Events Calendar

One of Australia's most renowned artists, Kate Bergin’s fantastical oil paintings feature all animals posed on tabletops with spoons, guns, keys, spectacles, and rotary telephones.

While the artist was a student at the Victorian College of the Arts in the early 1990s, frequent visits to the National Gallery of Victoria had a profound impact. Bergin’s paintings riff on European still-life traditions and historical depictions of hunting and collecting.

In The Watchers (2015), she nods to a common motif in 17th-century Dutch vanitas paintings; the apple peel hanging over the table ledge recalls a perspectival trick popular among artists like Clara Peeters and Willem Claesz Heda.

The artist observes live animals at the zoo and museum taxidermy displays to create her realistic depictions. Yet, in her final compositions, the artist bends reality, allowing animals of various species to coexist. These surrealistic tableaux gently mock our concepts of a “civilized” society.

Location

Artbay Gallery, 13 Marine Parade, Queenstown