CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Gina Kalabishis

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Gina Kalabishis’ practice pays direct homage to the beauty of Australia’s native flora and fauna. Finding inspiration in both her regular walks through the unruly, thick bushland of our national parks, as well as from her everyday encounters with unassuming plants and animals within her local Merri Creek backyard in Melbourne, Kalabishis’ delicate paintings and drawings lovingly replicate the earthy, wondrous textures of nature. Utalising a visual language that mixes still life and landscape techniques with intentionally dreamlike, surreal distortions, her images construct intimate narratives in which the human, emotive experience becomes enmeshed within the beauty of the natural environment.

Gina Kalabishis at her 2021 Artist-in-Residence at Umbi Gumbi, a 100-acre property nestled in spotted gum forest outside the township of Bermagui in NSW.

Kalabishis’s compositions operate on two levels – the background plane renders loosely painted romantic landscapes, often hazy and softly focused. On the frontal plane are intricately detailed still life ensembles of native botanical specimens. Drawn to collecting flowers, leaves, blossoms, and branches during her walks around the environs of her Melbourne home, or during her residencies in regional New South Wales, she creates floral bundles that are tied together and hung in her studio to be photographed and later painted onto linen or paper. Her painstakingly painted specimens and keenly observed native wildlife are the central features of these compositions, competing for attention in the foreground.
Excerpt of Artist Profile article by Victoria Hynes, 2022

I recently visited Gina's studio and stood in front of dozens of her paintings and drawings. I found myself wanting to stroke the bats' graphite fur, the pollen-filled fuzz of the bees' hind legs. I want to look at the gang gang with as much intensity as he looked at me. Gina's birds and bats have a frank gaze and those of us who love cockatoos (despite their naughtiness), and the grey-headed flying foxes of Yarra Bend park know the truth of this; that these birds and bats are curious, chatty and playful. However, Gina also captures their sleepy private faces, their vulnerability. Bats (like birds, like butterflies) are being squeezed into diminishing habitats. Bats' leathery wings give them grief on hot days and flying fox colonies have been moving further and further south in a vain attempt to avoid heat waves. In these COVID times the flying fox has become associated with disease and is persecuted as a result.
Excerpt of essay by Sophie Cunningham, 2021

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

READ: Gina Kalabishis 'Memento' reviewed in Artist Profile
READ: Gina Kalabishis 'Memento' reviewed in Neos Kosmos

Gina Kalabishis holds both a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) and a Post Graduate Diploma of Visual Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts. She has exhibited extensively and has been the recipient of a number of prestigious awards including the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award (2017), the People’s Choice Award for the Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize (2017), the People’s Choice Award for the Bruny Island Art Prize (2016) and was the winner of the Rick Amor Drawing Prize (2014). Most recently she has been a finalist in the WAMA Art Prize (2023), the John Leslie Art Prize (2020, 2018), the ROI Art Prize (2019), the Kedumba Drawing Award (2016), the Eutick Still Life Award (2014), and the Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing (2014).

In 2022 Shoalhaven Regional Gallery exhibited a retrospective solo exhibition of Kalabishis' practice entitled Memento - Pictures of you (after The Cure). In 2019 she exhibited at Wayne State University, Detroit in THIS LAND IS…, a group exhibition addressing current and future environmental concerns. In 2017 she exhibited in the group exhibition Verdant Garden at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre and was also included in a group exhibition Romancing the Skull at the Art Gallery of Ballarat in the same year.

Her work has been featured in the award winning publication NATIVE: Art and Design with Australian Plants, written by Kate Herd and Jela Ivankovic-Waters (published by Thames & Hudson). In 2020 she was awarded a residency at NG Art Creative Residency Eygalières, Provence, Southern France and in 2021 undertook an Artist in Residence at Umbi Gumbi in Cuttagee, NSW. In both 2016 and 2017 Kalabishis was Artist Residence at the Bundanon Trust Studios, Illaroo NSW.

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.

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Media Highlights

Listening for the Lyrebird at 6am No.2 2023
watercolour and gouache on Japanese paperboard
24cm x 27cm
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Listening for the Lyrebirds at 6am No.1_ 2023
watercolour and gouache on Japanese paperboard
27cm x 24cm
$950 AUD

If I didn't have your Love (after Leonard Cohen) 2023
oil on linen
137cm x 198cm
(Framed in Tasmanian Oak 140 x 202cm)
$15,000 AUD

Home 2024
oil on board
20cm x 20cm
$900 AUD

My Guy (after Mary Wells) 2023
watercolour and gouache on Japanese paperboard
27cm x 24cm
$950 AUD

There Is Always Hope 2020
oil on canvas
38cm x 38cm
$1,500 AUD

Bundanon anew - One more night (After Michael Kiwanuka) 2018
oil on linen
198cm x 152cm
IN ARTIST'S STUDIO
$12,500 AUD

Romeo & Juliet (after Dire Straits) 2018
oil on linen
153cm x 122cm In Artist's studio
$10,500 AUD

Pictures of you (after The Cure) 2021
ink and watercolour on paper, unframed
124cm x 91cm
$5,500 AUD

Green Heart 2021
oil on canvas
50cm x 40cm in artist's studio
$2,000 AUD

Breath in Blue Light 2017
oil on linen
152cm x 91cm
IN ARTISTS STUDIO
$6,500 AUD

Arete no2 2016
oil on linen
152cm x 87cm In artist's studio
$6,500 AUD

Passing Pulpit Rock Distant Sky (after Nick Cave & Else Torp) 2017
oil on linen
86cm x 124cm In Artist's studio
$7,500 AUD

The Magical Elixir 2021
ink and gouache on paper, unframed
104cm x 76cm
IN ARTIST'S STUDIO
$4,000 AUD

Melbourne's Flying Fox No. 2 2021
graphite and charcoal on paper, unframed
76cm x 56cm
$2,500 AUD

Ain't No Sunshine (After Bill Withers) 2022
ink and gouache on paper
76cm x 56cm , unframed
$2,500 AUD

Melbourne's Flying Fox No. 3 2021
ink and gouache on paper, unframed
76cm x 56cm
$2,500 AUD

Ducking 2020
Ink and gouache on watercolour paper, unframed
69cm x 50cm
$2,400 AUD

Soeur Francaise no.2 (French Sister) 2020
Ink and gouache on Saunders Waterford watercolour paper 300gsm, unframed
75cm x 56cm
$2,500 AUD

Happy Tears No.2 2020
ink and gouache on watercolour paper, unframed
76cm x 56cm
$2,500 AUD

Love's many forms 2021
ink and gouache on paper, unframed
76cm x 56cm
$2,500 AUD