Smithereens

About

“EVERYTHING IS BROKEN. BLOWN TO SMITHEREENS.”

Richly ornamented and apparently beautiful, eX de Medici’s work interrogates the politics of power and gender relations. Working in the demanding medium of watercolour, often on an unusually monumental scale, De Medici’s practice engages with politico-economic systems of control and the ways in which these are constructed and distributed through violence. This exhibition extends de Medici’s exploration of corporate morality, mass surveillance, data collection and the consequences that accompany the abuse of authority.

eX de Medici is one of Australia’s most significant artists. Her work has been extensively collected by public museums, including: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; and Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.

With a career spanning over four decades, her work has been exhibited in numerous international institutional exhibitions, including: Urima University, Iran (2013); University of the Arts London (2010): Innsbruck Natural History Museum/Art Gallery, Innsbruck, Austria (2007) and a forthcoming group exhibition at La Salle College of the Arts in Singapore curated by Bala Starr. Her work has also been featured at international art fairs including Art Basel Hong Kong.

Drawing from art historical traditions and tattoo subculture, de Medici creates scenarios that expose the dangers behind benign appearances, exploring the accumulation and expression of power through violence; both hidden and in plain sight. De Medici uses historical decorative styles to create complex paintings which both emphasise and critique conservatism, functioning as a conceit; a device “to bell the cat.”

For the artist’s first solo exhibition with Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore, de Medici will present a medium-defying seven-meter-long watercolour from the 2017 series Spies Like Us featuring CCTV encrusted telephone towers, and new “smithereens” paintings from which the exhibition takes it’s title. De Medici has drawn inspiration from Canberra, the Australian capital city where the artist has lived since childhood. A central work of the exhibition will be a large-scale watercolour and egg tempera , Protect your Insecurity, which depicts a grand monument clustered with paint-splattered CCTV cameras. This work references the Australian-American Memorial, a public sculpture outside the Department of Defence in Canberra, the pinnacle of which is topped with a stylised figure of the American Eagle.

The monument acts as a bridge between the two bodies of work presented in Smithereens; the tower from the 2017 works being from the same location. The telephone tower works will be complemented by new paintings utilising a shared motif which mimics the soft-serve corporate babbling of multi- national corporations. Images in which everything is broken; blown to smithereens.

“Art”, says de Medici, “has no ability to make a difference, but we must raise the alarm. If we don’t we are complicit.”