This exhibition of striking new paintings marks a coming of age for emerging local artist Brent McLaurin. They highlight his remarkable skills as a figurative painter and reveal a maturing of his artistic practice. Collectively this series of paintings form a storyboard, as though for a film outline, exposing unsettling domestic encounters between various neighbours. These are suburban images, of regular people caught up in darkness and desires beyond their control.

Individually, these paintings form the haunting memories that one takes away from an exceptional film. Most are portraits, capturing a long, contemplative moment in a character’s life. Threads of anxiety, tension and raw fear are woven together with a dark sense of humour. Many paintings are hauntingly beautiful, our hearts ache for what the young girl has seen or endured in Shell-shocked in Suburbia, featured on the invitation. The juxtaposition of opposites, such as façade and hidden realities, good and evil, light and darkness, beauty and disfigurement are further clarified by the title of this exhibition, Ivory Black Street.

This is Brent’s third solo exhibition. He cites his artistic influences as being Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Surrealism and the medical section of the local library. Combined, these sources have produced powerful and confronting imagery that illuminate the bizarre and the beautiful in everyday life.

Brent studied film and television, including cartoon animation, from 1986 to 1988 inclusive. In 1990 he enrolled at the Claremont School of Art, completing a Diploma in Fine Art in 1993, majoring in painting. Brent held his second solo exhibition at The Church Gallery in 2000, which was extremely successful for him, both in sales and critical acclaim.

*prices valid 2002