Tonee Messiah: A New Famine

Overview

This month, Gallery 9 is welcoming back Israel-born artist Tonee Messiah for A New Famine, her ninth solo exhibition with the Darlinghurst gallery.

A painter uniquely skilled in gentle observation, Messiah is known for her intuitive ability to aesthetically represent emotion, to mysteriously capture the fleeting, poetic and interior moments in life that are often challenging to pin down. Likening painting for her to another form of thinking, she describes her latest series in A New Famine as "landscapes of the mind".

Building surfaces with both soft and hard forms that merge and overlap in an "archaeological drift", the paintings offer up soft, unfurling shapes and blooms alongside denser areas of pastel and crayon. Placing agitation alongside a floating weightlessness, the series conveys both a sense of movement and mystery.

It's the type of show where you'll stare deeper and deeper into a painting until you feel at risk of falling in. Fun fact: Messiah has been described as one of the most collectible young artists in Sydney by industry folks. Why not go along and fantasise about where you'd hang your very own?

Image: Tonee Messiah, Terrarium Ecology [cropped], 2017.