BOYNES / CARMODY / HALL / THACKWAY
CHRIS CARMODY: FLUORESCENT ARRAY
Opening reception 3pm Saturday 31 May 2025
Taken off record
acrylic on board, 61.0 x 40.5 cm. $900
Showing in the window gallery in June, Chris Carmody’s Fluorescent Array, eight paintings on board from his ongoing preoccupation with the “inconclusive meaning” of the fading in sunlight and wear of found materials. “These paintings are based on faded books I’ve documented in different libraries over the years. Seen together they speak of some strange resonance between what is intended and what is incidental. My eye flicks across these faded forms searching for something.”
Chris Carmody completed an Honours in painting at ANU in 2009 and now lives and works in Brisbane.
CLARE THACKWAY: SILK PAINTINGS
Viewing and reception 3pm Saturday 31 May 2025, with Chris Carmody
Dream of Ascension
dye on silk, 57 cm x 38 cm.
Photo by Gregory Copitet
Civic Art Bureau is pleased to release five silk paintings by Clare Thackway.
“There is great fragility in these paintings, in which bruised oils are washed like watercolours and diaphanous silks carry entangled silhouettes in fluid magentas and blues. The hands evoke what Rachel Cusk calls ‘all that love and terror and strangeness’ and Louise Bourgeois’ ‘Hands’ (2002-2003), in which she rendered the psychological complexity of motherhood – her great, ambivalent subject – in red crayon traces.” Lauren Carroll Harris, 2024.
Clare Thackway was selected as a finalist in this year’s Archibald Prize. Born in Canberra, Thackway completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts, Painting at ANU in 2004. She currently lives and works in Paris, France.
ALEXANDER BOYNES: THE EDGE CANNOT HOLD
Curated by Benjamin Shingles
Opening 4pm Sat 14 June 2025
Reflections, 2025
ink, acrylic and enamel on birch board, 60 x 80cm
New artworks by Canberra artist Alexander Boynes, exploring the environmental and cultural cost of fossil fuel extraction in Australia. Through paintings in vivid, fluorescent colour, they depict tension between natural beauty and industrial violence, and inhabit a liminal space between grief and hope, loss and resistance. While the climate crisis feels overwhelming, Boynes’ work conveys an assiduous belief in the power of art to bear witness, advocate for change, and to nurture a vision of a more just and sustainable future.
Alexander Boynes works across painting, photography, print, and video installation. His work is held in major collections in Australia, the UK, and the USA. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the National Museum of Australia and Center for Art + Environment (USA), and is a curator at Canberra Contemporary.
LIZZIE HALL: THE LOST SEA
30 May - 8 June 2025 at Canberra Contemporary Platform, 19 Furneaux St, Manuka ACT
Opening 6pm Thursday 29 May 2025
Aral Sea 2001 Momento Mori 2024
oxide and oil on linen, 115 x 170cm
Photo by Stephen Best
The Lost Sea is an installation comprising a large sculpture made from salt in dialogue with oil paintings that speaks to our relationship with loss, both personal and environmental.
This project expands the work Lizzie exhibited earlier this year at the Bureau in Elegy with Kate Stevens. Described by Gordon Bull as “haunted by the ghosts of a dried and devastated landscape … full of loss and grief”, Lizzie’s Aral Sea paintings are striking and beautiful reminders of mortality, for ourselves, for those we love, and for the land.
Lizzie Hall is represented by Civic Art Bureau. She completed an Honours in printmedia and drawing at ANU in 2000.
NOW
NEVER PERFECT
Thee Monster Munch Mangler, 2023
Watercolour pencil on paper, 31 x 39 cm
Benny Chop’s Never Perfect last days. See his choppers Taylor, the long-legged Shovelhead, and Diana, the candy apple Triumph, plus artworks by over a dozen other artists. Smiles for miles.
COMING SOON TO THE BUREAU
JULY - Wouter Van de Voorde: OPGELICHT
AUGUST - Jacqueline Bradley, Rosalind Lemoh, Merryn Lloyd, Dionisia Salas: HOT, COLD, HEAVY, LIGHT
ELSEWHERE
At ANU School of Art & Design Gallery, Julian Laffan’s sublime higher degee research exhibition Tracing the Grain: Locating the life of the tree in the woodblock, until June 6
At the Drill Hall Eye to Eye: The Susan Taylor and Peter Jones Collection, 25 years of focussed and dedicated collecting by a remarkable Canberra couple. Until June 15.
At Megalo, 45 years of print, marking the anniversary of Australia’s largest open-access printmaking studio, founded in 1980.
In other news all is well on our home front. Baby Lewis giving us lots of smiles and I’m running late with almost everything. See you at the Bureau!
Cheers from Adam