Pat Brassington: Dear Diary
Pat Brassington is one of Australia’s most significant and influential artists. With a career spanning four decades, Brassington has become well known for her incisive ability to infuse the familiar with the fantastic. Her practice is informed by an interest in surrealism, feminism and psychoanalysis.
Seemingly innocent, her enigmatic photomontages open up like a flower, gorgeous and suggestive, then morph into a psychological Rorschach. In her work the endless possibilities of our complex inner states - narratives of sex, memory and identity - run quietly rampant.
Her images are at once charming and menacing. They rouse a sense of disquiet as they subtly and humorously scratch at the underbelly of the human condition. In her unique way, Brassington is able to present haunting, dream-like images which lead the viewer to the edges of the imagination.
Pat has won the prestigious Australia Council Award for Visual Arts, the inaugural Don Macfarlane Prize and the Bowness Photography Prize. In 2012, Brassington was honoured with a major nationally touring survey of her work, A Rebours, by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art .
Selected solo exhibitions include: Nonetheless, Latrobe Regional Gallery (2019); The Body Electric, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2017); Pat Brassington atTen Cubed, Melbourne (2014); In Search of the Marvellous at CAST Gallery, Hobart (2013); a survey exhibition at the Lonnstrom Art Museum, Finland (2008); Pat Brassington at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2007); a major solo retrospective at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne (2002) and Gentle at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2001).
Pat Brassington’s work is held in many public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Queensland Art Gallery; National Gallery of Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart; ArtBank, Sydney; Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne; Cologne Museum of Contemporary Art, Germany; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; Murdoch University, Perth; Devonport Art Gallery, Tasmania; University of the Northern Territory, Darwin and La Trobe University Art Collection, Melbourne.
