Biography
Artist Statement
Romantica
Catalogue essay by Marguerite Brown (MA ArtCur) 2023
When Gina Kalabishis goes walking in the bush, occasionally she encounters a “space of awe”i that literally stops her in her tracks. Most of us can relate to being unexpectedly awestruck by the light, atmosphere, and sheer ebullient glory of the natural world. It takes you away from your thoughts – the busy shopping list of your life administration; the email to be sent, the phone call to return. Certain moments remind us we are part of something infinitely bigger than ourselves. This is the space of awe that Kalabishis seeks to evoke in this new body of work Romantica.
Most of the paintings in Romantica are inspired by time spent on Yuin country at the bushland Gang Gang Residency on the south coast of NSW, where she was artist in residence in 2021. Other works feature scenes taken from Cape Conran Coastal Park along Victoria’s far east wilderness coast. Both places hold personal significance for Kalabishis, having spent numerous summers on family camping trips at Cape Conran, and being moved by the unique history and stunning wilderness of Umbi Gumbi, a 100 acre property and co-operative where the Gang Gang Residency is situated.
Just as humans will never lose the innate desire to commune with the natural world, artists will forever imbue representations of nature with emotional resonance. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.” Kalabishis’ work has long been dedicated to the realm of feeling, or one feeling in particular – love. She compares the experience of nature’s sublime beauty with falling in love. This heady subject matter is developed in earlier works through her fusion of ikebana inspired still life arrangements with atmospheric landscapes.
In Romantica the hovering still life arrangements have gone, and the artist’s eye turns to the understory of the bush. Here the tangled vegetation of the forest floor carries the blackened scars of recent bushfires, dramatically cast against slivery green foliage and in many works punctuated by explosions of orange flowers. While bushfire has always been a part of the Australian experience, today imagery of burnt scrub carries with it a potent environmental message as climate change brings an escalation of these natural disasters. Celebrating the beauty of a place can act as a passive plea for protection, and these works are no exception.
In one of the major works, ‘If I didn’t have your love’ (after Leonard Cohen) an impenetrable melange of ferns, banksias and other vegetation consume the picture plane. Pale areas of mist rise alongside dark pockets of shadow creating an atmospheric space ripe with mystery. This work showcases the artist’s seductive palette of red, blue, purple and grey that is carried throughout the exhibition. It also features the quintessentially hardy native banksia tree that populate many works. Banksia’s tough cones are adapted to release seeds in response to bushfires, and here they serve as a reminder of the capacity of life to flourish even in the most hostile environment.
One can glean metaphoric associations that mirror personal relationships in these new paintings. Kalabishis depicts the space after a calamity, when the firestorm has passed. But instead of desolation she finds wonder, wresting beauty out of the chaos and with it an enduring promise of new life.
i Gina Kalabishis, in conversation with the author 10th February 2023
NOSTALGIC MEMENTOS OF THE NATURAL WORLD
VICTORIA HYNES: Arts writer for Artist Profile 2022
Channeling a love of nature and deep ecology through her art practice, Melbourne painter Gina Kalabishis’ delicate and immersive paintings present a fragile ecosystem in need of environmental protection.
The term ‘Biophilia’ was first coined by psychologist Erich Fromm in 1964 to describe ‘a passionate love of life and all that is alive’. Human beings have a profound drive to connect with the natural world that seems engrained in our DNA to survive a species. While most people recognise that being in nature is beneficial to their wellbeing, Melbourne painter Gina Kalabishis has made this a central tenet of her artistic practice. For Kalabishis, our relationship with the environment and its flora and fauna, should be nurtured in the same way as our human relationships. Both deserve our attention, tender care and respect. The artist manifests her deep love of the landscape and its inhabitants through her ethereal paintings, a selection of which will be on display at the Shoalhaven Regional Gallery in Nowra.
Kalabishis’s compositions operate on two levels – the background plane renders loosely painted romantic landscapes, often hazy and soft focussed. On the frontal plane are intricately detailed still life ensembles of native botanical specimens. Drawn to collecting flowers, leaves, blossoms and branches during her walks around the environs of her Melbourne home, or during her residencies in regional New South Wales, she creates floral bundles that are tied together and hung in her studio to be photographed and later painted onto linen or paper. Her painstakingly painted specimens and keenly observed native wildlife are the central feature of these compositions, competing for attention in the foreground.
