Exhibits,

Dane Lovett Slow Rise / Burning Up

Opening: Wednesday 13 March, 6 - 8pm Dates: 13 March - 6 April 2019

Catalogue:
Slow Rise / Burning Up

Dane Lovett’s emerging practice was compelled by making ‘repetitive paintings’. This series of early work dealt in the same, if not almost identical sets of art historical images with the goal of stripping the copy of historical import whilst maintaining some kind of essential connection to the original. His interest in collapsing distinctions between paintings from art history and photographs of pets posted online, naturally embeds a seam of humour in the practice. Lovett is particularly interested in how iconic images, especially from art history, can slip between the familiar, the strange, the ugly and the beautiful, and occasionally reverberate between all four.

His latest body of work Slow Rise / Burning Up made for the Bus exhibition is driven by a curiosity about how digital images change the way artists make paintings, and also how we look at them. Lovett is interested in placing a set of formal constraints around portraiture in the context of how we consume images. In this body of work he has focussed on a very well-known face and skewed a familiar scale for portraiture. Through repetition of this face-in-action, the series fixes on micro-expressions that reveal a performance within a performance: the slight curl of a lip, the tilt of a head and the angle of a cheek. Within each frame Lovett has honed in on distortion as a driving force in order to deliberately think about how we are all compulsively scrolling all the time, through images, tabs, playlists and feeds.

Dane Lovett has been based in Melbourne working as a painter for the past 12 years. He received his MFA from the Victorian College of Art in 2016, his BFA (Honors) Victorian College of Art in 2007 and a BFA from Queensland University of Technology in 2005. Recent solo exhibitions include Dog Show at STATION, Melbourne (2018) and Nightshades at Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney (2017). In 2018 he completed a residency research trip to the United Kingdom and Iceland supported by the Australia Council for the Arts. He was also awarded an Australia Council Tokyo Studio residency in 2011. He was winner of the Royal Bank of Scotland Emerging Art Prize for 2010, the 2009 winner of the Clayton Utz Emerging Art Award and the Qantas Spirit of Youth Award (SOYA) in 2005. His work is held in a number of public and private collections including Artbank and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He is represented by STATION in Melbourne and Sullivan+Strumpf in Sydney.