KIRSTY BUDGE
(I’VE GOT) HALF A MIND
12 OCTOBER - 12 NOVEMBER 2022
Kirsty Budge’s paintings combine deep introspection and an interest in psychoanalysis with a broader view that embraces the richness of the world. They are a complex and ambiguous mix of figuration, abstraction, personal narrative and landscape.
“At the moment I appear to be a painter of negative space, literally and figuratively. I’m a painter of the background, of the metaphorical and physical absence and lack, of the dark recesses, of shadows, of subtext, of the scene behind the scenes, of layered amendments, clues and complex cover ups. Of a dirty unearthing of absurd situations that require objective deliberation in order to proceed. They are an illusion of new space, hidden frameworks and secret structures, exposing the remnants of history at the forefront. All figures and forms are found, relieved, embodied, illuminated, buried and built, through oil paint. It’s an abyss, a crypt of melancholia teetering between disgust and optimism but with some moments of light at the end or on the other side. Somewhere around here.”
Kirsty Budge is a New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist. Recent exhibitions include FAIR by NADA, New York (Daine Singer, 2020); Melbourne Art Fair (Daine Singer, 2020 and 2022); If you’re gonna spew, spew into this, Daine Singer, Melbourne (2020); The Doing (Daine Singer, 2019); NADA New York (Daine Singer, 2018); Gawkalitis, Daine Singer (2017), The Painters are In, Spring 1883 (Daine Singer, 2016), and I’m not desperate, you’re desperate, Sarah Scout Presents (2016).
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).
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Photography: Tim Gresham
