Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf will be closed Wednesday 25 December and Thursday 26 December 2024, as well as Wednesday 1 January 2025. The Gallery is open normal hours from Friday 27 December - Sunday 29 December. We wish you a wonderful festive season and a very happy New Year.
Desiderium is defined as an intense longing or grief for something that is lost. In this exhibition, Witney portrays the aftermath—or rather, the reaction to—this state of longing: a restless, cyclical search for distraction, soothing, and escape.
This body of work, developed during the Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf Artist In Residence program in 2024 and over the past two years, reflects both personal struggles with shame and loss, as well as the broader human tendency to avoid difficult emotions in pursuit of approval, love, or material success. Expressive figures are trapped in states of consumption, avoidance, anger, and disassociation. Imbued with blindingly bright colours, these works convey a raw, visceral exploration of vulnerability and an insatiable appetite for release.
Hal Witney is a contemporary Sydney-based artist who explores the intersections of highly gestural mark-making and performance. Through this disciplinary lens of contemporary drawing, Witney examines the relationship between imagery and identity. Often using materials such as paper, ink, pencil, acrylic, and oil in performative and highly gestural ways, Witney creates immersive, and at times ephemeral, installations that centre paper as a historically charged, yet prosaic, material. Witney has previously exhibited in Sydney at Olsen Gallery in 2023 with An Uncertain God and was included in a group exhibition at Nanda/Hobbs in 2024.