Ryan Presley, The Dunes how good is Australia (detail), 2021. Courtesy: the artist and Adelaide Contemporary Experimental.

Fresh Hell brings together a suite if paintings that Brisbane-based artist Ryan Presley has been steadily developing over the past eight years, for the first time in a major solo exhibition.

Fresh Hell brings together a suite if paintings that Brisbane-based artist Ryan Presley has been steadily developing over the past eight years, for the first time in a major solo exhibition.

Presley’s practice wrestles with themes of power and dominion—in particular, how religion and economic control served colonialism and empire building over time, and the representation of its customs and edifices in our everyday lives.

Fresh Hell is informed by Presley’s own Catholic upbringing and experience, having been baptised in a desert township; Alice Springs. Large-scale oil paintings are detailed and layered with meaning, often referencing the canon of Western religious works that span from the Icon schools, Middle Ages, Renaissance periods through to the current day. These historical referents are, however, re-interpreted by casting young Aboriginal people as the key protagonists in recent pasts and foreseeable futures.