Three years in the making, the works draw on the extensive periods she has spent in the Shoalhaven region and in particular her three artist residencies at Bundanon, Arthur Boyd’s estate along the Shoalhaven River. Stalled from completing her last residency due to CoVid lockdowns, her imagery has the emotive response of a half-forgotten dream, remembered loosely as an undulating river system flowing between monolithic gum forests.
Using oils, inks and gouache paints, she deliberately challenges art historical traditions of the male ‘plein air’ landscape artist versus the housebound female ‘still life’ painter. By placing her still life images in clear, sharp focus - front and centre in the artwork- and the landscape as a blurry, obscured background, she is giving the so called ‘female’ imagery predominance in her compositions.
For a Australian of Greek descent woman born in central Melbourne, over the years Kalabishis has developed a passionate connection to the Australian landscape. Her first encounter with the artworld was as a teenager viewing the Heidelberg School’s ‘Golden Summers’ exhibition at the NGV in 1985. Her earlier landscapes drew on these grand colonial artworks, by the likes of Von Guerard and Streeton, yet this series is looser, more utopian and dream-like, like a Oriental painted screen.
Kalabishis studied art and design at Footscray TAFE before completing a BFA and Post-Graduate Diploma at the Victorian College of the Arts in the 1990s. She worked as a teacher and Gallery Director at the University of Victoria for 15 years before focusing fulltime on her art practice over the past decade. The artist is represented by Flinders Lane Gallery in Melbourne and her paintings are held in major public collections such as the National Gallery of Australia, the Victoria University Art Collection, the Art Gallery of Ballarat, the Gippsland Art Gallery and the Bundanon Trust Art Collection.
The painter claims that it was an earlier time teaching at the Aboriginal Community Elders Services near her home on the Merri Creek that has had the greatest impact on her perspective. One of the female elders commented that: “Do you know, we come from this land, but you were born on this land, you are doing things with it. It's your land. You are part of this land.” As a child of immigrants, it was the first time this artist felt connected in a genuine way to the country that she grew up in.
Among the stars of this show are several loving depictions of a cheeky pair of Gang-gang cockatoos that made regular appearances outside her house during a residency at Tapitallee in the outskirts of Nowra. Carefully painted with such attention to detail, they are almost humanised and rendered as idiosyncratic portraits rather than anatomical illustrations.
Other animals that feature in her compositions include Sulphur-crested cockatoos, kangaroos, pelicans and wombats, all set among arrangements of Australian botanicals - gum leaves, ferns, banksias and blossoms - presented like Ikebana sculptures in the foreground. This artifice adds to the hyper-real aspect of Kalabishis’ work so that the viewer is not lulled into perceiving the paintings just as gentle pastoral idylls. Whilst aesthetically picturesque, don’t be mistaken for thinking of her artworks as just pretty pictures.
Underlying all these compositions is a subconscious ecological message. In the face of natural disasters such as bushfires and floods, as well as deforestation and encroaching urban development, some of these natural specimens are becoming less commonly sighted, to the extent where perhaps they will one day only be viewed as constructed images or sculptures in a museum like environment. Just as Ikebana was developed in Japan to reflect the culture’s reverence for nature and the impermanence of life, the delicate beauty of the subjects only adds to their sense of fragility and the painful sense of loss if such creatures became endangered like so many other species.
Ultimately then Gina Kalabishis’s paintings are a plea for environmental preservation. Our natural habitat deserves to be nurtured and cared for just like a growing child. Arthur Boyd, purchased the land of this deep valley in the Shoalhaven, not only to live and work, but also to help promote environmental awareness and protection. He would be honoured that such poignant, intimate and uplifting suite of artworks were inspired by the ecosystem on his Shoalhaven River estate on the south coast of New South Wales.
Gina Kalabishis, Memento- Pictures of you
Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, Nowra, NSW
1 October -26 November 2022
Catalogue Essay: Bundanon Floor to Sky
by Dr Ryan Jefferies 2018
Head of Programs, Science Gallery Melbourne
Bundanon means ‘deep valley’ in the language of the Wodi Wodi peoples of the Yuin nations, who as the traditional custodians of the lands, share deep spiritual connections with the fertile valley shaped by the Shoalhaven River. Empathizing with Indigenous culture, artist Arthur Boyd highlighted the human imbalance with this landscape and our ignorance to imminent ecological damage. Boyd developed a passion for environmental protectionism while he lived at Bundanon in New South Wales, where he championed the idea that ‘you can’t own a landscape’. And while this may be true, it is important to acknowledge that we can be part of it.
