Featured Image: Matt Bromhead, Warbles, 2022, Ink on kozo on board,150 x 120cm. Courtesy: the artist and OLSEN ANNEXE.

Olsen Annexe presents Truth Over Tradition, a highly anticipated exhibition of two and three-dimensional works by gallery artist Matt Bromhead. For this show, Bromhead has built his surfaces from the work of days past—creating pictures that gradually build and make themselves known through layers of transparent paper. Using this method, the artist encourages us to acknowledge the layered nature of information we receive; to question our sources, and to reconsider that which we take on face value.

This body of work pursues a new way of working, a methodical layering process involving translucent paper and pigmented material. Between each sheet of his thin Kozo (Mulberry paper), Bromhead lays a ground of slow-drying glue. These drawings unfold over many hours in turn and are a kind of cumulative total of a daily practice. Gradually the compositions come in to being. “I hope that they show their final form and their skeletal history equally”.

“Bromhead’s sculpture and drawing practices are closely related; they ping pong back and forth, bouncing the same ideas between them yet transpiring in seemingly opposing mediums. Both are exercises in line and formalism, yet while his drawings take shape through an almost automatic process of putting pencil or ink to paper, his sculptures rely on the qualities and characteristics of his found objects to reveal themselves as finished pieces.” Rose of Sharon Leake writes-  Excerpt from Art Collector.

Matt Bromhead has enjoyed great success in a number of esteemed prizes, having recently been included in the Dobell Drawing Prize (2021), the Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize (2020), Hazelhurst’s Art on Paper Award (2019) and the Paddington Art Prize (2018).

Opening: 11 June, 2-4pm