MELBOURNE.- Tolarno Galleries announced representation of Justine Varga, who has just been declared the recipient of the esteemed 2019 Dobell Drawing Prize, now presented as a biennial by the National Art School in association with the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation. Varga is known for her luminous photographs, some made with a camera and some without (and some made with a combination of the two).
Employing techniques that deserve comparison with the earliest nineteenth-century photographic experiments, Varga refigures the act of photographing for our contemporary moment. Her work has been described as:
an autobiographical witnessing of the world – a memoire, rather than merely an act of representation. Film registers performative gestures, while in some instances the film is drawn upon, handled, scratched, spat on and weathered, among other things.
Exposed to light for periods of months and even years, the film is processed and then printed at large scale in the darkroom, itself a process of transformation. Functioning as ‘ravaged memorials to lived experience’, the works appear to be abstractions but are in fact rigorous distillations of the real.1
Varga has made a steady ascent since graduating with Honours from the National Art School, Sydney, in 2007. Accolades include the Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture (2017) for her work Maternal Line. Dr Shaune Lakin, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia, said of her prize-winning entry:
Maternal Line is a beautiful photograph. Its purple and green palette has colours and smoky metallic effects I had never seen in a photograph before... Maternal Line is profoundly photographic and to me was among the most “photographic” works shortlisted for this year’s award. It was made using photographic film and complex photographic darkroom processes: it was handprinted chromogenically by sensitising photographic paper to wavelengths of light. At every turn, photographic processes and materials – including light – were used to bring this portrait to life.
Varga has twice won the juried Josephine Ulrick & Win Shubert Foundation for the Arts Photography Award (2013 and 2016). She received the Australia Council London Studio Residency (2014), and was awarded the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia Primavera Veolia Acquisitive Prize (2014). She has also been nominated for the Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography, Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2016) and was shortlisted for the Ramsay Art Prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide (2017).
Her work is in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, Monash Gallery of Art, Macquarie University, University of Queensland and Artbank, and in private collections in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland and France.
She is currently exhibiting as part of Defining Place/Space: Contemporary Photography from Australia at the Museum of Photographic Arts (MoPA) in San Diego, USA.
A body of her work featured in the TarraWarra Biennial 2018: From Will to Form (pictured top), and Performing Drawing at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. She was commissioned to mount a solo exhibition, Photogenic Drawing, at the Australian Centre for Photography (2017) in Sydney. Her works were included in Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph, curated by Geoffrey Batchen for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand (2016), and also in New Matter: Recent Forms of Photography, curated by Isobel Parker Philip at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2016).
A major commission for Duo Central Park in Sydney, a new building designed by Foster + Partners, London, will be unveiled this year.
Justine Varga will present her first solo exhibition with Tolarno Galleries in April 2020.
1. Quoted from the 2017 Ramsay Art Prize website
