Jimmy Varga

I’m an Ōtepoti-based artist of mixed Filipino and Pākehā descent. I’ve contributed to Dunedin’s Battle Magazine and have previously exhibited at Wave. This July, I enrolled at the Dunedin School of Art and have been studying under Michael Greaves, Graham Fletcher and Anita DeSoto.

In my current projects, I range between abstract and figurative modes of expression and have recently begun experimenting with larger scale. I am interested in iconographic painting, the high/low divide in art, and notions of cultural nationalism. I engage with these concepts and areas of practice from the perspective of my own disjunctive sense of cultural identity and qualified sense of citizenship.

Place and placelessness are recurrent themes in my work; as are the function (or failings?) of ontologies; and the frangibility of subjectivities which privilege individualism and purport to be unified, autonomous and immutable.

Categorical Proposition

Acrylic on canvas 76cm x 60cm 2022