Australian painter Gregory Hodge marks his homecoming with major exhibition
The Paris-based Sydney artist enjoys a global following, with shows around the world. Now, though, he’s returning home for a major solo exhibition that’s not to be missed.
A bouquet of flowers explodes in an array of vibrant colours; a rocky peninsula juts out over a coastline of thrashing waves; a figure reclines on a settee, perhaps caught mid nap. They’re all scenes featured among the 15 works on display in And Then Together, the latest major solo show from acclaimed Australian artist Gregory Hodge, currently occupying both levels of the Sullivan+Strumpf gallery in Sydney. But these are not crisp snapshots of everyday life. Instead, they are somehow simultaneously clear and fuzzy, drifting in and out of focus, playing with your eye.
“The big thing about this show,” says Hodge, when we meet at his charming apartment in Paris, “is that it’s a real departure from other works of mine that were based on abstraction.”
Indeed, people familiar with Hodge’s work might be surprised to find so much, well, clarity on the canvas. But in fact, this is a direction in which the artist has been moving for some time, one that neatly coincides with his move to Paris five years ago.
“It feels like ages ago now,” says Hodge of his decision to relocate with his wife, fellow artist Clare Thackway, and their two small children. “It’s a big move with a young family. But it’s been really good for the work, and that’s been the main thing.”
Hodge left Australian shores after landing a coveted residency at the renowned Cité Internationale des Arts in the Marais, where he has now completed several stints. He currently works from a studio in the south of the city, and while it’s nice to have separate work and living spaces, he recently moved into a smaller studio. It means the Sullivan+Strumpf show is the first opportunity to see all of the pieces displayed in one place. “It was a bit Tetras-y making these works,” he laughs.
Part of the reason it feels as though Hodge has been in Paris for far longer is that the family’s timing wasn’t exactly perfect; they arrived just as the covid pandemic hit. But Hodge has more than made up for any lost time. This year alone he’ll hold shows in Sydney, Paris, NYC and Brussels, with his calendar well and truly mapped out for the rest of 2025.
Perhaps more than anything else, this success has been down to Hodge’s extraordinary grasp of technique, his uncanny ability to show himself in his work through the swipes and slashes of colour on his canvases. His is a talent for taking otherwise flat images and making them spring to life. The whirling kaleidoscopic works in his early shows – such those featured in Slide, his first solo exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf way back in 2013 – practically jumped off the wall.
That playful ability to create visual depth has come a long way since those days, but it remains a recurring theme in the works for this latest exhibition. “A lot of them are figurative and they’re about illusion and surface texture,” Hodge says. “They have a visual intensity to them.”
He brings up an image of one of the artworks on his laptop, zooming in until what began as a painting of a building facade transforms into a tangle of shapes and lines, the threads of colour woven together, as though the work had been created not with a paintbrush, but on a loom.
“I’ve been doing a lot of research on historical tapestry manufacturing in France,” explains Hodge, who has a doctorate from the Australian National University’s School of Art & Design in Canberra, where he grew up. “And from the 17th and 18th centuries onwards, they were made from these large-scale genre paintings that they would adapt into these beautiful tapestries.”
Not unlike those French tapisers, it is the otherwise unremarkable scenes of daily life, albeit ones plucked from Hodge’s mind or camera roll, that inspire the works in And Then Together.
“I really see the choice of imagery as very traditional, in that sense,” he says of how his creative process mirrors the transformation of the “genre paintings” that ended up as tapestries, centuries ago. “So these are very contemporary paintings, but you can kind of reach all the way back [to the 17th or 18th centuries]. And I love that.”
To do this, Hodge makes use of what he calls a number of “mark-making tools” including combs and sponges to overlay transparent paint with layers of colour, turning the two- dimensional source images into rich textural plays. “It took me ages to work out how to do it,” he says of the technique he’s been honing for the past couple of years. “They’re quite flat but they look three dimensional.”
He’s not wrong. The works are acrylic on linen, but Hodge’s use of paint creates a kind of magic-eye effect, the images dancing in and out of focus, depending how close you stand to them. Like a hazy memory brought to life.
Despite their appearance, the 15 densely layered works – mostly about 2m x 1.6m in size – are still thin enough to be rolled up in order to be transported to Sydney for the show that runs until March 29. “Almost like carpets,” Hodge adds, cheerfully. Magic carpets, perhaps.
Gregory Hodge’s solo exhibition And Then Together is on at Sullivan+Strumpf gallery, Sydney until March 29.
This story is from the March issue of GQ Australia.
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