Exhibitions
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ONLINE ONLY – MARCH 2023
VIEW CATALOGUE HERE – Viewer discretion is advised
Picasso’s legacy is problematic. As one of the most famous and infamous artists of our time, and a personal favourite for artist Matthew McVeigh, he is an idol who needs to be both destroyed yet simultaneously revered for his great contributions to art and culture. McVeigh is not known to be shy of speaking truths to power however in these new works he examines his own male gaze and like Picasso who said, “Good artists borrow and great artists steal”, he has re-imagined an uncancelled Picasso’s body of work placed in a contemporary context.
Matthew McVeigh is an interdisciplinary artist who graduated from WAAPA. His practice is predominantly interested in how identities, histories and institutions can be consumed and subsumed into homogenized narratives. McVeigh’s works have been acquired by important collections including the Holmes à Court Collection and the Art Gallery of Western Australia collection.
Image: Missionary, 2023. Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 101 x 76cm.

Online only – March 2023
“If you only have you – make work about you.”
Nazzari is a prolific Perth artist with an obsessive social media presence which belies their introverted and quiet nature. Working with a combination of drawing, painting, screen technology and collage, they constantly work and rework.
These new watercolours are exquisite in their detail and generous with their insights on how we interact with our own inner selves and with others. These stream-of-consciousness paintings jostle a dedicated automation to their practice with a deeply sensitive and humanistic process, ultimately showing a beautiful tension teetering between confidence and fragility.
I am a huge fan of Nazzari and of artists who can through their work, tap into a deep questioning of what makes us who we are, and why we do what we do. However, few are able to match Nazzari’s sense of clarity – or else a willingness to discover it, and all with such masterly and painterly ease.
Image: Ever, 2023. Watercolour on Arches paper, 42 x 30CM.

OPENS FRI 21 APR 2023: 6 – 8PM
VIEW SAT 22 APR + SUN 23 APR: 10 – 4PM
Gaye Jurisich lives and works in Hamilton, New Zealand and is a widely reviewed and respected multi-disciplinary artist. Her works interpret landscape as both narrative and energy, looking past the obvious to the artist’s interpretation of time, scale, space, spirit and combines this with her memories, desires, passions and fears.
Jurisich’s first solo at KolbuszSpace Secrets and Exposures (2021) sold out and her sculptures have featured in the both the Bondi and Cottesloe Sculpture by the Sea exhibitions. Jurisich has work in numerous international collections including in New Zealand, Australia, Berlin and in the Pratt Institute in New York.
This exhibition will feature new large scale paintings and smaller sculptural works.
Image: Noise (detail), 2022. Mixed media on canvas. 160 x 240cm
Past Exhibitions

OPENS FRI 10 FEB 2023: 6 – 8PM
VIEW SAT 11 FEB + SUN 12 FEB: 10 – 4PM
Robyn Bernadt is a paper installation artist who works with reclaimed paper materials as an environmental response to art making. Her practice elevates these materials; altering their perceived value and challenging people’s perceptions about the materials they usually throw away. The works take on a value-added life of their own, and the viewer can be forgiven for considering the made and presented objects are of precious materials, given the jewel-like crafting that Bernadt employs.
Glory Box is an installation of five series of paper sculptures and delicate cut-paper works exploring feminist themes and subverting traditional craft practices by juxtaposing material and imagery. Bernadt challenges traditional notions of the domestic sphere and questions problematic stereotypes of the homemaker and sex object.
Bernadt lives and works in Boorloo (Perth), and graduated from Edith Cowan University with a Bachelor of Visual Art in 1999. This is her first exhibition at KolbuszSpace.
Image: X-Stitch Ladies I, 2022. Vintage Women’s Weekly and Arches paper, 36 x 51cm

OPENS Fri 9 Dec: 6-8PM
VIEW Sat 10 Dec and Sun 11 Dec: 10-4PM
Kartika Laili AHMAD
Robyn BERNADT
Georgia BISLEY
John EDEN
Austin HONOUR
Beverley ILES
Gaye JURISICH
Luke KOLBUSZ
Ryan NAZZARI
Matvey NECHAEV
Joana PARTYKA

