CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Gina Kalabishis

Gina Kalabishis has just been announced as a Finalist in the 2017 Eutick Memorial Still Life Award!

FLG artist Gina Kalabishis has been curated into the Art Gallery of Ballarat's forthcoming group exhibition Romancing the Skull. The exhibition explores themes of mortality, politics and rebellion and runs from 14 Oct 2017 to 28 Jan 2018.

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.

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. She has featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Australia, Spain, Asia and America and has been selected for number of significant national art prizes.

She was the Winner of the 2017 People’s Choice Award for the Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize, 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 and will be included in a group exhibition, Romancing the Skull at the Art Gallery of Ballarat later in 2017.

In 2014 Kalabishis was awarded the prestigious Rick Amor Drawing Prize from a field of over 450 submissions. Gina Kalabishis is represented in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia and Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale. She lives and works in Melbourne.

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

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

DOWNLOAD BIO / CV (PDF)