SALLY ROSS

Sally Ross

Smith & Singer are delighted to announce our forthcoming exhibition of renowned contemporary artist, Sally Ross.  The second solo exhibition with Smith & Singer, Sally Ross, will feature 16 new works by the artist.  An exploration of mark-making and the mythic in the landscape, Ross effortlessly contrasts abstraction and representation within each richly detailed and layered composition.

‘I now find myself in the landscapes I wish to paint. In a beautiful landscape, materialized, unimagined. Much of my work has been a distillation of picturesque images scrounged from old photographic books of far-off places I had never been to. However, these new paintings are visions from places I have experienced - from the top of a rocky outcrop, a track in a rainforest, beside a verdant moat, overlooking the ocean from a remote coastline. Abandoning these real landscapes I return to the studio to the intimate, instinctive process of painting – looking, looking, looking, looking again, a tweak, a scrape, a flick of the brush, a spattering of marks,  I cannot begin to count how many greens there are… slowly the works reveal themselves, a lively painterliness emerges from somewhere amidst the doubt, the sidesteps, towards resolution… and then, just as we live our lives, something real is transformed by the imagination into a blur between the imagined, a fantasy and the real.  

A relatively simple proposition… Picturesque scenes of places experienced or imagined - coastlines, clearings, rolling hills, expanses of water, foliage and flowers, Natura naturans (nature naturing). The landscape, the studio and the mysterious possibilities of paint.’ (Sally Ross, 2023)

Ross has exhibited globally, with solo exhibitions in Australia, France and the United States of America – including long term representation in Paris and Los Angeles – and group shows and art fairs spanning Australia, Belgium, Hong Kong, Italy, Mexico and Switzerland.

A five-time Archibald Prize finalist, Ross’ works are held in the Fondation Maeght, St-Paul de Vence, France; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; Geelong Art Gallery, Geelong; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Artbank, Melbourne; Macquarie University Collection, Sydney; along with private collections in Austria, Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. 

Sally Ross is open to the public at 14-16 Collins Street, Melbourne, from 2-25 February 2023, 10 am to 5 pm, Monday to Saturday.

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