In ‘Bundanon Floor to Sky’ Gina Kalabishis exquisitely highlights the human connection to the landscape through her bold, immersive artworks that explore the Australian bushland with a visual poetry and scientific eroticism. Her anthropomorphism of the landscape profoundly draws us back into the natural world with deep desire and intrigue. The traces of technological glitches, the merging of seasons and the distortion of scale combine to present a dreamlike timelessness and beautiful warping of reality. Her emotive realism juxtaposes against our growing disconnect and blindness to the ecotopia of nature.
From brush kurrajong to the prehistoric burrawang, the diverse plants of Bundanon are themselves like artworks aesthetically positioned across an outdoor gallery. Their myriad of foliage and flowers presented in a rich spectrum of green and brown hues. Above them, the troposphere illuminated by the bright spotlight of the sun, flickering with the transient seasons. The ever-present human body is often subtlety hinted at by Kalabishis. Bark becomes skin. Sometimes smooth and overtly sexual. Sometimes torn and discarded as if part of an autopsy conducted at the hands of a forensic scientist. The outstretched remains are left decaying back into the earth to nourish a new cycle of growth. A spiral shell that Kalabishis travelled along the winding length of the Shoalhaven River to collect, becomes the landscape’s inner ear. The tiny structures of the auris interna – the cochlea, tympanic membrane and auditory ossicles – become enormously oversized to capture the warm morning songs of tiny passerine birds of the bush. Their voices resonating with a scale much larger than their diminutive selves.
An emotional undercurrent of a lost lover flows through the artist’s work with a raw sexual energy. We cannot help but feel that the forests and scrublands are an absent partner we desire and want back in our lives. Kalabishis clusters native plants and flowers into anatomical ikebana arrangements, emulating lungs, heart and interconnecting vessels. Intertwining branches are lovers embraced. The mirrored lives of people and plants is direct. Flora too is alive. Plants breathe, have sex and need food. They also nourish our own emotional wellbeing. We are therefore products of our environment and our very blood and bones share the same building blocks as the leaves, bark and stems of our native flora. This is an environment where art, science and culture can deeply intertwine as we attempt to understand our place within an existing ecology. An ecology that we often forget as the disconnect between bushland and people widens.
The wonderful legacy of Boyd’s bequest of Bundanon continues with Kalabishis’s beautifully emotive artworks. A gift that extends to the rich creativity that can transpire from our unique landscape and a reminder of our place in the fragile balance of life. At a time when we are becoming increasingly urbanised, Kalabishis superbly places us back in the landscape and we are left lusting for more.
2016: You and Me
" Holding back a branch as one meanders along a scuffed path through the bush, most wouldn’t give it a second thought. The Australian wilderness is rough and unruly - as eucalypts grow their bark shreds and falls, tea tree branches arch over boardwalks and native poa grasses spread, lashing at shins exposed in shorts or skirts or bathing suits. But within this touch, of fingertip caressing leaf and twig and seed pod, Gina Kalabishis feels alight at the beauty and celebration of life that surrounds her. Tamed yet also untameable, her work reflects the fact that our relationship with nature is joyous and testing.
Kalabishis often makes a pilgrimage to a closely-kept-secret camping ground, within a National Park on the south east coast of New South Wales. For her it is a restorative process – sometimes peaceful, other times more challenging, for when exposed to the space and silence one can finally process complicated thoughts. Although usually painting at her home nestled in Melbourne’s suburbs, where weatherboard terrace houses are often seen with silver princess gums standing like soldiers at their mailboxes, Kalabishis aches for this journey to where she can solely be immersed with nature, away from the ticking of pedestrian crossings.
After years of trying to harness these feelings within her practice, when contemplating this latest body of work the artist discovered the term ‘biophilia.’ Belonging, intimacy, touch, euphoria. These siblings to love all arise when an individual recognises a physical and emotional response to nature. German psychologist and sociologist Erich Fromm (1900 – 1980) penned the term in reference to being attracted to all that is alive and vital. Bjork, the ethereal Icelandic songstress released an album in 2011 titled Biophilia, exploring the link between nature, music and technology.
