The Pleasure Of Your Company Reality recedes in Kate Bergin’s fantastical oil paintings, which feature all manner of animals posed on tabletops with spoons, guns, keys, spectacles, and rotary telephones. While the artist was a student at the Victorian College of the Arts in the early 1990s, frequent visits to the National Gallery of Victoria had a profound impact.
Kate’s paintings riff on European still-life traditions and historical depictions of hunting and collecting. The artist observes live animals at the zoo and museum taxidermy displays to create her realistic depictions. Yet, in her final compositions, the artist bends reality, allowing animals of various species to coexist. These surrealistic tableaux gently mock our concepts of a “civilized” society.
Kate’s still life paintings are far from ’still’, animals poised to leap from the canvas, birds ready to take flight, compositions on the brink of collapse. Kate’s work is intoxicating and absurd, it captures the mundane and the exotic in masterful detail.
“I hope these paintings with their use of the exotic and the everyday elements and bound within the ongoing concerns of Natura Morte help us to see the world as a wonderful and magical place alive with possibility”
A Slow Journey 55 x 65cm $30,500
The Dream Makers 100 x 70cm $44,500
Dance Ensemble 153 x 143cm $88,500
The Pleasure Of Your Company 202 x 185.5cm $125,000
The Getting Of Wisdom 120 x 90cm $67,500
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