Zoë Croggon
Melbourne Art Fair
22-25 February 2024
We’re pleased to present a solo exhibition of Zoë Croggon's sculptural magazine collages at the Melbourne Art Fair, alongside a selection of works by artists including Kirsty Budge, Kate Tucker, Grant Nimmo and Matt Arbuckle.
In her Magazine series, Narrm/Melbourne-based artist Zoë Croggon works with precise interventions into found imagery. She creates sculptural collages that consider the relationship between the kinetic body and the aesthetic structures that impress upon it, contemplating how deeply our surroundings inform the cadence of our lives.
Disparate images are fused or folded together with an exacting focus on the formal interplay of texture, light, colour and form, melding bodily gestures together with their surroundings in combinations which are at times both sensual and severe, slick yet fractured. The pages of Croggon’s Magazines are curled, folded and tucked, mimicking the textural pliancy of fabric. They pair formal symmetries within the magazine while heightening the surgically polished and disembodied female form.
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Zoë Croggon has held solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria, Gertrude Contemporary, Peckham 24 (London), Silver Eye Centre for Photography (Pittsburgh), Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Perth Centre for Photography, the Melbourne Art Fair, and has had eight solo exhibitions with Daine Singer gallery since 2012.
Croggon has participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Monash University Museum of Art, Samstag Museum of Art, Ian Potter Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
She has been awarded the Maddocks Art Prize (2019), Art Gallery of New South Wales Studio Scholarship at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2018), ARTAND Australia / Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award (2014), the Asia-Pacific Photobook Prize (2015) and the ACACIA Art Award (2010). She has also been shortlisted for the Churchie Art Prize, Basil Sellers Art Prize at the Ian Potter Museum of Art and the Wallara Travelling Scholarship. Her work is held in collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, MUMA, Museum of Australian Photography, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Horsham Regional Gallery, Gippsland Art Gallery and Artbank.
Croggon’s first book, Arc, was published by Perimeter Editions in 2015. Her second book, How to Cut an Orange, will be published by Perimeter Editions in 2024.
Croggon completed a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts with First Class Honours in 2011.
“The decisive “cut” in collage can feel violent at times, especially working so much with photographs of the body. I like working in collage because it is full of contradictions, it is a medium that is simultaneously constructive and destructive. ”
Zoë Croggon, Seeing Darkly, 2023
collage of found images and glue on paper, Perspex frame
47.6 x 36.7 x 7 cm framed
Zoe Croggon Magazines
Kirsty Budge / Matt Arbuckle/ Kate Tucker / Grant Nimmo
In the lead-up to her exhibition, Melbourne Art Fair spoke with Zoë about the significance of the image, balancing intuition and pattern recognition, and the inter-connectivity between the body and the built environment.
“I’m interested in the shifts that occur physically and psychologically when our surroundings change, even slightly, like when a cloud obscures the light of the sun. It is the interconnectivity of things that compels me (and which I think always will), which is why my work often poises the human form and its built environment somewhat as equals, the body no longer occupying space and space no longer determining the body but each existing only in relation to the other, completed by the other.”