To explore this relationship in all of its intricacies Kalabishis juxtaposed elements of her city home and self with the wild and isolated landscape. Foraging for flowers, leaves and branches she tied, hung, and draped ikebana like arrangements, photographing them suspended in her surrounds – whether that be at home or in the wilds. Taking these photos back in to the studio she found herself inspired by Kandinsky and Rothko. Although this may seem an odd marriage – a realist painter finding a likeness within the work and concepts of pioneering abstract artists – it was their deep relationship with colour that inspired Kalabishis. Kandinsky (1866 – 1944) felt that deep blues – pthalo, ultramarine and lapis – were associated with the supernatural, and were calming and contemplative. Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970) also infused his abstract works with careful emotional colour contemplation. Kalabishis, in appreciation of these insights, has limited her palette in her major works to explore this also. Her luscious and smooth application of paint renders eucalypt leaves, lily pilly berries and bound twigs settled within their landscape in shades of only carefully considered hues. Blues as a nod to Kandinsky, pinks and browns as she explores love and intimacy and attempts to infuse her emotions by expressing them with tender colours that match.
With this new body of work Kalabishis also brings the element of flesh into her paintings. As though clothing the bones that once were made so prominent in her earlier works, the flash of flesh through beautiful foliage provides a lovely harmony to the human emotions and desires she is willing into her paintings. Teamed with titles referencing songs of love penned by Australian musicians by the likes of Paul Kelly, Neko Case, Max Richter and Nick Cave, You & Me, is exactly that. A love song to the Australian landscape, to the most petite leaves and the grandest of arbours, and the relationship that can be had with nature and within the self."
By Melanie Caple
HEARTLAND
2015
‘Gloomy and indigestibly stodgy’ is how art critic Robert Hughes famously described the paintings of Eugene von Guérard in his 1966 book The Art of Australia. Since then the nineteenth century émigré artist from Austria has been restored to the pantheon of artistic greats and Hughes himself has expired, and yet something of that ‘gloom’ remains imprinted on von Guérard and his contemporaries.
In the paintings of Gina Kalabishis, which freely pay homage to the early colonial art of Australia, that so-called ‘gloom’ has been not so much intensified but redefined, into a celebratory reclamation of this heritage. Peering through the veil of shadows we discover moving epitaphs to love, friendship and community. As a kind of romantic social-humanist Kalabishis draws together various fields of art making into poignant and powerfully cohesive images. Combining von Guérard and Ikebana shouldn’t work but here it does—though neither are entirely orthodox in their depiction. Where once her lush botanic specimens occupied a shallow space of pure colour, Kalabishis has introduced details from iconic paintings by the heroes of Australian art—von Guérard, Streeton, Condor and McCubbin—to provide a background. Their icon status, however, has been dampened through a process of blurring and inversion, of both the original picture’s orientation and tone. The results are both disorienting and dreamlike—Kalabishis presents us with a curious hybrid of the visible and the invisible, as if our heroes have travelled through a glass darkly. The genres, also, are muddled, to effectively level the playing field against a spectral light that has no precedent in art.
For Kalabishis—an Australian with Greek heritage living in Melbourne, with friends and family scattered near and far—‘Heartland’ is a place where all loved ones can gather. They unite just as the artist has united the fronds of her native plants, brought together against the odds in a common place. Kalabishis’ plants are mostly Australian native—hardy, tolerant and adaptable (just like Australians, she says)—but are shown in monochrome, where the darker tones might symbolise Aboriginal Australians, and the lighter tones the fair-skinned arrivals from recent centuries. The mid-tones are the ‘in-betweens’, where the two have merged. Their compositions are not formal, but recall instead the jumble of seaweed.
The crisp, sharp detail of the botanical specimens contrasts with the out of focus landscapes behind. Both are subjects we commonly associate with sunlight—certainly within the Australian artistic tradition (think only of Streeton’s ‘Golden Summers’)—but here become otherworldly and ethereal. These are potent hearths for the imagination to flare; they double as memento mori for the natural environment, under threat from the agencies of man, and serve as a warning of what we stand to lose. Kalabishis is at once the funnel for the past traditions of art to coalesce, and a prophet of its demise. The inverted landscapes and suspended plants give rise to a sensation of imminent collapse.
