French tapestries from the 16th and 17th century inspired a new exhibition
The Canberra-born painter hones his skills of abstraction while embracing life in the French capital.
“It’s staying,” Australian artist Gregory Hodge says adamantly over a video call from his home in Paris’s 4th arrondissement as he flips his camera’s view so that an enormous artwork fills the screen. “It’s a new work,” he continues, the intricate and illusionary creation coming into sight. “It’s all the things that I’ve been trying to do with painting in the past couple of years.”
Hodge’s tone is fervent as he explains the significance of the piece that dominates his dining room wall with its sheer size. “I only made it last year, but I feel like it’s a real marker of this time for me. It won’t go into any of the shows that are coming up,” he adds. “But a lot of the work I feel is anchored off this one painting.”
The work he’s referencing is a showcase of paintings he rendered over a six-month period for an upcoming solo exhibition Sullivan+Strumpf is presenting in its new Melbourne space next month. “I’m going to come to Australia because I really want to see the gallery and follow the work,” says Hodge of the collection that will also be previewed at Sydney Contemporary art fair from September 7–10.
The pieces on display reveal a natural progression from those he recently presented in Paris in June at Le Pavé d’Orsay. “You can identify a shift since I’ve been living here. [My art is] still very much embedded in the language of my previous work, but there’s definitely an influence of the city.”
Hodge grew up in Canberra and studied at the Australian National University’s (ANU) School of Art & Design where he completed honours in painting in 2005, later returning to gain his doctorate in the same subject in 2016.
“The whole art school experience was really important for me; it placed me in a space where I met people who were interested in making art full-time,” he recalls. “That was the first time I’d ever met people like that.”
Hodge later taught painting, drawing and design at the ANU’s School of Art & Design, as well as at the University of Wollongong.
It’s this same sense of community that the artist finds in his new home in the French capital. Hodge relocated with his wife, accomplished painter Clare Thackway, and their two young children in 2019 after travelling to the city as the recipient of the Art Gallery of NSW’s Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris residency program.
“It’s a magnet for people in creative industries,” he says fondly of Paris. “There are lots of creative people in our circle. We feel like that’s a really lovely part of our journey here.”
While the family calls central Paris home, Hodge works out of a studio in Pantin, a small industrial suburb located on the city limits. He shares this space with his wife, along with a number of other artists. “Most of my days are spent in the studio,” he says, adding that he tries not to work on weekends. “I really enjoy the separation between where we live and where we work.”
Hodge’s surroundings have played a vital role in his progression as an artist. From his proximity to some of the most illustrious cultural institutions in the world, to his bicycle commute by Canal Saint-Martin to the studio, passing Parc de la Villette and the Philharmonie de Paris along the way, his presence in Paris has provoked what he describes as a far more personal approach to his art. “Where the work was once a little self-reflexive, I now feel the way I’m incorporating imagery is coming from my own experiences,” he says. This year he’s also undertaking a studio residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts à Paris Montmartre campus.
“At the moment, my work is strongly influenced by the research I’m doing on 16th- and 17th-century tapestries that are made here in France,” he says. For Hodge, this particular project has inspired a more nuanced approach to illusion, and via these works, he examines the connection between representation and abstraction while blurring the lines between the two dimensional and the three dimensional. This month he is collaborating with Galerie May for Paris Design Week, showing new paintings alongside tapestries and furniture.
“There’s a gestural mark that anchors a lot of my work,” Hodge says of the motif that often resembles a swatch of fabric, a body, or an element of the environment. “I think about it as a mark that stands in for something else. It’s both a painterly gesture but also a metaphor. It’s made to look like it’s just appeared but to generate those marks there’s a lot of preparation, so I have to be fairly sure about what I’m doing before I start.”
This preparation involves the creation of intricate collages. This was once a laborious practice for Hodge that required the production of miniature works, but for these collages he now engages the use of Photoshop.
“It’s really important to have a sense of where I am with the work,” Hodge says of his acrylic on canvas creations. “There are definitely decisions that are made on the surface and in the act of actually painting, but during the process of constructing them, I know where they’re going.”
Hodge credits much of his success to his schooling at ANU and his stints teaching at Australian institutions.
“I was by no means driven early on,” he recalls. “I was interested in art, but I didn’t know any artists or what being an artist looked like. So what helped me was finding a community of other artists.”
It’s for this reason he cites the purchase of one of his pieces by the National Gallery of Australia in 2018 as a career highlight. “I used to spend a lot of time there as a kid,” he says of the Canberra institution, “so I’m really proud that there’s a work in that collection of mine.” His first international residency in Rome in 2015 also holds significance.
As for the paintings he values most, the crowning jewel being the work mounted on the wall behind his dining table, Hodge keeps these close to home. “I try to keep a couple of paintings a year,” he remarks. While some lie in storage in Australia, others have been loaned out to family members. “I can’t hold them all myself,” Hodge says earnestly as he glances over his shoulder at his favourite piece.
Gregory Hodge, Through Surface, is at Sullivan+Strumpf Melbourne November 2-December 2, 2023
This story appears in the September issue of Wish Magazine.