MELBOURNE.- Sullivan+Strumpf Melbourne’s upcoming exhibition 'tissu tissue' from one of Australia’s most highly regarded abstract colourists Lara Merrett opens Thursday July 20 until August 12, 2023. A manifestation of the way she observes the world around her, Melbourne-born Merrett's stunning works on canvas are a visual language through which she expresses a world view, charged with a conceptual exploration of materiality and mystical thinking.

Lara Merrett works within an expanded field of painting, with as deep an understanding of the interplays of colour as those of surface in works of both intimate and monumental scale. Within her colour fields, the artist imagines all the ‘geographies of space, atmosphere and physicality’, layering and pouring water-based materials directly in a process never fully anticipated yet always transformative for the work and, when collaborative, all of those involved.

For the artist, ‘It’s like magic when the unexpected starts to happen. I love it—it’s completely intoxicating. Each work has its own personality and therefore takes its own time.’ Such alchemy might last days, weeks or perhaps months. In each case, the artist and works are always driven in part by their material exigencies but so too by their conceptual sources drawn from literature, nature, community and activism. Merrett’s simultaneous agility, amplification and softening of the rigid confines of canvas and gallery, both complicate and honour painterly traditions. Merrett is the recent recipient of the 2023 ‘Sense of Place’ grant awarded by Shoalhaven City Council, with which she will undertake a community engagement in collaboration with the Manyana Matters Environmental Association, continuing her shift towards merging community and work with her formal colourist investigations, creating both expanded canvases and expanded communities. Merrett is currently preparing for her next solo exhibition with Sullivan+Strumpf, tissue, tissue, which will launch in July of 2023, in Melbourne.

Born in 1971, Melbourne, Australia, Lara Merrett currently lives and works between Sydney and Bendalong, New South Wales. She studied painting abroad at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain, before completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales and graduating with a Master of Arts (Painting). In 2022, Merrett was announced the winner of the Ravenswood Women’s Art Prize and she held major solo exhibition ‘By my side, walking’ with Sullivan+Strumpf which was supported by significant Create NSW funding.


Sullivan+Strumpf
Lara Merrett: tissu tissue
July 20th, 2023 - August 12th, 2023

Everyone’s welcome to the opening event that evening, Thursday July 20, 6pm to 8pm, at 107 - 109 Rupert St, Collingwood.