While not at the forefront of the artist’s intentions, there is an indelible sexual energy about these pictures. From the languid, curling leaves to the inviting openings and apertures to the velvety dark tones, we sense the proximity of heady primal urges. As images of sex and love, community and togetherness, and environmental catastrophe, there is much to discover (and continually rediscover) within these haunting and very beautiful paintings. Kalabishis presents the vision through the doorway; we have only to draw breath, step through and enter.
Simon Gregg
Curator, Gippsland Art Gallery
Gina Kalabishis’ work stares in stark wonder at the excess of nature, whether it be the glory of the watchful flower, the eye of which is the engulfed embodiment of our humanity, or a laughing cat’s guileless enjoyment of a catty joke that pokes fun at the seriousness of our endeavour, and opens our sophistication to ridicule.
She enfolds us in our own tumour growing unknown in our bodies, turning our words into the flowers of memory, and our memories into a history of the interchange of decay and generation, in which terminal blood stains are also the buds of erotic longing. She takes us into the deep pathology of our wanton neglect, culpability and guilt, to a place where dead vines threaten to strangle the isolated garden and loneliness are the brief blooms overarched by tendrils weaving tight the darkness of the night, and where the truncated and stoppered tree, the parasitic plastic teat, and grafted skin become the futile dreams of reassimilation into a garden of the mind now as lost as that of the soul. And yet she is the archaeologist’s delight, for out of her dead, with their vulva mouths in the act of last screams, giving birth, support and succour to myriad forms of budding, she captures a life balanced tenuously on dry-stick bones floating magically in air with the aid of a few wires, our technological umbilical into the lives of others, into other worlds.
This is History in bone and paint made out of the strict discipline of Japanese flower arrangement, and the extreme formalism of western still life, hinting always at the pathology of these forms without denying their rapturous suppleness and fecundity. There is the clinician’s eye operating too, the perception of a scientific illustrator seeking art in description. She creates a visual field which is both very specific and filled with a painful joy of the moment, as if apprehension and understanding coincided sublimely; and allegorical and general, as if there is a commonality in the intense ritual formality of a painted flower inscribing the after words of the dead. By these wires we hang in our history in nature, and in these ways Gina Kalabishis creates an art of the witness looking for beauty in his or her passing.
Gina Kalabishis delicately interlaces the structures of the human body, as represented by medical illustrations, and the extreme formalism of the still life. Kalabishis cleverly hints at the pathology of both kinds of formalism without denying their beauty and seductive qualities.
Dr. Ron Southern
Historian
Arete No.2 & Arete No.3 (see works 2016)
The word ‘arête’ has two possible meanings:
- A sharp mountain ridge, sometimes formed by glaciers. These arêtes are high points in the geographic landscape, the towering natural monuments of the vertical world, whose grandeur can simultaneously demand our attention and overwhelm us with wonder.
- In the Greek language, ‘arête’ is synonymous with ‘excellence’. In philosophical terms, the word further embraces a sense that something is actively striving to be as good as it can be, as it yearns to reach its highest state and express the ideal form.
In Gina Kalabishis’ latest paintings - ‘Arête No.2’ and ‘Arête No.3’ - the artist melds together the two meanings of the word and continues her playful homage to colonial representations of landscape, incorporating intriguing and unexpected inclusions of sensuous human forms, while amping up the visual acuity of her Ikebana-like sculptures of Australian flora.
Whether you’re inclined to swoon at natural beauty or seek after the ideal form, these two works show the artist striving to share with us her own painterly ‘arête’.
Bruce Copland, Curator
August 2016
Gina Kalabishis lives and works in Melbourne, she holds a Post Graduate Diploma of Visual Arts and a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University and a Advanced Diploma of Arts (Electronic Design and Interactive Multimedia) from Victoria University in 2003. She has featured in solo and group exhibitions in Australia, Japan, Spain and America and has been a winner and finalist in a number of significant national art prizes.
Episode 52 with Talking with Painters with Maria Stoljar
https://talkingwithpainters.com/2018/08/12/ep-52-gina-kalabishis/
(Winner) 2017 Eutick Memorial Still Life Award, Project Contemporary Artspace, Wollongong
(Winner) 2017 Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize People's Choice Award, The Gallery @ Bayside Arts & Cultural Centre
(Winner) 2016 Bruny Island Art Prize People's Choice Award. Bruny Island, Tasmania
(Winner) 2014 The Rick Amor drawing prize, The Art Gallery of Ballarat
(Winner) 2013 The Inaugural Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discovery (ACMD) Acquisitive Art Prize, St Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne.
