In galleries now
Melbourne, Art Beat
Lucy Ray - Windows, Blankets and a Shadow (2026)
Lucy Ray (Flinders Lane Galleries, 1st Fl, Nicholas Building, Cnr Flinders Lane & Swanston St, Melb., until Aug 15; www.flg.com.au )
Marie Hagerty (Lennox St. Gallery, 322 Lennox St, Richmond; until Aug 15; www.lennoxst.gallery )
Jason Haufe (Blockprojects Gallery, 759 Glenferrie Rd, Hawthorn; until Aug 22; www.blockprojectsgallery.com )
The COVID lockdown forced Lucy Ray into being an artist. There she was, a designer, stuck in isolation for an unforeseeable duration and wanting to do something fulfilling, something entirely for herself. So she tried the obvious. Ray did what countless art school staff have encouraged reluctant students to just get on with (although they usually won’t). She made drawings...
There are thirteen drawings and five modest oil paintings in Ray’s latest exhibition at Flinders Lane Gallery. Small and in pencil upon paper, on first glance her drawings appear modest productions. Then, if you lean in to study the application, what sort of marks are made, the artist’s self-discipline, evident throughout in a deliberate lack of variety in those marks and the voiding of graphic expressiveness, is arresting.
Each drawing is built up from densely clustered pencil strokes, every grey stroke measuring 3 to 4mm. When rendering man-made objects there are rows and rows and rows of them, neatly laid out there like a parade ground of drilling soldiers viewed from above—or, to use a more fitting visual metaphor, the overall drawing might be likened to a grey pixelated screen. Alternately, when rendering natural things, such as foliage, scrub, bushes, trees, those tiny lines will be gathered in herringbone arrangements, or spread out in flowing patterns, whatever is required to convey the visual rhythms of plant life and vegetation.
Technically, one should probably classify Ray’s works as illustrator’s drawings. Many pieces are frontally aligned, the artist merely composing with verticals and horizontals, then using a central vanishing point to run in orthogonals. Still, they’re carried out with an air of analytical precision one usually notices in the work of zoological illustrators or architectural draughtsmen. The artist is trying to act as a camera, carefully copying down what is seen, no more, no less. But that process, the heightened level of craft and, as a consequence, disengagement with what is rendered, is deceptive. Because Ray’s exhibition keeps alluding to the uncanny, many scenes putting me in mind of Shirley Jackson’s fiction, normality is about to turn unstable.
The drawings and paintings will show a very ordinary scene in the everyday world, but something out of the ordinary takes place. A crocodile crawls across the driveway of an expensive motel. Two bisons lock horns in the deserted foyer of a department store. The artist has quite a talent for dry understatement. Then there is the steer which has wandered through a shopping mall (illus below), halting for a moment above escalators in visual parody of Edwin Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen. Its as if in these renderings the world accidentally slips a gear, causing a strange incident, then normality flows again. There are more scenes of deserted places, with different animals, goats, sheep, a horse, shown where they should not be (illus above). And there are other scenes altogether, again seemingly deserted which is probably what unsettles. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of another. They may be seated in a car, while in Pool Chairs, Bunting and Shadows someone’s shadow falls into the immediate foreground. Perhaps its Ray, or might it be the viewer?, thereby edging us into this fiction.
Ray is a Brisbane artist, although the show was produced during a residency in Vancouver, on Canada’s Pacific coast, hence the American-looking forests, unfamiliar beasts, shopping centres and left-hand drive cars. The paintings are not as proficient as Ray’s drawing. Most show aerial illuminations at night (fireworks, a meteorite) and are compositionally strong. But the chromatic values are flawed, Ray using syrupy yellows when brilliant whites are required as meteorite spotters will surely point out.
An entertaining performance from a young talent of promise. —If you have an adolescent at home who is starting to draw, bring them to see.
Lucy Ray - A Mall, A Quilt and A Bull (2026)
Marie Hagerty - The Human Comedy (2026)
Marie Hagerty exhibits eleven smart and sexy canvases in the inner display space at Lennox St. Gallery. This artist has a reputation among non-objective painters for being a maverick. Not for her orthodox geometric abstractions, those austere canvases precisely divided into coloured rectangles, interlocking bars and Euclidian forms.
Instead Hagerty works with biomorphic abstraction, a style steeped in the production of Jean Arp, Henry Moore, Frances Bacon and, especially, late 1920s Picasso. Biomorphism is abstraction conducted in a sensual language of evocative organic forms—with Picasso’s erotic Marie-Therese Walther abstracts there was no disguising the allusions to breast, thigh, hip, and buttocks.
