Smithereens
Sullivan+Strumpf, Singapore
Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore is delighted to present the first solo exhibition in South East Asia by senior Australian artist eX de Medici.
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, eX de Medici 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.
eX de Medici began studying in the early 1980s, experimenting with alternate forms such as performance and photocopy. Since then, she has persistently stormed the barricades of art and used it to challenge the status quo. Over a forty-year career, she has followed a range of artistic paths, while consistently critiquing the social and political systems that govern our lives.
Having begun her career in painting and photo-media, de Medici worked for a decade as a tattooist after completing an Australia Council-funded apprenticeship in Los Angeles in 1989. She relinquished professional tattooing in 2000 to concentrate on watercolour, a medium through which she seduces and provokes her audience. The artist has pursued her cause with the resolve of a bloodhound, determined to root out and unmask the deceit at the heart of global struggles for political ascendancy. In this context, her watercolours are as transgressive as her tattoos.
The watercolours in Smithereens draw on key themes in de Medici’s work, exemplified by the panoramic tableaus. Alive to the dangers of governmental control in an increasingly digitised world, she realises our worst nightmares in Spies Like Us 2016, replete with a nest of mobile phone towers, and a cluster of ominously dispassionate surveillance cameras. I killed her with my club 2017 finds her in familiar territory, with the language of flower painting hard up against emblems of power and death. Amongst a field of floral motifs lie deadly rounds of ‘expanded ammunition’. Devised to unfurl on impact, the bullets rip through flesh, the spent cartridges bearing an uncanny resemblance to flowers.
