Grace Anderson: Circular Beauty Game

Grace Anderson: Circular Beauty Game comprises a suite of recent paintings by the Naarm-based artist. Among the paintings presented are Miss Angel–Bunny, featuring a surrealist rabbit figure with a bottle of ‘Angel’—Terry Mugler’s iconic yet cloying perfume of the early 1990s—and Apple (My Husband Dine), an homage to Jim Dine’s works of the 1960s, to which he would hang tools or stick bottles to the bottom of his works. Described by art critic Rex Butler as ‘a terrific slacker scatter artist’, Anderson treads a constant line between the three-dimensional and the flat, and between ritual and desire. Leaning into a sincere enthusiasm for the decorative, Anderson depicts fragments drawn from her life as well as from imagined, fantasy worlds to platform a strangely poetic, but contrary sense of beauty.

Works stem from an obsession with objects as well as autobiographical referencing of such things as street art, teen girl subcultures, beauty and fashion. Sometimes the paintings extend beyond their own pictorial space to include carefully arranged sculptural elements that are directly taken from life – for instance, the clutter of a bedside table, the debris from a party or a collection of beauty supplies and hair tools. But, while the paintings and sculptural installations may appear slapdash, Anderson’s work reflects a careful and deep observation of the things around her. Her works are variously imbued with a sense of sadness, of reflection and of longing—life might be cruel and it might be sickeningly sweet; Anderson’s distilled observations straddle both modalities to reveal an unsettling and unapologetically feminine present.