CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Rebecca Hastings

Based in South Australia, Rebecca Hastings’ practice engages with themes of the posthuman condition, reflecting and drawing on both personal and collective existential anxieties. Adopting the conventions of figurative and still life painting genres, Hastings’ classically-rendered paintings merge uncanny and gothic tropes with the everyday to convey otherworldly, surreal narratives. Utilising visual qualities of Romanticism, hard-edge graphics and pop culture iconography heighten the temporal interplay that typifies Hastings’ work. These loaded yet obscure conflations enable the work to hover within a psychological mindscape – an invocation of the Uncanny Valley disturbingly poised between the real, and the unreal. Overall, Hastings' works acknowledge the inexpressible fears of our time, playing out as memento mori for our planet, our innocence, and our humanity.

'The pursuit of the uncanny, the strange and the unsettling persistently haunt Rebecca Hastings’ paintings. While previous work has revelled in contradiction through candy colours, juicy flesh and unflinching gazes, these recent paintings push and play with new depths of imagination. Hastings has created a world that hums within a stifling atmosphere of hands, fur, fabric and fakery. A palette of warm oxides and deep blue contain her subjects in a field, where it feels hard to draw breath. Through technical skill and command of her materials, she draws us down to where reality is slippery, and narrative elusive.'
Excerpt from essay by Mary-Jean Richardson, 2024

'In contrast to her previous work, which focussed on an internal exploration into maternal ambivalence, this latest body of work is more of an outward focus looking at the anxiety in relation to the state of the planet that our children will inherit. “My early practice was an inwardly focused rumination on maternal ambivalence,” she explains. “But as my children have grown I think of it more broadly as an investigation of the post-human condition, and our anxieties as humans entering a new way of being.'
Excerpt from text by Jane Llewllyn, 2020

Due Preparations
So here we are.
Staring down our fast-approaching future.
A world riven by our own hands.
Nature’s leavings. Scrappy reminders of complacency.
Let’s take only what we need. A little DNA, and some seeds.
A collection of vinyl from our youth.
Things to hold in our hand, and mind. Enough to start again.
1.5 degrees has come, and gone.
And on and on we scroll, faces bathed in blue-light.
Indolent flies stand by, mandibles working.
Rose-tinted lenses, fading to empty quicksilver.

Oubliette
The unseen, silently observes.
A liminal half-world plays host to a chimeral reckoning.
Childhood demons long tucked away, return unbidden, commingling with fears for my offspring.
Beauty, grotesquery, tenderness, and violence; this is your safe space.
An uncanny articulation of the inexpressible.
Secreted within a small place of forgetting.

ARTIST PROFILE:
Hastings graduated from Adelaide Central School of Art in 2011 with a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours), and in 2017 received a Master of Visual Art (Research) from the University of South Australia (UniSA), supported by an Australian Post Graduate Award. Hastings has received Art SA Project grants and a UniSA Graduate Research Travel and Research Support Scholarship, enabling a research residency in Japan in 2017. She recently has undertaken an artist residency at the Adelaide Central School of Art in 2024.

Her work has been shortlisted for the BP Portrait Prize 2015 (National Portrait Gallery, London), and has been a finalist in a range of significant art prizes, including the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize (2021), the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award (2012), the Sulman Prize (2014 and 2015), and the Archibald Prize (2014).

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Media Highlights

When I grow up I want to be Ingres 2026
oil on board
61cm x 46cm , framed size 64 x 49cm
Sold
Sold

The Aphotic Zone 2026
oil on board
61cm x 46cm , framed size 64 x 49cm
Sold
Sold

Where conspiracy theories go to die I 2026
oil on aluminium
40cm x 30cm , framed size 43 x 33cm
Sold
Sold

Where conspiracy theories go to die II 2026
oil on aluminium
40cm x 30cm , framed size 43 x 33cm
Sold
Sold

NPC (she, her) 2026
oil on paper, mounted, unframed
40cm x 40cm
$2,200 AUD

NPC (he, him) 2026
oil on paper, mounted, unframed
40cm x 40cm
$2,200 AUD

Rabbit Hole Redux II 2026
oil on paper, mounted, unframed
27cm x 27cm
$1,100 AUD

Rabbit Hole Redux I 2026
oil on paper, mounted, unframed
27cm x 27cm
$1,100 AUD

Rabbit Hole Redux III 2026
oil on paper, mounted, unframed
27cm x 27cm
Sold
Sold

Your scratch disks are full 2026
oil on paper, mounted, unframed
24cm x 24cm
Sold
Sold

21 Grams 2024
oil on polycotton
100cm x 83cm
$12,000 AUD

The Digital Native (Phthalocyanine) 2024
oil on polycotton
50cm x 50cm
$5,500 AUD

The Scraper 2024
oil on polycotton on composite aluminium panel
23cm x 30cm , framed size 25cm x 33cm
$4,000 AUD

The Untrainer 2024
oil on polycotton
55cm x 42cm
$5,500 AUD

Get it here 2024
oil on polycotton on aluminium composite panel
30cm x 23cm , framed size 33cm x 25cm
$4,000 AUD

I went on a digital detox 2024
oil on board
20cm x 20cm
$1,800 AUD

Take only what you need 2023
oil on board
49cm x 49cm
$4,000 AUD

Save what you can 2023
oil on board
49cm x 49cm
$4,000 AUD

Come for a ciggie behind the shelter shed 2023
oil on board
61cm x 61cm
$5,500 AUD

Do not resuscitate 2023
oil on board
61cm x 61cm
$5,500 AUD

At the third stroke it will be eleven fifty eight and thirty seconds 2023
oil on board
30cm x 30cm
$3,000 AUD

In memory of ice caps II 2023
oil on linen
30cm x 30cm
$3,000 AUD

In memory of ice caps III 2023
oil on linen
30cm x 30cm
$3,000 AUD

You have one new message 2023
oil on board
30cm x 30cm
$3,000 AUD

I couldn't control the world so I tidied my sock drawer 2023
oil on board
30cm x 30cm
$3,000 AUD