invoking the complexities of memory and representation. Forms in nature are broken apart and reformed in her paintings giving new interpretations of landscapes. Based on memory and imagination, her landscapes lead to new worlds being created; they are familiar yet foreign, complicated yet simple. Her work constantly contradicts what the viewer’s eye is used to seeing and understanding about painting and landscape itself, mirroring the Australian landscape, with its contradictions of familiar and strange.

O’Connor is a graduate of the National Art School in Sydney and was announced as a winner of the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship in 2023. She has been a finalist in various prizes including the Paddington Art Prize (2023, 2021), Northern Beaches Environmental Art & Design Prize (2023), Mosman Art Prize (2022) and was awarded the 2022 AACI Internship placement at Ernabella Arts Centre, APY Lands. Her work is featured in Amber Creswell Bell’s forthcoming book on Australian Abstraction.

Opening Event: Thursday 7 March, 5 – 7pm.

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