Jan Murphy Gallery is excited to present Flowerings by Melbourne-based Protege artist Louise Tate.

Personal and fictional histories layer the paintings that Louise Tate crafts from family photographs, public archives, and landscape imagery. In these vignettes, from different times and places, her paintings are built, in layers of textures and marks, to defeat the linearity of time. They become an amalgam of human experience, her own palimpsest of history that extends outside the moment. Painted during lockdown and in the time following, Tate’s dreamlike imagery offers a cautious sense of levity and hope.

“There have been so many hours of solitude this year. The majority of this exhibition was made during lockdown in Melbourne, where life mostly took place within the four corners of my living room. The roads outside the apartment where I live quickly emptied, and people watching became bird watching as pigeons reclaimed the street. The hours lengthened, thick and slow like molasses. The vastness of the world shrank to the barest of birdsong.”
Louise Tate, 2021

Tate completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (with first class honours) at Melbourne’s RMIT in 2016. During her degree she undertook a university exchange in the Netherlands studying (for six months) at the Utrecht School of the Arts (2014). This was formative for her painting practice. In 2019, Tate completed a residency at the prestigious NARS Foundation in New York and was also a finalist in the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize. In 2020 Tate was a semi-finalist for the Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship and a finalist in the Hopper Prize (USA).

Louise Tate, Too many choices, 2021, oil on linen, 71.5 x 61.0 cm (detail)