Current Exhibition
Nicole Zhang (b.1997)
The Growing II (2024)
Acrylic on Canvas
152cm x 122cm
$6000AUD
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NICOLE ZHANG (b. 1997)
The Growing II (2024)
Acrylic on Canvas
152cm X 122cm
$6000 AUD
The Growing II (2024)
Acrylic on Canvas
152cm X 122cm
$6000 AUD
i am the gardener and the flower is a new body of work which reflects on the labour of personal and spiritual growth through the liturgy of gardening.
Depicting multiple figures labouring in a rain garden, the works parallel permaculture with cultivating the heart and navigating the emotional landscape in the pursuit of understanding the self and shaping character. The fruiting tree is a biblical reference to 9 fruits of the spirit (otherwise known as 9 virtues) and is an image of abundance and appeal and yet also of expectation and duty.
The figures in the garden overlap with one another and the plants within the garden, becoming indistinguishable from them. i am the gardener and the flower quotes a line in the poem “I am given a body” by Osip Mandelshtam which the work contemplates as acknowledging the individual’s agency and participation in cultivating one’s identity and place whilst also being interdependent and shaped by community.
NICOLE ZHANG
Nicole Zhang’s practice centres on genre painting and its potential to respond to the complexities of everyday life and document encounters between the mundane and the sacred. Zhang’s work engages with and references the pictorial vernacular of modern and contemporary figurative painting. Through the use of compositional strategies, patterning, recurring symbols and motifs, Zhang’s work acknowledges the duality of quotidian tasks as at once prosaic and spiritual.
Zhang is the current recipient of the Art Incubator award and has exhibited around Australia. She has also been a finalist in the Blake Prize and Fishers Ghost.
This is her second solo show.
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