Hagerty exhibits quite bold frontal abstractions in a narrow palette of black, white and grey, sometimes with a single colour added (mostly cadmium red deep, twice pthalo blue). They’re curious works made to resemble trompe l’oeil collages, as if we are staring into a shallow cabinet in which the artist has arranged fleshy organic forms made from cut paper, fabric and wires.
As paintings go these are bundles of visual contradictions, for the artist whimsically switches both illusionism, and abstraction, on and off as she works up each piece. So we find that skinny graphic lines which zip across a canvas to balance the composition will be left as regular paint sitting flat on the surface over much of the piece; but then, in certain sections, it will appear suspended in space and made to cast a deep shadow.
Much fun has clearly been had in the studio. But what reproductions do not convey is how Hagerty applies her oils in flat coats which will dry to a medium sheen. Its a manner of painting which really jars when the artist introduces trompe l’oeil incidents; how its surface-emphasising flatness will abruptly give way to spacial illusion as flat paint casts long shadows.
Hagerty also gets up to tricks with her fleshy organic forms. Of course, stress is placed throughout on avoiding the literal, the artist sticking with abstract swellings, shapely curves and plump fleshy bulges to suggest sensual encounters. Yet this reliance on visual metaphor is suspended in certain canvases by introducing recognisable versions of human bone: a femur, a clavicle, the top of a cranium.
With these highly sophisticated works, this is very much a show for art professionals, as confirmed by some distinguished identities at the exhibition’s opening. Chris Deutscher & Karen Woodbury were there, while several curators even flew down from Canberra. Now that’s saying much.
Marie Hagerty - The Human Comedy II (2026)
Jason Haufe - Monument (2025)
Jason Haufe is reputed for the quality and inventiveness of his non-objective drawings. During the naughties they saw him thrice chosen as a finalist for the Dobell Drawing prize, as well as shortlisted for a Rick Amor Drawing Prize. Haufe has switched medium in recent years, and he is currently exhibiting eighteen black-and-white collages on thick card at Blockprojects Gallery.
The collages are quite small, most measuring just under 30 x 25cm, being presented as objects within box frames. Inspecting them closely, Haufe has sliced up then moved about and glued down multiple plain paper photocopies of several printed pages. Some have a thick smear of paint added. Others a square of white card beneath the final layer of collage. No recognisable images appear, even in fragmented form, although sometimes one seems just to make out a tiny numeral. This is illusory, because the artist used as his sources several of those printed patterns lining security envelopes, that is, detailed geometric designs intended to obscure the envelope’s contents and prevent information being read through the paper.
The results are not so much abstractions, as experiments in formlessness. There is no possibility of representation taking place. The exhibition’s notes speak of wanting to encourage visual ambiguity so that viewers may accidentally, and quite briefly, think they see something represented, the fleeting suggestion of a whole, or an apparent detail of a familiar form. Toying with the question of whether or not we can read a cohesive form in random visual data, Haufe wanders around the Psychology of Perception, especially its Gestalt Theory rabbit hole, terms not mentioned and which he is possibly unaware of.
They probably don’t introduce these disciplines anymore within either art schools or graphic design departments. My encounter with the subject of formlessness began when our class sat through a screening of Antonioni’s classic Blowup (1966); then, utterly puzzled, we had a follow-up afternoon seminar about the slippery nature of visual perception, trying to unpick the enigma at the centre of Antonioni’s plot. I’ll never forget the confusion of some students over the disappearance of Vanessa Redgrave’s lover. They just couldn’t get Gestalt Theory into their heads, and kept harping on about David Hemmings finding that corpse, and also that aimed gun, by checking his grainy photographic film (illus. below).
David Hemmings falls into formlessness
All had evolved out of Second World War, then Cold War, efforts to interpret aerial photography. How to correctly identify those hazy shapes seen by a spy plane flying tens of thousands of feet above? The result was Gestalt Theory, an approach to decoding by their visual footprint objects and structures, towns and farms, schools and office blocks, factories and military depots. ((Such material used to seem very Sixties, and rather dated, although maybe advances in AI, the development of facial recognition software, etc., and other security aspects, ensure the issues have become relevant afresh.))
As for Jason Haufe’s exhibition, there is a hit-or-miss quality to his visual mind games, and which pieces are sufficient to engage, then hold, the eye. Yes, something about the Gestalt configuration of Monument does intriguingly suggest an equestrian statue (illus above), although Keep out of reach is clearly just a formless accident (illus below). And, frankly, so are too many other exhibits.
Jason Haufe - Keep Out of Reach (2025)