Pat Brassington: Strike

As Australia’s leading surrealist, Pat Brassington’s masterful control of unreality remains unparalleled. With a career spanning four decades, this most recent exhibition is as unmissable as her first. Brassington’s lifelong interest in psychoanalysis and surrealism, and her commitment to a feminist eroticism, is described in a suite of images that hang like dream-filled windows. As recognisable as they are unforgettable, Brassington’s photographs have long defined excellence in Australian contemporary art ­– Strike is no exception.

Brassington picks up where she last left us, just outside of reality, in a soft and unsettling waking dream. The work is that of the interior, her signature pink is the back of your eyelids, or the underneath of your tongue. The hidden parts of you pictured without the usual violence of the outside. Yet still penetrating. Elongation, evisceration, and amputation are suggestions only. Greyscale for things that are whole and wholly unfamiliar like the collaged outlines of someone else’s memories; pink for what is partial, still moving slowly through you. A lilac punct, or a violet strikethrough, a chromatic aberration to send us reeling. There is rarely comfort in Brassington’s works even as the uncanny chokes on familiarity.

Winner of an Australia Council Award for Visual Arts (2018), the Don Macfarlane Prize (2017) a Redlands, Konika Minolta Art Award (2016) the Bowness Photography Award in (2013), the Australian Paper Art Awards (2001), the Shell Print Award (1997) and the Maude Vizard-Wholohan Art Prize Purchase Award (1990), among numerous other grants and awards, Brassington’s works are held in numerous public collections across Australia including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, Fremantle Arts Centre, Geelong Art Gallery, Queensland Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Museum of Contemporary Art, MONA, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Cologne Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia and the Heide Museum of Modern Art as well as in numerous national and international private collections.

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