Lou Hubbard: Operative comprises Hubbard's third solo exhibition with the gallery, following Witless in 2010 and Table Land in 2016. 

Hubbard’s practice encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and the moving image to interrogate the nature of training, submission and subordination. Basic materials of domestic and institutional utility (very often personal objects) are tried and tested, then shaped into formal relationships. Emotional resonances are drawn out through careful selection and placement of these found and readily-at-hand objects.

Operative comprises a new video installation and sculptural assemblages created in and of our anxious times. Like much of Hubbard's work, these new sculptures organise everyday objects into unusual arrangements, their proximal relationships suggesting various scenarios including the humorous aside and the act of bearing witness.

The 2016 exhibiton Table Land by Lou Hubbard brought a significant—but previously never shown—painting Untitled (Landed), 1993 into focus with three major sculptural works. Each of the sculptures comprised an assemblage of everyday materials, exploring common relationships to subjectivity and knowledge, lived experience and cultural inheritance.

Hubbard’s Unstable Table, 2005 is a kind of Australian still life comprising a ‘settler’ wooden table with an arrangement of wooden fruit, goblets, carved bookends featuring a mother and child and an old glossy bookplate of a Russell Drysdale painting of an Australian girl—each element brought into strange proximity to both display and probe our colonial past.

LOU HUBBARD, UNSTABLE TABLE, 2005

Timber table, dowels, colour-plate Children Dancing No.2 (1950) Sir Russell Drysdale’s Australia, carved wood Mother & Child bookends, wooden goblets, pine vases, pine back massager, Tasmanian Myrtle apple and pear salt and pepper shakers

80 x 118 x 55 cm

$16,000 (INC GST)