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Level 5, 104 Exhibition St., VIC 3000, Melbourne, Australia
Open: Tue-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat 1pm-4pm

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Artist: Benjamin Armstrong

Pictures for Thinking has a wide breath of subjects: light, body, history, time, and measurement. Combinations of these subjects are used to elicit insights or to raise questions. In Bones III penetrating light becomes the source illuminating the shared structures of our varied bodies.

The same subject is often seen across two or more pictures. The parallel optics between them trigger comparisons and invite the viewer to examine myriad interpretations across subject and history.

The making of these artworks is akin to a chemical spill. It is an accident with an unpredictable result, but one in which chance and intuition coalesce. The entangled methodologies that bring these pictures to fruition include, in no particular order or hierarchy, the conventional mediums of print, drawing and painting.

If I was to ask the viewer of these artworks one thing, it would be to slow the gaze and deepen the optic nerves connection to the brain, to go the opposite direction of scrolling and millisecond focus.

– Benjamin Armstrong, February 2022

Benjamin Armstrong made his Tolarno Galleries debut in 2008 with the opening show at Tolarno’s new Exhibition Street gallery space, and was lauded by critic Sebastian Smee in The Australian as “the most dazzling show of the new gallery season... among the strangest, most beguiling works of art produced in Australia in the past 10 years.”

Significant recognition followed swiftly thereafter, with invitations to show as part of NEW 09 at ACCA and New Acquisitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2009); Adelaide Biennial (2010); Melbourne Now at National Gallery of Victoria (2013) and Biennale of Sydney (2014).

International galleries also beckoned, with showings in Rome, Beijing, Gwangju and New York. Acquisitions came from the British Museum, London, Monash University Museum of Art, University of Queensland Art Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, MCA Sydney, Art Gallery of South Australia and Art Gallery of Western Australia.

In 2018, Armstrong’s 2008 linocut series The shape of things to come inspired the title of the inaugural exhibition at Buxton Contemporary in Melbourne.