Monumental

Queensland-born, Eora/Sydney-based artist Gerwyn Davies presents his latest solo exhibition at our Berlin gallery. Photographed in Shanghai, Monumental will debut officially during Berlin Art Week.

Currently the subject of the survey exhibition Sunburn at Tweed Regional Gallery, Davies previously exhibited there in 2023 as the winner of the prestigious Olive Cotton Award. His widely celebrated practice entwines performative self-representation and costume design to explore the powers and pleasures of queer photographic in/visibility.

Making the self at once hypervisible and hidden, Davies’s images engage with the power dynamics of portraiture, exploring, in his words, “the potential for queer subjects to wrest greater control through perversions of visibility and the dictating of terms by which they are exposed.”

In Monumental, elaborate costume constructions echo the built environment through material and form, conjuring architectural image worlds where “character and context coalesce, and clear distinctions between figure and ground, subject and object, seen and unseen, are queerly collapsed.”

The exhibition follows an impressive run of institutional projects and career milestones, including Shimmer at the Museum of Brisbane, the culmination of his headlining presence at the LGBTQIA+ Melt Festival, and his most ambitious commission to date: a sprawling textile installation that formed a centrepiece of the public program at last year’s Sydney Contemporary art fair.