CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Gina Kalabishis

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.

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

Gina Kalabishis holds a Post Graduate Diploma of Visual Arts, Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University and a Advanced Diploma of Arts (Electronic Design and Interactive Multimedia) from Victoria University in 2003. She has featured in solo and group exhibitions in Australia, Spain and America and has been selected for number of significant national art prizes.

In 2014 Kalabishis was awarded the prestigious 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 is represented in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia. She lives and works in Melbourne.

Kalabishis will be exhibiting in the Kedumba Drawing Award 2016 in August and also undertaking a Bundanon Trust Artist in Residence in September 2016. She has been announced as a finalist in the Bruny Island Art Prize 2016 and will be exhibiting as part of the group exhibition Verdant Garden at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre from November 2016 – February 2017.

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

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