Minna Gilligan
Let Love Shine
9 March - 9 April 2016
Minna Gilligan works primarily with painting, drawing and collage. Her practice speaks of fleeting, personal encounters with the past and present, and manifests in a tumultuous reconciliation of both. The title of Let Love Shine is drawn from Madonna’s 1983 song Holiday and exemplifies the joyous surface optimism of Gilligan’s work, with hazy rainbows and powdery clouds of paint. Though her paintings reference 1960s/ ‘70s psychedelia and evoke a nostalgic romanticism - with lone women floating in technicolor dreams - her work is atemporal, existing in a utopian space of imagery filtered through the digital realm.
Minna Gilligan has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts. She has held solo exhibitions at Daine Singer, Melbourne Art Fair, Spring 1883, West Space, TCB Art Inc, Rear View and Dudspace (Melbourne) and participated in group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), National Galley of Australia (Canberra), Heide Museum of Art (Melbourne), Alt Space (New York), Ontario College of Art and Design (Canada), Space 15 Twenty (Los Angeles), PICA (Perth), Papermill ARI (Sydney), and in Melbourne at Knight Street Art Space, TCB Art Inc, George Paton Gallery and Gilligan Grant Gallery.
In 2015 Gilligan published her first book, Time After Time (Hardie Grant Australia/ Rizzoli New York), as well as the artist book, Poems, Prayers and Promises, commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria. Gilligan is a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary and teaches at Monash University. Her work is in the National Gallery of Australia and Deakin University collections.
Gilligan also performs in the band Pamela with artists Jon Campbell and Georgina Glanville. Recently they have performed at the National Gallery of Victoria, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), Daine Singer (Melbourne), Darren Knight Gallery (Sydney) and the Ian Potter Museum of Art (Melbourne). Gilligan maintains an illustration practice as an artist for New York-based online magazine ROOKIE as well as fashion clients, and is a member of artist collective The Ardorous, curated by Canadian photographer Petra Collins.
