Kathy Liu: Painting Now 2024

With their enchanting enmeshment of abstraction and figuration, the paintings of Eora/Sydney-based artist Kathy Liu will form a softly striking centrepiece for Painting Now – arriving after a string of successful group and solo exhibitions at our Murrurundi gallery. Now experiencing an exciting creative breakthrough that has seen a magnificent expansion of her work’s scope, Liu was recently the subject of an extensive profile in Belle magazine, which reflected on the intuitive process by which she brings her ethereal paintings to life.

What might begin as an exercise in loose, tonal abstraction can take a delightfully unexpected turn as her painterly pools begin to coalesce and enigmatic, inchoate figures emerge through diaphanous wafts of colour. “Sometimes it feels more as if I’m there to help the artworks find their own storylines,” says Liu, whose canvas becomes a conduit for adventures through imaginative worlds. “It reflects my subconscious, bringing up themes and narratives from my past life that I have almost forgotten. Lost memories of childhood, my love of mythology, some distant lines of poetry, all of these are unburied and rediscovered through my work.”

Redolent of hazy memories, nocturnal musings or half-remembered dreams, the resulting compositions feel alive with emotion, poeticism, a sense of magic and effervescent movement. From a smattering of stars and harlequin prints to merry-go-rounds, crescent moons and cuddly creatures, figurative elements all bubble up through overlapping, ethereal layers of pinks, greens and lolly hues, with these stories and characters recalling a childlike innocence and unfettered imagination.

But as with the circus paintings of Chagall and Picasso – both cited as influences – there could be a tinge of melancholy in these dreamlike scenes. The ephemerality of childhood amusements is echoed by a gossamer quality that sees fragmentary images on the cusp of emerging or just fading away – an ambiguity that rhymes with her fluid, freeform approach and the serendipitous possibilities of her abstract painting practice.

Liu’s Painting Now series is an exciting triumph for an artist whose practice is going from strength to strength. To discuss works from the series, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au