CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Gina Kalabishis

Gina Kalabishis' forthcoming solo Floor to Sky will be on exhibition from 17 July - 11 August.
Please contact the gallery if you would like to request a preview.

Winner of the 2017 Eutick Memorial Still Life Award

Melbourne based painter Gina Kalabishis explores the feeling of love in all its permutations. Utilising the motifs and mythology of Australia’s native flora, and creating compositions inspired by ikebana arrangements, she constructs intimate interior/landscape narratives in which the human experience becomes enmeshed with the beauty of nature.

Holding back a branch as one meanders along a scuffed path through the bush, most wouldn’t give it a second thought. The Australian wilderness is rough and unruly - as eucalypts grow their bark shreds and falls, tea tree branches arch over boardwalks and native poa grasses spread, lashing at shins exposed in shorts or skirts or bathing suits. But within this touch, of fingertip caressing leaf and twig and seed pod, Gina Kalabishis feels alight at the beauty and celebration of life that surrounds her. Tamed yet also untameable, her work reflects the fact that our relationship with nature is joyous and testing.
Excerpt of essay by Melanie Caple 2016

The crisp, sharp detail of the botanical specimens contrasts with the out of focus landscapes behind. Both are subjects we commonly associate with sunlight—certainly within the Australian artistic tradition (think only of Streeton’s ‘Golden Summers’)—but here become otherworldly and ethereal. These are potent hearths for the imagination to flare; they double as memento mori for the natural environment, under threat from the agencies of man, and serve as a warning of what we stand to lose. Kalabishis is at once the funnel for the past traditions of art to coalesce, and a prophet of its demise. The inverted landscapes and suspended plants give rise to a sensation of imminent collapse.
Excerpt of essay by Simon Gregg, Curator, Gippsland Art Gallery 2015

Gina Kalabishis’ work stares in stark wonder at the excess of nature [...T]he strict discipline of Japanese flower arrangement, and the extreme formalism of western still life, hint [...] at the pathology of these forms without denying their rapturous suppleness and fecundity. There is the clinician’s eye operating too, the perception of a scientific illustrator seeking art in description. She creates a visual field which is both very specific and filled with a painful joy of the moment, as if apprehension and understanding coincided sublimely[...] By these wires we hang in our history in nature, and in these ways Gina Kalabishis creates an art of the witness looking for beauty in his or her passing. Gina Kalabishis delicately interlaces the structures of the human body, as represented by medical illustrations, and the extreme formalism of the still life. Kalabishis cleverly hints at the pathology of both kinds of formalism without denying their beauty and seductive qualities.
Dr. Ron Southern, Historian

Kalabishis most recently won the 2017 Eutick Memorial Still Life Award, was the winner of the 2017 People’s Choice Award for the Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize, the winner of the 2016 People’s Choice Award for the Bruny Island Art Prize and 2016 finalist for the Kedumba Drawing Award. She recently exhibitied in the group exhibition Verdant Garden at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre in 2017 and was included in a group exhibition, Romancing the Skull at the Art Gallery of Ballarat in 2017. Her work has also been featured in the award winning 2017 publication NATIVE: Art and Design with Australian Plants, written by Kate Herd and Jela Ivankovic-Waters and published by Thames & Hudson. In both 2016 and 2017 she was Artist Residence at the Bundanon Trust Studios, Illaroo NSW and in 2014 was awarded, Illaroo NSW. In 2014 she was awarded was awarded the Rick Amor Drawing Prize from a field of over 450 submissions, as well as being announced a finalist in the Eutick Still Life Award, and the Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing.

Kalabishis holds a Post Graduate Diploma of Visual Arts, Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University and an Advanced Diploma of Arts (Electronic Design and Interactive Multimedia) from Victoria University. Her work is represented in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia and Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale. She has featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Australia, Spain, Asia and America.

CATALOGUE ESSAYS
You & Me, by Melanie Caple 2016
Heartland, by Simon Gregg 2015

DOWNLOAD BIO / CV (PDF)