Arthouse Gallery is delighted to announce our dynamic exhibition program for first six months of 2025. This coming year features solo shows by newly-represented, emerging artists as well as new works from our celebrated and diverse stable of Australian contemporary practitioners. We really look forward to welcoming you to the gallery in 2025.
group exhibition
'30 years of arthouse, summer edition'
14 January - 1 March
Over the past three decades, Arthouse Gallery has distinguished itself as one of Australia's leading contemporary art galleries. Currently representing over forty artists, the gallery celebrated its 30th anniversary in December 2024 with a major exhibition that brought together works from its impressive collective. The 'Summer Edition' of the exhibition continues until 1 February 2025.
john baird
'Port Jackson, Still Lifes and Otherwise'
6 February - 1 March
Opening Celebration Thursday 6 February, 5 – 7pm
JOHN BAIRD West of North Head, acrylic & shellac on board, 100x 100 cm; John Baird, photographed by James Geer
Distinguished Melbourne artist John Baird who brings his unique aesthetic and practice to the gallery with a brilliant exhibition of new work.
Working across painting, collage and sculpture, Baird explores how slippages between utilitarianism and decoration inhabit everyday objects. With a lingering aura of nostalgia, the sail boat, the dressing table or the floral arrangement are elevated from the commonplace. By consciously conflating foreground and background, Baird forges a surreality that adds a dream-like dimension to his constructed spaces, enkindling our memories and inspiring our imaginations.
Baird has participated in numerous solo and group shows around Australia, and his work is held in major national collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum, Artbank and Bell Potter Group, as well as international and national corporate and private collections.
ROBYN SWEANEY AND KENDAL MURRAY
Melbourne Art Fair
20 -23 February
(L to R) ROBYN SWEANEY Out of the blue, acrylic on polycotton, 97.5 x 137.5 cm (framed); KENDAL MURRAY Days Away, Cat's at Play, mixed media assemblage, 51 x 28 x 28 cm
Arthouse Gallery is thrilled to be presenting a dynamic and iconic exhibition with multiple Wynne prize finalist Robyn Sweaney whose intricately detailed paintings depicting houses across Australia have captured the imagination and joy of the Australian public, as well as acclaimed sculpture artist Kendal Murray with her wonderfully created miniature worlds in compacts, purses and antique assemblages.
With these two solo exhibitions by these much loved Australian contemporary artists, we will be transforming our gallery booth into one of nostalgic whimsy and wonder. We invite you to step into this modernist dream where imagination is at play through Sweaney and Murray's enthralling and evocative work.
DEAN BOWEN
'Flourish'
6 - 29 March
Opening Celebration Thursday 6 March, 5 – 7pm
Dean Bowen is renowned for his charming, child-like aesthetic and unique thematic interplay between urbanity and rurality, humanity and animality. With a practice spanning over 40 years and encompassing painting, bronze sculpture and printmaking, Bowen has developed a distinctive and humorous symbolic language that filters through each work. His highly charismatic and whimsical renderings of animals, human characters and Australian environments celebrate the vicissitudes of life, evincing the simple pleasures of human habitation within the artificial and the natural world.
Bowen holds a PhD and an MA from Monash University, as well as a Diploma of Fine Art (Printmaking) from RMIT. He has exhibited widely in Australia and overseas, including Paris, London, Japan, Germany, Poland, Egypt, Switzerland, Spain, China and Slovenia. Bowen has received a number of significant sculpture commissions including Point Leo Estate 2017, Deakin University Burwood Campus 2014, Hamilton Gallery 2014 and the arts/ACT Government Gungalin Commission 2011. In 2023, he opened a major survey exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Takasaki-City, Japan. Bowen’s works are held in many major collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Australia, Australian War Memorial, Heidi Museum of Modern Art, Artbank, University of Sydney, Monash University, Queensland University of Technology, University of Melbourne, National Library of Australia, Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery and Point Leo Estate.
FABRIZIO BIVIANO
3 - 26 April
Opening Celebration Thursday 3 April, 5 – 7pm
FABRIZIO BIVIANO Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water (The Sequel), oil on Belgian linen, 91 x 76 cm; Fabrizio Biviano in his studio, photographed by Jyles Reynolds
Australian artist Fabrizio Biviano has a preoccupation with the past and notions of spent time, both his own and others. Drawing inspiration from the traditions of Dutch still life painting, graphic design and personal experiences, he uses the objects of daily life to produce self-referential work that seeks to examine his personal investments of time, loss and consumption.
Biviano completed a Master of Fine Art from Monash University in 2014. An art instructor by day, he maintains a tireless dedication to his practice. Biviano was a finalist in the inaugural Evelyn Chapman Art Award at S.H. Ervin Gallery (2018) and the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award (2018). He was also a finalist in the renowned Arthur Guy Memorial Prize for Painting (2015), the Kings School Art Prize (2024), the Paul Guest Prize for Drawing (2014) and the Belle Arti, Chapman and Bailey Art Award (2010). His work features in the collections of Artbank and the Latrobe University Museum of Art and many private collections in Australia, the USA and the UK.
Scott Duncan
3 - 26 April
Opening Celebration Thursday 3 April, 5 – 7pm
SCOTT DUNCAN, photographed by Silversalt Photography; (L to R) Sweet 'n' Sour, earthenware with glaze, 58 x 23 x 13.5 cm; Fresh Slacks, earthenware with glaze, 59 x 19 x 13.5 cm
Scott Duncan is a dynamic ceramicist whose work is a pastiche of mid-century design and antiquity where the traditional forms of ceramic practice are reconstructed through his whimsical work. Creating his own chalks and pencils, there is an alchemy at play where low and high fuse together creating forms reminiscent of Italian Bitossi Ceramiche and Scheurich Pottery with ceramic food labels delicately sculpted by Duncan resembling faces adhered across the surface in pareidolian amusement.
A chef by trade, Duncan infuses these techniques into his art practice where clay is layered and moulded like shortcrust pastry, taking on forms resembling materials such as congregated cardboard, chewing gum and fruit, mischievously pulling apart the traditional notions of ceramics. Nostalgia plays a part with ceramic form taking on the sweet lollies of youth; musk sticks, bananas and toffees.
Duncan has been a feature artist at Sydney Contemporary (2022) and has previously had three major solo exhibitions as well as various group exhibitions in both New South Wales and Victoria. He is a twice finalist in STILL: The National Still Life Award (2019, 2017) and a finalist in the Fishers Ghost Art Award (2024). His work is part of the Artbank collection, and in 2022 Duncan completed a major commission for the opening of the ACE Hotel Sydney curated by Flack Studio.
COLIN PENNOCK
1 - 24 May
Opening Celebration Thursday 1 May, 5 – 7pm
COLIN PENNOCK, photographed by Will Mansfield; After A King Tide, oil on linen, 64 x 64 cm (framed)
Pennock has exhibited nationally and internationally and his work is held in prominent collections including the University of Ulster, the British Consulate in New York and Washington, the Brian Sewell Collection in London and the Hawkesbury Regional Gallery Collection. Pennock received a residency at NG Creative Art Residency in France (2022) and has been the winner of the Alan Gamble Award, Mosman Art Prize (2005) and a finalist in the Len Fox Painting Award (2016), Mosman Art Prize (2019, 2014) and Fleurieu Peninsula Art Prize (2008, 2004).
