SYDNEY.- Sullivan+Strumpf presents a major solo exhibition from celebrated contemporary artist eX de Medici, Double Double Crossed, running across both level of their Zetland Sydney Gallery May 26 to June 11, 2022.

eX de Medici is a voice of dissent in the Australian art world. Her meticulous still lifes of skulls, helmets, guns, flowers and insects are at once beautiful and ugly, designed to lure the viewer into confronting scenes of power, violence, corruption and greed. – National Gallery of Australia, Know My Name

Across a career spanning almost four decades, Canberra-based eX de Medici has garnered acclaim Australia-wide and internationally. Her work featured in the 2021 iteration of the National Gallery of Australia’s iconic Know My Name exhibition; and is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Portrait Gallery, Australian War Memorial, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, and Queensland Art Gallery, to name a few.

Since her earliest days of art making, de Medici’s work has interrogated and challenged representations of the nexus of power, violence and greed.

As a student – of Fine Art at Canberra School of Art, she became immersed in the capital’s punk and experimental art scene; reflected in a practice encompassing photocopy, computer-generated imagery, installation and performance, aspects of which she continues to return to today.

In 1988 she had her first tattoo, and subsequently, with the assistance of an Australia Council Overseas Development Grant, travelled to Los Angeles to study with renowned tattooist Kari Barber, as an extension of her work in experimental mediums.

For the next 12 years de Medici worked as a tattoo artist, shifting her practice from traditional art mediums to bodies; and her involvement in this sub-culture, replete with its own language, continues to underpin the complex iconography of her work today.

The late 1990s saw a radical departure in the artist’s practice, inspired in part by the watercolours of botanical illustrator Ferdinand Bauer, and also, as a reaction to John Howard’s years as Prime Minister of Australia.

In response, de Medici herself turned to watercolour - the most conservative form of communication she could think of, to address her concerns around the ultra-conservatism of the period, and the broader implications of their impact on the nation’s political discourse. The artform’s traditional reputation, as a conservative, feminine medium for amateurs, inestimably appealing to her consistently contrary stance.




Since this time, she has continued to work primarily in watercolours, applying her expertly honed skill and discipline as a tattoo artist to large representations on paper. Over the decades, the issues addressed in her work have broadened to include the ongoing impacts of colonisation, political and economic power, and the veracious and reverberating effects of global capitalism and human greed.

In 2000 de Medici undertook a residency at the CSIRO, which extended to a 20+ year relationship, and was the foundation for the scientific collaboration that has led to her latest body of work, opening at Sullivan+Strumpf May 26.

In 2006 she was awarded the Australian Print Workshop Collie Print Trust Fellowship; and in 2009 was named as Australia’s Official War Artist for the Australian Defence Force (ADF) peacekeeping mission in the Solomon Islands. Travel continues to inform de Medici’s practice and most recently, several trips to Iran have heightened the influence of Persian history and culture on her work.

In Double Double Crossed, de Medici brings into focus her long-term involvement with the CSIRO’s Entomology Division, in particular her relationship with Dr Marianne Horak and Ted Edwards, of the Australian National Insect Collection.

In a series of her typically exquisite images, she zooms in on the highly detailed bodies of the Microlepidoptera [small moths] at the heart of Horak and Edwards’ studies. However, these images are far from traditional natural history illustrations of these two genetically related specimens from New Guinea and mainland Australia.

In beautifully executed watercolour, de Medici also communicates the broader political shifts and environmental impacts that close research of these specimens brings to light.

In characteristic de Medici style, the abdomens of these tiny animals are replaced by the molecular structures of what the artist feels are some of contemporary society’s greatest ills – Greenhouse, Omnicron, Plutonium (Fission), Testosterone x Drill Bit – with these evils becoming the works’ titles.

Part moth, part weapon, these beautiful creates also continue de Medici’s ongoing exploration of hybridity: capturing the dual evolutionary pathways that reflective of the natural world, and the impact of human dominance in play.

Double Double Crossed also includes two of de Medici’s ‘signature’ portraits of guns, elaborately wrapped in fabric drawn from the clothing worn in historic paintings by significant figures such as Elizabeth I.

Like much of her work, these terrifyingly beautiful images convey the ongoing ramifications of history and the devastating effects that power and greed continue to have on our planet.