Georgia Spain | I'd rather be here than not: {Suite} Ponsonby

{Suite} is pleased to introduce Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Georgia Spain for her first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Fascinated with the human condition, Spain's practice occupies a tenuous threshold between the known and the obscure, the familiar and the absurd - intermingling figuration with abstraction to visualise worlds where interior states and external environments collide.

In this latest body of work, the artist continues to explore ideas around human spectacle, theatricality, and mark-making. Groups of figures are portrayed in the midst of action or movement, their bodies and bodily relationships merging with the surrounding land and sky. Through loose, agitated brushwork and amorphous forms, physicality is crushed together with locality, giving rise to painterly worlds that suggest a sense of collective awareness and vitality.

Concurrent depictions of beauty and violence reflect the artist's own struggle with the duality of her practice as it swings between the euphoria and dismay of art making. The show's title 'I'd rather be here than not' resolves to embrace the process, however; its double meaning both a celebration of the facets of being in this world, as well as a nod to the artist's own studio and work.