(Winner) 2010 The Hellenic Museum and Bank of Cyprus Art Award, Melbourne
(Winner) 1994 Emanuel Hirsh Award. Victoria College, Prahran
(Winner) 1993 Essendon Artist Award, Essendon Festival Art exhibition
(Finalist) 2024 John Leslie Art Prize, Gippsland Art Gallery
(Finalist) 2023 WAMA Art prizw, Ararat Art Gallery
(Finalist) 2019 ROI Artprize, Melbourne
(Finalist) 2019 St Kevins Art show, Toorak, Melbourne
(Finalist) 2018 John Leslie Art Prize, Gippsland Art Gallery
(Finalist) 2017 Eutick Memorial Still Life Award, Project Contemporary Artspace, Wollongong
(Finalist) 2017 Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize People's Choice Award, The Gallery @ Bayside Arts & Cultural Centre
(Finalist) 2016 John Leslie Art Prize, Gippsland Art Gallery
(Finalist) 2016 Bruny Island Art Prize, Bruny Island, Tasmania.
(Finalist) 2016 Eutick Memorial Still Life Award, Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery, Coffs Harbour
(Finalist) 2015 Eutick Memorial Still Life Award, Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery, Coffs Harbour
(Finalist) 2014 Eutick Memorial Still Life Award, Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery, Coffs Harbour
(Finalist) 2014 Adelaide Perry Drawing prize, PLC, Sydney
(Finalist) 2012 Rick Amor drawing prize, The Art Gallery of Ballarat
(Finalist) 2011 ANL Maritime Art Prize and Exhibition, Mission to Seafarers
(Finalist) 2011 The Top 20 Peoples Choice Award, The ANL Maritime Art Exhibition
(Finalist) 2011 CPM National Print Awards, Tweed River Art Gallery
2023 Gang Gang art residency, Umbi Gumbi, Cuttagee. NSW
Awarded two residencies in 2020, The NG Art Creative Residency Eygalières, Provence, Southern France and Umbi Gumbi Artist in Residence, Cuttagee. NSW
2019 nominated as a candidate for a Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program (LAP) Visual Arts Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center USA.
2016-17 Artist in Residence, Bundanon Trust, NSW
In 2016 Kalabishis exhibited in the Kedumba Drawing Award
In 2013-14 she had undertaken a continuing access residency at the Harry Brookes Allen Museum for Anatomy and Pathology, Melbourne University, in 2014 an Art residency at Caritas Christi hospice part of the Palliative Care arm of St Vincent's Hospital and in 2012 a residency at The Mission to Seafarers, Melbourne.
Kalabishis has been a recipient of a number of commissions and grants and her work is held in international and Australian private and public collections.
Gina Kalabishis established Level 17 Artspace at Victoria University in 2008 and was the Gallery Director until 2011.
Gina Kalabishis is represented by Flinders Lane Gallery.
BORN MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA 1970
STUDIES/QUALIFICATIONS
2003 Advanced Diploma of Arts (Electronic Design and Interactive Multimedia) Victoria University
1999 Certificate III in Small Business Management for Artists and Designers, RMIT
1996 Post Graduate Diploma of Fine Art (Painting) Victoria College of the Arts, University of Melbourne
1993 Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) Victoria College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Prahran
1989 Advanced Certificate in Art and Design Footscray College of TAFE
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS / PROJECTS
2022 Romantica, Flinders Lane Gallery
2021 The Flying Gardeners, Flinders Lane Gallery
2018 Bundanon Floor to Sky, Flinders Lane Gallery
2017 Niteart, Once in a blue moon, Flinders Lane Gallery
2016 You and Me, Flinders Lane Gallery
2015 Heartland, Flinders Lane Gallery
2015 Australian Free Style,Hotel Pacific, Kanazawa, Japan
2014 Breath, The Art Vault, Mildura
2014 Breath, Nite Art: Harry Brookes Allen Museum for Anatomy and Pathology, Melbourne University
2013 Love and Limerence, Catherine Asquith Gallery
2011 Imperfect Bloom, Level17 Artspace, Victoria University
2009 City of Whitehorse Christmas decorations, public art concept and installation
2008 Garden Beds, ParkArt commission, Darebin City Council
