Kate Vassallo + James Lieutenant

About the work

James Lieutenant and Kate Vassallo work together to make largescale, immersive installations using paint. These abstract paintings are site-responsive, visual investigations into the architectural spaces that house them. Engaging with the history of wall painting in art, the pair also draws influence from the visuals of corporations and marketing, interior design, and other temporal or immersive forms of artmaking.

By working together, they attempt to neutralise the distinct mark of an individual artist. Illusion, graphics, design, abstraction, process, patternmaking, chance, failure, and temporality come together in making and viewing their work.

 

For Canberra Art Biennial 2022, the pair will create a new installation in Front Gallery. This functional café space is a hive of activity, where people enjoy hospitality, gather, and relax. Responding to this unique environment, the wall painting is conceived to enhance the sensation of being present in the space.

About the artist

James Lieutenant and Kate Vassallo are an Australian collaborative artist duo, currently based on Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri Country (Canberra, Australia). The artists graduated from the Australian National University School of Art in 2010, where they met while studying. Each of them has since maintained a steady individual art practice, also working together since 2012 creating large-scale wall painting installations.

 

The pair has completed institutional commissions with Artbank, Canberra Museum and Gallery, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Sydney), and Goulburn Regional Gallery. Their work has also been curated into exhibition programs at artist run spaces and small-scale arts organisations throughout Australia, including Bus Projects (Melbourne), Blindside (Melbourne), and Canberra Contemporary Art Space. They have also undertaken corporate and private commissions, with their collaborative works held in private collections throughout Australia.

Represented by

James Lieutenant is represented by Jennings Kerr Gallery.