One Australian artist caught the eye of Gucci – here’s why
Sydney-based artist Jonny Niesche lives life in full colour.
One of Jonny Niesche’s favourite and abiding memories from childhood is sitting on the grass above Bondi Beach in the early evening enjoying a bucket of hot chips and fighting off the seagulls. The reason that Sunday tradition sticks with him isn’t the welcome, salty treat – although it comes a close second – but the stunning colour palette it evokes in his memory, specifically the gentle lilac and pale pink hues of the setting sun.
“The sunset and all those colours, even though it’s so cheesy and such a cliché, is so beautiful and deeply moving. I’ve been obsessed with that colour palette ever since,” Niesche says.
That experience of intense colour and its effect on him was further enhanced when his mother would drag the then eight-year-old into the department store cosmetics section where, rather than sit sullenly as you might expect, he found himself entranced.
“It was mirrors and smoky colours and it was just beautiful,” he recalls. “I had this experience of being in a space that, for a young straight Aussie male in the late ’70s, was a guilty pleasure. I’d later remember how much I love make-up, the mirrors, colours and textures when I became influenced by glam rock – David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, Debbie Harry and [her glamorous punk-rock] clothing and make-up.”
Today the Sydneysider is a globally sought-after contemporary visual artist, known for capturing and portraying that very colour palette and the magic and mystery of those evocative childhood experiences. He has exhibited in Amsterdam, Auckland, Los Angeles and Singapore, and Niesche’s works are held in the collections of the state galleries of Victoria, Queensland and South Australia, the MCA in Sydney and Hobart’s MONA. And in a rewarding return to his roots and early interest in fashion, he has now been invited to collaborate with luxury Italian fashion house Gucci on a project involving eight other international contemporary artists all creating their own take on the much-loved Gucci silk scarves.
It is a long way from the New York hard-rock scene into which Niesche landed after high school and where he remained immersed for the next decade.
“I became a total stoner after school, really interested in electronic music and the early sampling of the late ’80s, so I moved to New York with my then girlfriend in 1990 and joined a rock band.”
The singer-songwriter gigged with the likes of Helmet’s Peter Mengede and hardcore punk band Bad Brains’s Darryl Jenifer, finding himself also fascinated by programming sounds in the studio, a visualised movement that would later reappear in his paintings.
After a decade and with a broken marriage behind him, Niesche returned home to work out his next move. Uncertain of what it was, he offered to renovate and sell his parents’ home. It was while gazing at the “For sale” sign that he had an epiphany: he wanted to paint again.
Niesche showed a talent for art at high school, regularly winning art prizes but had never taken it further. He bought some spray paint from the local hardware and, using the “For sale” sign as his canvas, painted over the top of it. “I just had this urge, so did it and enjoyed it,” Niesche says. “And that sent me on a journey where I became insatiable and obsessive about doing spray painting of colour fields, blocks of colour.”
He showed a couple of works to a mate’s parents, who owned the Dickerson Gallery in Sydney’s east and gave him a solo show. It sold well. Recognising that he had no formal knowledge or training in art or art history, Niesche took himself, aged 30, to art school at The University of Sydney where one of his fellow students pointed out that he was old enough to be his dad.
“I did three years of undergrad and absolutely loved it. I remember the first day they said, ‘There’s 100-odd of you and only one or two of you will work full-time in the arts’, and all I could think was, ‘That has to be me’. I didn’t want to do anything else and wanted to work as hard as I could to be as good as I could be.”
An honours degree followed, after which he earned a scholarship to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He was under the tutelage of renowned Austrian artist Heimo Zobernig, who helped him expand his practice from painting to sculpture. He would later return to complete his masters.
Today Niesche works out of a spacious two-storey studio in Leichhardt, a far cry from the cramped space he rented after returning from Vienna; a time when he restretched and reused old canvasses, subsidising his artist’s income with regular shifts at a nearby restaurant where he ultimately met his now wife Amber. He has replaced paint with transparent fabrics he designs digitally and has printed offsite, later layering and stretching them over metal and mirrored frames. But still the fascination with soft iridescent pastels, glowing neon tones and its mesmerising effect dominates.
“I move colour around until it evokes a feeling within me. I often have a visual soundtrack in my head that I play along to,” Niesche says. “I see myself as a painter and try to make paintings that are experiential. I’m interested in images that are always changing and shifting and respond to you, the viewer, and the light in the room.”
Niesche’s influences range from minimalist and abstract artists Donald Judd, Mark Rothko and Kenneth Noland to Monet’s curved Water Lilies paintings at l’Orangerie, analysing how to take elements from each and incorporate them into his own work without losing the essence.
While he has been showing internationally since 2013, it was a solo show at Spain’s Fundación La Nave Salinas in 2023 – where Niesche’s exhibition followed Kaws and video artist Bill Viola – that led to a commission from Truls Blaasmo. The art adviser was curating Gucci’s New Bond Street store in London, a converted former art gallery complete with new artworks. The maison’s then creative director Sabato De Sarno was impressed with the work and invited Niesche to be part of Gucci: The Art of Silk in which nine international artists take various Gucci silk scarves as their artistic medium and represent them through their own creative lens. Niesche joins American artists Robert Barry and Everett Glenn alongside contemporary artists from Italy, China and South Korea in celebrating the Italian fashion house’s longstanding connection to art by reinterpreting five of Gucci’s enduring themes – flora, equestrian, GG monogram, nautical and animalia – on silk scarves.
“I’ve always wanted to collaborate with a fashion house; I think there’s a really interesting conversation between fashion and art. I’ve always coveted Gucci and this felt like a good fit,” says Niesche, who is also designing a window at Gucci’s flagship Sydney store and will join a group exhibition at the Gucci Garden in Milan in June.
Niesche welcomed the challenge posed by The Art of Silk.
“My works have a very atmospheric sensibility, and then you have the classic historic Gucci motifs which are so iconic and strong. Finding the right balance between my hazy colour vignettes and those figurative motifs of animals and flowers was a puzzle, but a good puzzle,” he says. “I’m really excited to see how people use the scarves, the performative aspect. It’s wearable art.”
This story is from the March issue of WISH.
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