Figure Holding Ground brings together new paintings by Australian artists who push the speculative and critical possibilities of figurative painting today.

While there is an accepted global return to figuration and market forces repeat and sustain the genre’s commercial presence, there are also exciting new ways that contemporary painters are negotiating the potential of figuration, and particularly how figurative painting is being negotiated in this country. Artists borrow from multiple histories of painting to give sense to a subject, they experiment across diverse material approaches, they situate the figure within socio-political contexts and speculative pasts and futures. Ultimately, the nine painters in Figure Holding Ground unsettle both viewers and subjects through the endless potential of how a figure can ‘hold’ a ground.

The global shift away from a predominantly white male art domain towards embracing diverse artists and subjects has reignited figurative painting’s potential to tell stories, ask critical questions, and represent history, society, community. Figure Holding Ground asserts that any painting – particularly those holding the human figure within a pictorial space proposing a real-world imaginary – is loaded with politics.

Curated by Fernando do Campo and Michael Edwards