Kirsty Budge
Bridge and Tunnel
26 July - 13 September 2025

Kirsty Budge’s paintings emerge from a process of deep introspection and an interest in psychoanalysis and philosophy that seeks to embrace the richness of the world in all its absurdity and poignance. Her works emphasise ambiguous thresholds of everyday experience, visually describing how one’s inner life records and reflects upon sensible perceptions of the external world through a painterly mix of figuration, abstraction, personal narrative and cultural imagery.

In Budge’s process, the removal of paint is equal to its application. Layering and excavation are vital to the construction of the composition, as forms that initially appear to be at the forefront of the work are actually exposed remnants of the past underpainting. This continual process of re-inscription stems from the artist’s understanding of the ever shifting relationship between memory, dreams and perspective as guided by intuitive and unconscious processes.

Kirsty Budge, *Leopard eating people’s faces party*, 2025, photograph: Tim Gresham

The works of Bridge and Tunnel were created across the past year as Budge travelled between New York, Napier, the Blue Mountains and Naarm/Melbourne. They emerge from Budge’s desire to explore her relationship to the shifting environmental and psychological spaces inhabited across these different sites, and how boundaries between self and other, body and world are re-negotiated through both the experience of being in transit, and the process of making of a painting. The show is particularly informed by her experience spending several months in New York: a place saturated with cinematic myth and a sense of possibility, that also often serves up poignant reminders of the social and economic inequalities embedded within the ‘American Dream'. The paintings depict her experience navigating new cities, landmarks, personalities, housing and public transport as sites that produce new encounters, voids and potentialities. Budge takes on the role of voyeur and chronicler of the everyday theatre of life as it plays out across public and private space, colliding fragments of theatrical and pedestrian drama into a swirling soup of the subconscious.

Kirsty Budge is an Aotearoa/New Zealand-born artist based in Melbourne/Naarm. Recent exhibitions include NADA, New York (2024); Minor Attractions, London (2024); FAIR by NADA; Melbourne Art Fair (Daine Singer, 2020, 2022, 2024); Brown Mirror (2024), (I’ve got) half a mind (2022), If you’re gonna spew, spew into this (2020), The Doing (2019), Gawkalitis (2017), Daine Singer, Melbourne; NADA New York (Daine Singer, 2018); The Painters are In, Spring 1883 (Daine Singer, 2016), and I’m not desperate, you’re desperate, Sarah Scout Presents (2016). Group exhibitions include Killing Time, Chapter House Lane (2018); VCA 150 alumni 9x5, Margaret Lawrence Gallery (2017), Painting. More Painting, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2016), Spinnerei Leipzig, Germany (2016), Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery (2021, 2019, 2017), Return, Daine Singer (2015), Man, Tristian Koenig (2015); Pretty Shit, Incidents Above a Bar (2015) and Paintings, C3 (2014).

In 2021 Kirsty Budge won the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize. She has undertaken residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, as the recipient of an Art Gallery of New South Wales Studio Scholarship (2018), and at the Caselberg Trust on the Otago Peninsula, New Zealand (2019). In 2025/6 Budge will undertake a residency in New York and a solo exhibition in London.

Budge has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) from the Victorian College of the Arts, where she was recipient of the 2014 Stirling Collective Award for Painting. Her work is held in the Artbank, Bendigo Art Gallery and City of Port Phillip collections.

Kirsty Budge, *Red, White and Blur*, 2025, photograph: Tim Gresham

“Her most technically brilliant exhibition yet. There is a toughness about her work... there is also a really generous voluptuous line, a confidence of line that I really appreciate, but in between that confidence of line there is an experimental mark-making.”

— Tai Snaith, RRR Smart Arts

Listen to the review on RRR Smart Arts