NOV 2022
Anthem, Matthew McAlpine’s first solo exhibition with Kolbusz Space, is a collection of recent abstract paintings that prods at the intersection of landscape, nationalism, and environmental degradation in contemporary Australia. Rendered with a selective palette with a gritty impasto surface achieved through the addition of builder’s sand in acrylic paint, the artworks poetically allude to colours and textures of charred landscapes.
Interested in the power of language and using the Australian National Anthem as a departure point, McAlpine has manipulated, removed, or added words to lines from the anthem. The text sits embedded in the paintings, applied with stencils, a process that metaphorically reckons with the construction of history, nationhood, and landscape. The idea of construction is further explored by using builder’s sand and fragments of a cast acrylic ornate frame in several works. The fragmented frames draw upon the continued presence of colonial legacies in contemporary Australia.
Matthew McAlpine is an artist predominantly working in painting and sculpture and currently living and working in Boorloo/Perth. McAlpine graduated from Curtin University in 2016 with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) and has been exhibiting regularly ever since. His practice aims to explore the complexities and problems that arise from celebrating colonial legacies. While McAlpine draws upon a range of disciplines to interrogate these ideas, his practice is brought together by its poetic and material sensibilities.
This exhibition has been supported by a Creative Development Grant from the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, Western Australia.
Image by @saltydavenport

Online only – opens Fri 7 OCT, 2022
“If you only have you – make work about you.”
Nazzari is a prolific Perth artist with an obsessive social media presence which belies their introverted and quiet nature. Working with a combination of drawing, painting, screen technology and collage, they constantly work and rework.
This new exhibition of watercolours are exquisite in their detail and generous with their insights on how we interact with our own inner selves and with others. These stream-of-consciousness paintings jostle a dedicated automation to their practice with a deeply sensitive and humanistic process, ultimately showing a beautiful tension teetering between confidence and fragility.
I am a huge fan of Nazzari and of artists who can through their work, tap into a deep questioning of what makes us who we are, and why we do what we do. However, few are able to match Nazzari’s sense of clarity – or else a willingness to discover it, and all with such masterly and painterly ease.
Image: Harlequin 2, 2022. Watercolour on Arches paper, 42 x 30CM.

OCT 2022
‘Entre chien et loup’ (Between dog and wolf) is an expression that means at dusk or nightfall, the time of day when it is too dark to see the difference between a dog from a wolf. The dog symbolises the day and the protective light, while the wolf represents the night with fears and anxieties. In between there is the doubt and uncertainty of twilight… between dog and wolf.
In this exhibition Cassel is challenging what we think we are seeing. Purposefully concealing a clarity by manipulating scale and context of the everyday objects she paints, she presents works which defy any immediate identifications or conclusions. As in between dog and wolf, where neither is recognisable, these works sit resolutely in that uncertain in between – where Cassel presents for us opportunities for exploration and discovery.
Cassel says of her paintings: “I work by analogy, by link, using cutting and collage to elaborate unique constructions. My paintings are inspired by elements of reality that have been transformed, mistreated, disembodied in order to be reborn by extraction, by change of scale, within a new context. These multiple possibilities or combinations allow for suggestive and surprising encounters.”
Caroline Cassel lives and works in Paris, where she graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts. Cassel was then awarded a residency at the Crypt d’Orsay in Paris and also the Colin Lefranc Scholarship at Curtin University in Perth.
Image: L’oeuf (The Egg). 2022. Oil on linen, 80 x 80CM

SEPT 2022
In 2018 I came across an old Fotoautomatica booth on the corner of via del’Agnolo and via Giuseppe Verdi which I later painted for my exhibition Near You in Sydney 2020.
I have continued to think about the booth’s automatic pull of nostalgia in the face of contemporary irrelevancy – and the danger of this in terms of my paintings.
While a selfie’s purpose may not be self-examination or an investigation into the moment, this avoidance has become a contemporary addiction. The paintings in this exhibition are about pulling back from an automation of fast images, fast feelings, manufactured moments and more carefully positing into a real experience.
I recently learned that the 1969 Fotoautomatica in Florence was not original but rescued from the Soviet Union, restored to its original form, and installed by set designer Matteo Sani in 2011.
Image: Tanline. 2022, oil on linen, 153 x 122CM.