2007 Christmas decorations concept and installation, City of Whitehorse, Scapesystems collaboration
2005 National Police Memorial design competition entry, Canberra ,Scapesystems collaboration
2005 Pyalong Public Artwork Entry Feature - Stage 1, VicRoads, Scapesystems collaboration
2004 Salad, Counihan Gallery, Brunswick
2004 Flutter, CiberArt Bilbao, Spain
2003 Hubba Bubba, Online Virtual Exhibition, Geelong Art Gallery
1996 Hair, West Space, Footscray
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2024 John Leslie Art Prize, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale
2023 WAMA Art prizw, Ararat Art Gallery
2022 Art Apron Projet- Food Bank, Flinders Lane Gallery
2022 Flood Relief Fundraiser, Flinders Lane Gallery
2020 Still, Flinders Lane Gallery
2020 Spring Salon, Flinders Lane Gallery
2020 Gippsland ArtGallery Bushfire Appeal Exhibition and Auction
2020 Botanics, Gala Gallery, Rockhampton, Central Queensland
2019 30 x 30 , Flinders Lane Gallery
2019 On the Fringe, Flinders Lane Gallery
2019 This Land… Elaine L. Jacob Gallery at Wayne State University, Detroit, USA
2019 St Kevin’s Art Prize show, Toorak
2018 John Leslie Art Prize, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale
2017 Eutick Memorial Still Life Award, Project Contemporary Artspace, Wollongong
2017-18 Romancing the Skull, Art Gallery of Ballarat
2017 Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize,The Gallery @ Bayside Arts & Cultural Centre
2016 Eutick Memorial Still Life Award, Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery
2016 Impressions 2016, Australian Print Workshop
2016 FUSE, Flinders Lane Gallery
2016 Kedumba Drawing Award, Orange Regional Gallery, Orange
2016 John Leslie Art Prize, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale
2016 Bruny Island Art Prize, Bruny Island, Tasmania
2016 Verdant Garden, Bundoora Homestead Art Centre
2015 Off Road, Flinders Lane Gallery
2014 Eutick Memorial Still Life Award, Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery
2014 In Bloom, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale
2014 Melbourne Art Fair, Flinders Lane Gallery
2014 Celebrating 25 Years, Flinders Lane Gallery
2014 Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing, Adelaide Perry Gallery Presbyterian Ladies' College, Sydney
2014 The Rick Amor Drawing Prize, Art Gallery of Ballarat
2013 The Inaugural Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discovery (ACMD) Acquisitive Art Prize St Vincent's Gallery
2012 WE ARE HERE: Paul Borg, Gina Kalabishis, Shannon Smiley, Chapman and Bailey Gallery, Abbotsford
2012 FESTIVITE 2012, Catherine Asquith Gallery
2012 Impressions 2012, Australian Print Workshop
2012 Rick Amor Drawing Prize, Art Gallery of Ballarat
2011 The rest is silence, Death Be Kind, Brunswick East
2011 The Top 20 Peoples Choice Award, The ANL Maritime Art Exhibition, World Trade Centre, Docklands
2011 The ANL Maritime Art Prize and Exhibition, Mission to Seafarers, Docklands
2011 CPM National Print Awards, Tweed River Art Gallery, NSW
2011 Aura: The Haunted Image, Level 17 Artspace, Victoria University
2010 Tales of the Greek Migrant, A Modern Odyssey, Hellenic Museum, Melbourne
2010 Art Flash, Pursuit, Melbourne Art Fair
2010 The Good, The Bad and The Punished, The Artist's Garden, Fitzroy
2010 Connect 10, Level 17 Artspace, Victoria University
2009 Flora, International drawing exhibition, The Manukau School of Visual Arts, New Zealand
2008 Snapshot, Level 17 Artspace, Victoria University
2004 Women’s Art Salon Counihan Gallery, Brunswick
2004 Fringe x 4, Vanguard Gallery, Northcote
2003 Nikon Summer Salon, CCP (Centre for Contemporary Photography) Fitzroy
2003 Visuals, Ministerial Offices, Treasury Place, East Melbourne
2003 Wild Posting, Budget Gallery, San Francisco, CA USA
2003 Fleming’s Nurseries Award, Span Galleries, Flinders Lane
2001 Rear Vision, Victoria University Alumni Exhibition Span Gallery, Flinders Lane
2001 Bring back the Biffo, The Artist's Garden Fitzroy
