Artists statement

Melbourne-based artist and psychoanalyst Elizabeth Newman studied at the Victorian College of the Arts in the 1980s. She also practiced as a Lacanian psychoanalyst, and wrote and lectured about art, politics and psychoanalysis on occasion. Since 1985, her work has been exhibited throughout Australia and overseas.

'A Catastrophe' and 'Hard to get to', 2015 were shown in Newman’s first solo exhibition at the new Brunswick location of Neon Parc gallery in 2016; the exhibition was titled 'The effect that is propagated is not from the communication of speech but from the displacement of discourse'.

The paintings continued Newman’s renowned practice of reflexive or self-questioning painting, which explores – with characteristic hesitation and doubt – the possibility of abstraction after postmodern deconstruction, and after institutional critique. In Newman’s paintings, 'A catastrophe' and 'Hard to get to' inclusive, there is often an interplay between abstraction and representation that is indicative of this ambivalent or unsure relation to contemporary painting.