2023: Mikala Dwyer

Gertrude is pleased to announce the release of the 2023 Gertrude Edition, contributed by Mikala Dwyer.

Mikala Dwyer is one of Australia’s most respected artists. Exhibiting prolifically nationally and internationally since the 1980s, her distinctive practice is revered for its consistent metabolism across sculpture, installation, painting, performance and, more recently, animation. Elaborating symbolism and rituals of the sacred, profound and magical, her works are noteworthy for their evocation of the alchemical, mysterious and unknowable. Her work takes objects, forms and materials from the everyday, writhes them through the canons of geometric abstraction and minimalism of 20^th century art and design, and disperses them poetically within museum, gallery and public environments. It is a practice marked by its consistent experimentation with materiality, form and configuration, mystically arranged to encompass and create forces of energies within space. 

The two editions are based upon larger banner works first commissioned by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth, Aotearoa as part of her 2019 project Earthcraft, taking cue from the Old English word for geometry (eorðcræft). The works were subsequently shown at Anna Schwartz Gallery in 2020 and are now held within the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia. The two 2023 Gertrude Editions have been produced in collaboration with bespoke screen-printing and design house Spacecraft.

Selected solo exhibitions include Penelope and the Seahorse, Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney, 2023; The Silverings, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, 2022; Weights of Light, ACMI, Melbourne, 2022; A Sun, A Flower, A Bee, 1301SW, Melbourne, 2021; Bird, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2021; A shape of thought, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2017; Goldene Bend'er, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2013; and Panto Collapsar, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 2012;

Selected curated exhibitions include: The Recent, Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, 2023;  Making Worlds, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2022; Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2021; The Great Invocation, Garage Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2021; 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Art: Monster Theatres, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2020; Blessed Be: Mysticism, Spirituality, and the Occult in Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Tuscon, Arizona, 2018;  9^th Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine What You Desire, Sydney, 2014; The End of the 20^th Century. The Best is Yet to Come. A Dialogue with the Marx Collection, Hamburger Banhof, Berlin, Germany, 2013; 7^th Biennale of Sydney, The Beauty of Distance, Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, Sydney, 2010; TarraWarra Biennale 2008: Lost and Found, An Archaeology of the Present, TarraWarra Museum of Art.

Mikala participated in the Gertrude Studio Program from 2019-2022. She has presented solo exhibitions and contributed to curated projects at Gertrude since 1990, including: Ode to the ‘ō‘ō (with James Hayes), Gertrude Glasshouse, 2021; Gertrude Studios 2021: If Not at Arm’s Length; Gertrude Studios 2019; Alterbeast, 2010; Untitled Installation, 1991; and Wall to Wall: Ceiling to Floor, 1990.

Mikala Dwyer is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Gadigal Country Sydney and 1301SW, Naarm Melbourne.