AUGUST 2022
Kotsoglo’s intricate drawings seek to explore the capacity of visual art to represent and examine the wider implications of a perceived distinction between humans and the natural world.
Kotsoglo’s rejection of anthropocentrism does not render her work political in the usual sense, instead providing space for reflection rather than rhetoric.
Kotsoglo will also be showing concurrently at PICA.
Image: MATTER 2 4 2022 (Thistle) – Ink and Charcoal on Arches Aquarelle 300gsm – 76×56cm

JULY 2022
“A sharp two-stanza poem by Margaret Atwood ends with the lines “a fish hook / an open eye”. It offers an uncomfortable positioning of being both inside and outside the boundaries of control within individual relationships. Navigating such an in-betweenness of chaos and composure especially drives Olivia Colja’s art and her exhibition Return to the Hook.
Yet it’s difficult questions around intimacy that propel Colja’s latest work. ‘Competitive love is dangerous and Returning to the Hook is a line between knowing what’s moral and what’s socially taboo, but still behaving in a harmful way towards yourself and others. It can be subtle and unconscious or aggressive and explosive’, explains Colja.”
Excerpt from essay by Autumn Royal, ART GUIDE AUSTRALIA
Image: Youth, 2022. Oil on canvas 122 x 122cm

Online only: May 2022
Christophe Canato is a French-Australian photo-media artist who was accepted to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris at 17 and relocated to Perth in 2005.
Canato’s impeccably crafted and moving works explore social issues including politics and religion, physical identities and sexual orientations.
KolbuszSpace is proud to offer a studio-direct, limited release of his Anima series which examines male roles and identities in our contemporary western contexts.
This exhibition is a remarkable achievement. Each image is carefully wrought, a technical tour de force by a master of his craft. As Jean Cocteau explained “Art is a lie that always speaks the truth” and in this group of works Christophe Canato presents us with a series of elegantly constructed truths that are impossible to ignore.” TED SNELL, AM CitWA
Image: Anima #4. Archival inkjet print, edition of 5. 110 x 110cm.

JUNE 2022
** SOLD OUT **
Aileen Corbett’s sculptural ceramic forms oscillate between art and architecture, figurative and minimal abstraction. Whilst employing a lively arrangement of clean lines and sharp angles, her work is largely inspired by the physical environment and the utilitarian architecture of lesser seen cities.
Maintaining a minimal aesthetic, Corbett is interested in the principles of order, balance and harmony whilst imbuing some of her works with a whimsical personality.
Corbett studied at the School of Clay and Art in Melbourne under Shane Kent. This is her first exhibition at KolbuszSpace.
Image by Pier Carthew.

JUNE 2022
Diane Scott is a New Zealand artist who has a Master of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) from Elam School of Fine Arts University of Auckland. She is featured broadly through arts publications and her work is in corporate and private collections in NZ, USA and France.
Scott explores the tensions that exist between image and object and questions the hierarchies of the elements that comprise painting through the jumping of the image to the material, and from surface to void. She examines how an abstract painting can function as an object you see, but also in what that object makes visible through process, materiality and sensation.
Scott is interested in producing work that simultaneously questions and withholds, and how this resistance to translation is a vital part of an artwork’s enigma.
Image: The Clearing, 2022. Acrylic and graphite on synthetic paper, sealed and mounted on aluminium, 151 x 102cm

JUNE 2022
Kartika Laili Ahmad is an emerging lighting designer based in Perth who blurs boundaries between commercial design and art installation.
Ahmad explores the use of neon and argon in her works and how it affects all of our senses – directly and indirectly.
“My work is influenced by my interest in how lighting can be used as a tool to stimulate and enhance the experiential quality in the interior environment.”
Designed and manufactured locally Ahmad controls the entire process to exacting engineering and finishes.
kartikalailiahmad.com
instagram
Image supplied by artist.

