New Directions: Julie Fragar

Fragar’s ongoing project pushes her work to a kind of intellectual breaking point demonstrating what she is capable of with painting; so much. Her work is well represented in public and private collections, among them the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art and UBS. She has been curated into important exhibitions such as Optimism: Contemporary Australia at QAGOMA in 2008, Wilderness: Balnaves Contemporary Painting at the AGNSW in 2010 and Primavera at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2010. At this juncture in her career, Fragar’s work pulls no punches; her recent work is evidence of an artist flexing some serious painting muscle.

The paintings demonstrate a particular urgency of expression. There is a ferocity that suggests an artist in top flight. There are still the images of self and family but they are embedded with an imagined account of a true story, that of the first Fragar, Antonio de Fraga, whose journey from the Azores to Portugal via a shipwreck encounter with cannibals is told by the artist in vivid, confusing and confronting detail. This obfuscation of real and imagined is what Fragar refers to as the “oblique stuff of painting”. She explains: “The new works are a continuation the autobiographical paintings – in that they are concerned with the nature of autobiography and painting – but they are not quite so first-person. Conceptually they are more playful … [they] pick at the edges of authenticity and myth making, which are both potent question in terms of painting and autobiography.” She adds: “For now I’m enjoying feeling like a director rather than a performer.”