SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Maybaum Gallery will present Tipping the Scales, a solo exhibition by Australian artist Belinda Fox. Tipping the Scales is Fox's fifth solo exhibition with Maybaum Gallery and brings together a new series of paintings that explore growth and the strength of nature in a time of deep uncertainty. With so much conflict, displacement, and environmental crisis around us, Fox feels compelled to make work that offers a quiet resistance —an intentional act of optimism. These paintings are her way of trying to tip the scales toward something more compassionate and healing.
As with much of her work, Fox combines a range of techniques— watercolor, ink, pen, collage, spray acrylic, and encaustic wax. The layered surfaces and botanical elements speak to a love of materials and mark-making, and to the richness she finds in the natural world— not as a form of escape, but as a vital source of resilience.
Two key works, The Story Makers, are based on news images of destruction and human displacement. In them, Fox is asking viewers to pause, to reflect, and to resist the increasing numbness to the ongoing suffering around us. She wants us to remember the importance of safety, resilience, and compassion in these trying times.
Another pair of works, Guardian I and II, depict two trees of deep personal significance. These trees quietly watch over the studios of two long-time collaborators: Wilfred Kalf in the Netherlands, and Neville French in Australia. Wilfred’s wild pear tree, with its gnarled branches and gentle presence, stands sentinel beside his woodcraft studio in the Dutch countryside. Neville’s sprawling walnut tree, laced with golden lichen, grows just outside his ceramic workspace in country Victoria, its vibrant color and form a constant companion to his relentless curiosity and experimentation.
Fox states: I’ve spent time with both these trees, felt their energy and quiet authority. They’ve become symbols of creative guardianship—natural anchors in the environments where ideas are shaped and refined. These paintings are my tribute to those spaces, and the quiet forces that support making.
Belinda Fox is a multidisciplinary artist working in printmaking, painting, ceramics, and sculpture. Her work, which is often described as beautifully rendered and technically accomplished, investigates fragility and imbalance in an increasingly unstable world. Belinda Fox brings together elements of tradition, an artistic sensibility in her contemplation of our physical and metaphorical landscape, and a desire to find intimacy in what resides around us. With a technical mastery now characteristic of her work and a refusal of confinement to any one medium or form, Fox toes the line between abstraction and figuration, between intimacy and solitude, between the positive and the negative. She has won numerous awards for her printmaking and drawing including the Paul Guest Drawing Prize, the Burnie Print Prize and the Silk Cut award for linocuts. She has received funding grants to undertake artist in residencies in USA, Greece, Singapore, Darwin, Perth, Sydney and Tasmania and she has participated in major survey exhibitions of contemporary Australian printmaking in the UK, China and Australian Regional galleries.
Drawing from her virtuosic skills as a former Master Printer and fusing together profoundly personal and global concerns, Belinda Fox’s work lays bare the paradoxes endemic to contemporary human experience. Working in painting, drawing, glass, sculpture, printmaking and collaboration, Fox examines the volatility of our era, excavating the iridescent beauty that flickers below the shadowy surface of conflict and despair. Currently based in Melbourne, Fox presents us with a series in which beauty is a gateway into dense conceptual terrain patch worked with blackness and light, an ‘antidote’ to our polarized epoch; a bridge connecting us through a shared, albeit almost forgotten, humanity.
Belinda Fox has forged an international career showing in Australia, USA, Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea and Jakarta. She has received several notable awards including the Northern Beaches Environmental Art & Design Award (paper category) 2022, Paul Guest Drawing Prize (2010), and Burnie Print Prize (2007) and been a finalist in many awards including the Swan Hill Print and Drawing Award (2022, 2018, 2006, 2004) and Fremantle Art Prize (2007, 2006, 2003). Fox has taken up many residencies including a sculpture project with Urban Arts Projects (UAP) in Shanghai, painting in Provence, France, printmaking at C.A.P Studios, Thailand and Skopelos, Greece. Her work is also held in major collections including the Kunstmuseum, Netherlands, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Australia, Manly Art Gallery & Museum, Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Artbank, Fremantle Arts Centre, Print Council Of Australia, Swan Hill Regional Gallery and Wollongong University. In 2016 a monograph of Fox’s practice was published by Goff editions, USA, titled ‘Back to the Start’.
Her work has been displayed at the National Gallery of Australia and collected by National, Regional and Corporate collections globally. In 2015 Goff Editions published a monograph ‘Back to the start’ charting Fox’s career to date. Prior to 2006 Fox worked as a master printer and workshop manager at Port Jackson Press Australia, collaborating with leading Australian artists including John Olsen, Tim Storrier and David Larwill and Dorothy Napangardi. Belinda Fox is currently based in Melbourne, Australia and she studied printmaking at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. Belinda is also a registered artist of The Stroom, Den Haag.
