Rachael Robb, Blake, The Great Dragon and the Woman clothed in Sun, with Bottled Water, 2023. Oil on claybord, 40 x 30cm. Courtesy: the artist and Warrnambool Art Gallery, Warrnambool.

In a world dominated by spectacle, Rachael Robb quietly contemplates her surroundings through the slow, meditative practice of small-scale oil painting in her solo exhibition, I have been here before.

Steeped in painting techniques that began in Northern Europe centuries ago, Robb deftly handles her materials to create luminous mirages. Hovering between the mundane and the sublime these paintings are suspended outside of time, delicately layering the past, present and future. Bringing together fragments of gestures, images and objects from her daily life, Robb’s paintings form tightly cropped assemblages, to examine her return to a home left long ago.

Robb’s I have been here before continues the Warrnambool Art Gallery’s commitment to profiling the work of important regional artists at pivotal moments in their careers. The exhibition is Robb’s first public gallery institutional showing.

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