MINNA GILLIGAN
SMALL WORLD
19 APRIL - 20 MAY 2023

Minna Gilligan is Melbourne/Naarm based artist who works primarily with painting, drawing and collage. Her practice speaks of fleeting, personal encounters with the past and present, often evoking a nostalgic romanticism for the pop and psychedelia of the 1960s and 70s. Yet her playgrounds of colour are also atemporal - existing in a utopian re-imagining of this time which is filtered through the digital realm of the contemporary world.

Gilligan’s Small World is a series of acrylic and spray paint paintings and large-scale fabric works. Her painterly gestures here are bold and direct, in an attempt to capture the most immediate experience of registering thought and feeling through painting. These vibrating, maximalist compositions are paired with digitally printed fabric works that collage an array of found vintage images of commodities, food and the natural world. Both techniques explore the expressive potential of the materials at hand.

Each work is a portal into the artist’s unique aesthetic universe where signs and surfaces from popular culture are re-written as personal symbols, moods and feelings. Gilligan's aesthetic realm is illustrated through rose-tinted encounters with images, commodities, colour combinations, one liners and song lyrics gleaned from the popular culture of the recent past. The paintings flow between singular and collective experiences of visual pleasure and nostalgia. A childhood memory of the artist’s Nanna singing ‘It’s a small world after all’, as well as a recent series of ‘small world’ connections in Gilligan’s life, has inspired the title, Small World. As we age and change, our worlds can seem to shrink as we begin to prioritise things in a different way. Gilligan explores the oscillating feelings of singularity and togetherness, melancholy and optimism in her interpretation of seemingly small moments.

Minna Gilligan has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts. She has held solo exhibitions at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Castlemaine Art Museum, 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), TarraWarra Museum of Art (Healesville), Alt Space (New York), Ontario College of Art and Design (Canada), Space 15 Twenty (Los Angeles), PICA (Perth), Spring 1883 (Sydney), Papermill ARI (Sydney), and in Melbourne at Knight Street Art Space, TCB Art Inc, George Paton Gallery and Gilligan Grant Gallery.
Gilligan has published three books: Time After Time (Hardie Grant Australia/ Rizzoli New York, 2015), Poems, Prayers and Promises (commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, 2015), and So Far (Bywater Bros, Canada, 2016). Her fourth book, Collage Kit: a cut and create book is forthcoming with Thames and Hudson in June. Gilligan teaches drawing at Monash University and has conducted workshops in drawing and collage at numerous institutions. As part of the band Pamela, she has 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 has been a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary and her work is in the National Gallery of Australia and Deakin University collections.

“Gilligan delights, once again, in the immediacy of drawing. She makes new paintings, returns to the boldness and freedom of acrylic and aerosol on canvas, a technique she last used in art school. She shows me a new work, hot pink and acid green and yellow, grids and flowers and swirls. In the centre, an explosion of lines draws my eye, a tornado of expressive energy. For the artist, colours have always possessed an emotional charge. Sickly sweet, too-bright, hyperreal. To me, this is the palette of heightened reality. It’s the language of fantasies and visions and dreams, of life lived at full volume. The artist has been experimenting with an earthy brown. There it is, seeping into her freewheeling compositions, imposing a limit, grounding the viewer in the here and now.”

— Neha Kale

Read the catalogue essay by Neha Kale