2000 Social Fabric, Women and the Greek Textile Tradition Manningham Gallery
1999 Is Footy X@!!#'d?, The Artist's Garden, Fitzroy
1998 ‘Drawing’ and ‘Linden Gallery Christmas Show’, Linden Gallery, St.Kilda
1998 Cancer the Journey, Vic Health Access Gallery, NGV, Touring Show regional galleries
1997 Christ I'm Pissed Off, Stop 22, St.Kilda
1996 Antipodes V 1996, Gallery 101
1995 Ready Wrapped and Self-Sealed, Linden Gallery, St.Kilda
1995 A Four Art, West Space, Footscray
1992 Neophytes, Access Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria
1989 Prahran Painters, Linden Gallery, St.Kilda
SELECTED GRANTS AND AWARDS
2017 (Winner) Eutick Memorial Still Life Award, Project Contemporary Artspace, Wollongong
2017 (Winner) Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize: People's Choice Award, The Gallery @ Bayside Arts & Cultural Centre
2016 (Winner) Bruny Island Art Prize People's Choice Award. Bruny Island, Tasmania
2014 (Winner) Rick Amor drawing prize 2014. The Art Gallery of Ballarat
2013 (Winner) The Inaugural Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discovery (ACMD) Acquisitive Art Prize St Vincent's Gallery
2010 (Winner) Hellenic Museum and Bank of Cyprus Art Award
2008 Award, Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning Level 17 Artspace, Workforce Development (Victoria University)
2004 Moreland Cultural Grant
2004 Experimenta Travel Grant
1994 (Winner) Emanuel Hirsh Award. Victoria College, Prahran
1993 (Winner) Essendon Artist Award, Essendon Festival Art exhibition
COMMISSIONS
The Experimentalist: Nature series, Werribee Library, public art commission, Victoria University
Garden Beds, ParkArt commission, Darebin City Council
COLLECTIONS
National Gallery of Australia
Art Gallery of Ballarat
Gippsland Art Gallery
Bundanon Trust
Bank of Cyprus Art Collection
Harry Brookes Allen Museum for Anatomy and Pathology, Melbourne University
Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discovery Collection, St Vincents Hospital
Victoria University Art Collection
The Art Vault, Mildura
Cancer Genetics Centre, Sydney
Brad Teal Real Estate Collection
Private collections in Australia and overseas
ART RESIDENCIES
2020 NG Art Creative Residency Eygalières, Provence, Southern France
2016-17 Artist in Residence, Bundanon Trust, NSW
2014 Art residency, Caritas Christi hospice part of the Palliative Care arm of St Vincent's Hospital
2013 Short Access Residency: Harry Brookes Allen Museum for Anatomy and Pathology, Melbourne University
2012 The Mission to Seafarers, Docklands, Melbourne
TEACHING AND ART APPOINTMENTS
2014 Nite Art: Artist Talk, Harry Brookes Allen Museum for Anatomy and Pathology, Melbourne University
2013- 2014 Part-time: Art technician and Gallery Curator, Gallery Ranfurlie, Korowa Anglican Girls' School
2008-11 Gallery Director, Established Level 17 Artspace, Victoria University
2000-13 Art Lecturer. Digital Imaging, Printmaking, Painting and Drawing, Victoria University
2007-10 Art consultant for Victoria University Art Collection
2003-09 Public Art and Landscape Architecture Practice, Scapesystems
2008 International Art Forum Co-ordinator, Australia and New Zealand
2007 Photography Studies College, Lecturer in Digital Imaging, Southbank
CURATORIAL APPOINTMENTS
2013 'Slow Watch', Curator: Gina Kalabishis
2010 ‘A Tradigital Survey’, Curators: Gina Kalabishis and Kirsten Rann
2009 “FLORA’ Level 17 Artspace, Victoria University, An international drawing exhibition
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS, CATALOGUES & REVIEWS
2018 Catalogue Essay: Bundanon Floor to Sky,Dr Ryan Jefferies Head of Programs, Science Gallery Melbourne
2017. Chapter in the award winning publication NATIVE: Art and Design with Australian Plants, written by Kate Herd and Jela Ivankovic-Waters (published by Thames & Hudson)
2017 ‘Gina Kalabishis wins Eutick Memorial Still Life Award 2017 in Wollongong’ Illawarra Mercury
2017 ‘Gina Kalabishis winner of the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award 2017 in Wollongong’ Neos Kosmos
2016 &