MAY 2022
Austin Honour is a British/Australian multidisciplinary artist who’s work collages conventions of painting, sculpture and tattooing. Previously located in Berlin, Honour is now based in Perth, Australia.
Obsessed with context and cultural concepts, Honour explores the fascination we all share with extraterrestrials and the overlap it forces between imagination and reality, both in this work and as a metaphor for his broader practice.
Honour was awarded a BA (Hons) Fine Arts from Central St Martins in London in 2014.
Stills. Oil on linen 160 x 120cm

MAY 2022 Gallerysmith MELBOURNE
LOVE IS BACK by Waldemar Kolbusz presents in a climate of emotional maximalism, in which romance and joy are oversaturated and oversold to the extent that whatever original sensations might have existed, are now replaced. Relationships are mined for their honeymoon periods, then thrown away. The sensation of enjoyment begins to feel more of an appeal: I am in love. If you have ever had relatively meaningless sex with someone you appeared to be obsessed with only recently, you should recognise the husk of attachment I’m talking about. The exhibition isolates these tensions, considering which impressions might be truly our own.
Essay exerpt by Harry Sanderson
Happen, 2022. Oil on linen 183 x 183CM

APRIL 2022
Cult together with KolbuszSpace present an industry only event bringing together Australian design and art, with special guests Adam Goodrum and featured artists: Sam Bloor, Olivia Colja, Christophe Canato, Austin Honour, Waldemar Kolbusz, Imogen Kotsoglo, Matthew McVeigh, Matthew McAlpine and Joana Partyka.
View significant KolbuszSpace stockroom works alongside a collection showcase of furniture by Adam Goodrum for Australian design brand nau.

MARCH 2022
The filtering of gaze and desire through the CIS white heterosexual male perspective is still the dominant lens in which we view and understand body, and is a lens Gladden and Pace aim to shift and subvert through these collaborative new drawings and ceramics.
Together both artists have produced work that investigates the body as fluid, transformative and capable of existing outside of the rigid and prescribed confines of heteronormative desire, while also analysing the intersections of their queer lenses.
These new works sit together to be sometimes sweet, sometimes vulgar but mostly offering a hot, sweaty, hairy and dripping alternative approach to desire.
Dan Gladden (b. 1983) is a WA artist who has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally since completion of his Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons) in 2006, including Hatched 06 at PICA. His figurative paintings and drawings explore ideals of the masculine form, and analyse the construction of archetypal male identities.
Kimberley Pace (b. 1984) is a WA artist who has completed a Master of Arts from ECU and has exhibited regularly since 2009 both nationally and internationally. Kimberley’s practice investigates the fluidness of the corporeal body explored through a multidisciplinary studio approach involving garment, object, ceramics, drawing, performance, video and sound.
Dan Gladden and Kimberley Pace, Pickle Peel, 2021. Pencil on paper, 38 x 18 cm.

Online only Feb 2022
New works at KolbuszSpace to celebrate Sam Bloor’s significant Perth Festival exhibition UNDERTOW, where he will produce new works both on-site and beyond the walls of Fremantle Arts Centre which explore our coastline and the oceans beyond as a site of asylum and safe passage, interrogating Australian nationalism and border politics. The works challenge audiences to consider the necessity for generosity and compassion at a moment in time when our borders have never been so ferociously defended.
Since his sold out solo show at KolbuszSpace in Sept 2020, Bloor’s work has been acquired for the AGWA collection and he has shown and been collected internationally.
Image: UNDERTOW for Perth Festival, sponsored by FAC. Site specific work, Tourist Wheel Fremantle WA.

FEB 2022
Olivia Jones’ visceral and evocative oil paintings deal with history and mental health. Starting with richly coloured foundations and adding crushed rocks from her family bush block in Toodyay, Jones learns that no amount of white paint can conceal or erase the colour and texture beneath. By submitting to this futility and working within these realities, Jones adds acceptance and depth to these striking works and to the experiences which have shaped her. These works are a confident and quiet triumph.
Olivia Jones is an early career artist working in Fremantle, Western Australia. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from Curtin University and has exhibited at The Other Art Fair (Melbourne, 2017). This is her first major solo exhibition and was possible with funding awarded through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries for creative development.
Studio, photograph by Tasha Faye. 2021.