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Artist: Justine Varga

Opening: Saturday 11 March, 1pm-3pm. RSVP

Tolarno Galleries presents Sydney-born, UK-based artist Justine Varga’s new exhibition, End of violet.

Consisting of six chromogenic photographs, each in an edition of 5, End of violet is Varga’s second show with Tolarno Galleries, following her outstanding debut, Tachisme, in 2021.

Varga’s distinctive practice sees her engage with the photographic medium as a means of drawing with light, eschewing camera equipment for a range of experimental image-making processes.

For this exhibition, she began by holding palm-sized emulsion film negatives in her hand, subjecting them to sundry scratches, nicks and marks, painting them with saliva, nail polish or pigment, and exposing them to light.

Then, while enlarging the negatives and printing them up in the darkroom, she further manipulated the conditions of their exposure to achieve the dazzling effects on display in this suite of large-scale photographs.

Each enlarged negative is bordered by a margin of pulsing colour – blood red, hot pink, warm black, olive green, ultra violet – which reveals the chromatic interaction of Varga’s expressive mark-making.

However, the artist rejects any association of colour with the decorative. Instead, she engages with the generative power of colour.

As she states:

“The border area of a photograph is generally either black or white, a binary that is reiterated without thought. In fact, we are encouraged not to pay attention to it at all. I decided I wanted to disturb this experience of looking (or of looking but not seeing) by reclaiming agency over that part of the photograph with colour.”

Darkly radiant, Varga’s photographs exploit the indexical nature of the medium as a trace of the world. Speaking to the material conditions through which they were made, her layered images are both soft and spiky, warm and cool, painterly and graphic.

In the catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition, Saul Nelson writes:

“Varga takes the ruined, the broken, the nonconforming – the negative exposed to too much light, too much colour; smeared, scratched, painted, spat upon – and holds them up to us to see their beauty. She breaks the rules of photography, the better to show us their effects; effects that are so familiar that we don’t usually contemplate them.”

A graduate of the National Art School in Darlinghurst, Sydney, Justine Varga has had 17 solo exhibitions in Australia and New Zealand to date, and has been curated into more than 90 group exhibitions nationally and internationally.

She is the recipient of a number of awards, prizes and grants including the Dobell Drawing Prize in 2019, the Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture in 2017, and the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award in 2016 and 2013.

Varga’s work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of South Australia, Monash Gallery of Art, the University of Queensland Art Museum, Artbank and other public and private collections in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland, France and the United Kingdom.