The art that made me: Julia Gutman

‘I’m so grateful to be working at a time when young female voices are heard,’ Julia Gutman explained in her 2023 Archibald Prize acceptance speech. Her prizewinning work, Head in the sky, feet on the ground, pictures Gutman’s friend and popular musician Jessica Cerro, known as Montaigne, and takes its title from a Talking Heads song loved by both artist and sitter. Gutman describes her intricate mixed-media artworks as ‘patchworks’. The fabrics she draws upon are often her own, or belong to the friends she depicts, holding layered stories and memories. Gutman often re-contextualises iconic poses. For her prize-winning work, she adapted a pose from Egon Schiele’s painting Seated woman with bent knees 1917, which depicts his wife Enid in a choreographed position. In Gutman’s work, Montaigne’s posture is relaxed, and expression dreamlike, reflecting ease and mutual admiration.

I love Robert Campbell Jnr’s work, specifically as an example of expression that can dance between joy and suffering. This work speaks to our violent colonial history, evoking personal trauma yet at the same time radiates with Campbell’s wry sense of humour and bold expression of self. I love art that speaks to the complexity of the individual experience, particularly from an emotional standpoint, and I think Campbell does an incredible job of offering us the layers of his personal experience.

I love Atem’s work. The rise of her career over the past couple of years has been so inspiring. Her works are so tender and bold at the same time. Watching her win the La Prairie Art Award last year and seeing this work become part of the Art Gallery’s collection made me feel so hopeful about where the Australian arts landscape is heading. She’s a powerhouse.

Khadim Ali’s Invisible Border, an exhibition comprising largely textile works at the UNSW galleries in 2021, was one of my all-time favourite Sydney shows. Ali is gifted with the ability to combine the personal and political with his mind-boggling technical skillset to create works that read like poems. His tapestries and paintings are always simultaneously refined and heartfelt, which I think is a real feat.

Bourgeois’ practice is foundational when it comes to thinking about the acknowledgement of modern textiles in the Western canon. I think of her as an artistic grandmother of the work that I am interested in. I’m so excited for her exhibition at the Art Gallery later this year. I love her dark wit, unapologetic brashness, her bold statements and tender vulnerability. Renegotiating the trope of the ‘hysterical body’, this work specifically plays with gender and the gaze in a way that has informed my approach to practice.

A version of this article first appeared in Look – the Gallery’s members magazine