A Dangerous Smile
A Dangerous Smile not only documents a life that has been lived for centuries, but also reflects upon the very modern point at which the pursuit of inner peace intersects with the pursuit of politics.
Events Calendar
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The Last Days of Summer
Peter Hyatt combines sublime photographic imagery and digital art to create a richly invented tableaux. Familiar yet dreamlike, his work captures the collision of people, places and nature, frequently as disparate forces.
After the Archive: Park Life
Amanda Johnson’s paintings question the fate of the public garden in a context of global warming. How has our physical and cultural encounter with the public garden changed?
TERRAFORM
A photographic manipulation experiment representing the culmination of countless hours of exploration, both literal and artistic.
CARTONI: containers contained
A series of encaustic paintings focusing on structure, minimalism and abstraction, utilising the everyday material of corrugated cardboard.
Meteorites from Earth
A series of sculptures and drawings as a result of the artist's fascination with the intersections of space, nature and science.
Since You’ve Been Gone
A series of oil paintings that are based on locations around the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, focusing on old homes, gardens and trees. It won't always be like this.
Shop Talk
A unique installation of drawings and painting exploring community life and suburbia through the interpretation and recreation of quirky and vibrant shop front windows.
Sex of Nature
A photographic series exploring areas of wilderness in Tasmania and Nepal. The stark and isolated landscapes invoke feelings of loneliness and awe, and the notion that the natural environment is harsh and unforgiving.
Water Bending Off A Rock
This series of photographs represents the endless flow of the water cycle and how water continues on a path, always adapting to its surrounds on its endeavours.
Dancing from the Dark, Looking for the Light
An exhibition of new monotypes, paintings and etchings inspired by The Australian Ballet.
Mrs Larritt
An exhibition of lithographs and drawings celebrating the caring role and early married life of Maggie Larritt, wife of the first Surveyor of Bendigo. This body of work acknowledges the singularly European view of the colonial migrants as they lived on Dja Dja Wurrung land.
Living Water
Fuelled by a passion for ink and paper, and intrigued by the rich visual languages of Chinese brush painting and calligraphy, Living Water is Ella Whateley’s response to full immersion in Taiwanese culture during an inspirational residency at National Taiwan University in Arts (NTUA) in 2018.
Wilderness: A Natural Response
Renowned contemporary watercolourist Terry Swann’s Wilderness: A Natural Response, is a unique perspective of the contrasting landscapes of remote Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
Once was Paradise
A series of oil paintings highlighting the artist's passion for the natural environment and horror at seeing the ongoing effects of climate change.
SMALL! 2019
The second annual community-based small works exhibition at fortyfivedownstairs.
Glowry
A glow-in-the-dark installation commenting on ideas about identity, colonialism and adventure.
The Delusions Run Thick
Mark Chu embraces the power of fantasy, hollow ambition, and absurdity, in a series of large scale, self-portraits depicting the plural nature of who or what a person can (and cannot) be.
reconstructed landscapes
Annie Burns' paintings engage with the sublime natural world and our relationship with it in the face of destruction.
Sensitive Sweethearts
Sensitive Sweethearts is an art exhibition for those who wear their heart on their sleeve.
1.5 Degrees
A group exhibition responding to the challenge of the global community to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. It is about the science of climate change, communicated in diverse and intriguing ways.
give me shelter
An exhibition of screenprints based on landscapes that were noticed, photographed, and forgotten. Memories are captured, but the viewer moves on. Changes that occur to the landscape are out of sight and mind, and missed. But the environment is screaming for us to take notice.
Between Horizons
A collection of new and delightfully peculiar small sculptures. They are fantastical watercraft, knotted, woven, and welded together with materials gathered on the artist's travels around Gippsland.
Microcosmographia
Microcosmographia brings together five artists working with themes of science and nature, the earth bound and geology, cosmology, mythology and universal/cosmos sciences.
Faceless People
David Hirst traps emotions, memories and ideas in his abstracted painting and sculpture, to be shared with or re-interpreted by others.
Pochades 2010-2020
Peta Cross presents a series of approximately 400 small Pochades created between 2010 – 2020. Pochade painting has been the practice of many painters since the Impressionists. They are quickly executed sketches in oil paint.
Stiff Upper Lip
An analytical still life painting project that explores complex psychological states such as containment, austerity and isolation.
QUIETUDE of the land, the figure and the flower
A series of landscape, figurative and floral paintings celebrating contemplative, gentle and meditative actioned marks.
Seasons
Through the ceramic medium, this exhibition explores the concept of ‘Seasons’ in relation to individual life experiences and the shifts that seasonality and change presents.
Transformer
Transformer explores ideas relating to liminal space through the transformation of well known Australian landscape paintings.
3000 Streets
3000 Streets is the photographic trace of Mike Reed’s near and far wanderings in the worlds’ arteries, always with a lean towards the unusual and quirky.
SHORT STORIES
With a great love for books, Lisa Sewards explored short stories during Melbourne’s 2020 COVID-19 restrictions. Each book turned into a capsule of reflection and hope and has led to this new series of printmaking and painting works that celebrates the short story genre in Australian literature.
all / most / some / none
Utilizing a system whereby the ruled grid becomes the vessel for a lexicon of hand-drawn symbols, the principal theme in Madeleine Joy Dawes' work is the utilization of iterative mark making as a temporal site to record measured and psychological time.
elemental
A collection of new paintings exploring facets of landscape and abstraction by Joan Blond, Aliki K, Bev Plowman and Jo Carroll.
Travels With My Wife: Painting Hong Kong from the Water and Air
A new series of small paintings exploring bustling harbour and airport scenes in Hong Kong.