Gertrude Contemporary is delighted to be hosting book launches by Perimeter Books for two of our Alumni Studio Artists at Gertrude Glasshouse in February.
Emily Ferretti
Walking in Both Directions
Saturday 4 February, 3–5pm
Gertrude Glasshouse
44 Glasshouse Road, Collingwood VIC
The idea of duality is hardly a new one in the scope of art history. The threshing of tensions between lineages, aesthetics, references, techniques and their various counterpoints is at the core of art’s continual re-imagining and manifestation, especially in the context of the contemporary. During a career that has spanned the last decade, Melbourne-based artist Emily Ferretti has pieced together a convincing painterly vocabulary, only to gently rephrase, remould and recast it, time and time again. The major new book, Walking in Both Directions, arrives at a pivotal time for the artist. Bookending a three-month residency in the Australian Council’s Greene Street studio in New York City in 2015, the paintings, drawings and (in one case) major installation that feature in this book not only explore her work’s increasingly abstract, complex and faceted terrains, but her growing fascination and research into the aesthetic, compositional and philosophical underpinnings of American folk art.
Image: Emily Ferretti, Walking in Both Directions, cover artwork, courtesy of the artist and Perimeter Books
Laith McGregor
S-O-M-E-O-N-E
Saturday 11 February, 3–5pm
Gertrude Glasshouse
44 Glasshouse Road, Collingwood VIC
Taking the major 2012 work S-O-M-E-O-N-E as both its title piece and a point of embarkation, this major volume offers the first substantial overview of the recent practice of Australian artist Laith McGregor. Eschewing the formal and structural conventions of the traditional monograph, this book is neither exhaustive nor linear in its breadth. Rather, it assumes the similarly rigorous and rambling quality that has come to characterise McGregor’s scroll-like drawings, idiosyncratic sculptures and painted gestures, honing its focus on a selection of key works created during the last five years. Made in close collaboration with the artist, S-O-M-E-O-N-E offers an at once critical, playful and heuristic expression of a practice that is psychic, layered, cumulative, diaristic and highly personal in its scope. In the same motion, it heralds a telling new voice in the contemporary art vernacular.
Image: Laith McGregor, S-O-M-E-O-N-E, cover image courtesy of the artist and Perimeter Books