Joanna Gambotto

In October 2022 Fox Galleries will introduce Polish-born, Sydney-based painter, Joanna Gambotto’s ‘Dreamscapes’, a series of exuberant interior manors, flaunting a golden palette packed with the promise of a European vacation. Warm reds and yellows to rich fudgy browns, demonstrating a slippery realism abstracted by the surrealist haze of the entranced dreamer.

In dreams we look for hidden meanings, usually reserved for an audience of one. The question of where exactly we go in dreams has always been a point of fascination. Jung called it “shaped energy”, Freud considered it “wish fulfilment”, Crick described it as “reverse learning”, whatever your way of seeing: planning, manifesting, predicting, fantasising, obsessing, visualising or data dumping, this nibbling on the unconscious paints the day as a picture to be lived.

Gambotto’s paintings fragment the facts, plot twists that transcend the traditional interior into a panoply of banal personal possessions, places visited and things seen. An abundant force of composed chaos, expressive brush strokes bursting with the buoyant excess of the humdrum. Clever contortions saturated to the point of losing meaning, time, space and linear narrative that have the potential to implode at any moment.

They are, put simply, joyously absurd and deftly painted.

Gambotto’s bewitching still lifes and interior scenes will swoop you into the clutter of the dreamer as a space to be lived, explored and played in. Presenting visions that survived the dream world; the offerings of a painter colluding with mystery. However you want to see it, nobody escapes the great slumber: we enter dreams, dream big, dream to forget, follow dreams, get lost in dreams; this is the enigmatic realm of the dreamer.

Artist Statement: 

Dreamscapes collapse the barrier between the dreaming and waking realms, tapping into the world of unconstrained imagination. They have been stitched together from random, unrelated imagery, in a similar way our brain conjures up dreams and creates an alternative reality, which to a conscious, rational mind, wouldn’t make sense. Unusual juxtapositions of objects and images introduce an element of playfulness to the work and charge it with a whimsical narrative.

View a virtual walk-through of Gambotto’s exhibition here.