Gardens 22–25 February 2024, Melbourne Art Fair

In the world of Joanna Lamb, the weeds are just as important as the rose bushes. These unlikely companions are treated to the same process, ridding them of superfluous detail to reveal their inherent formal characteristics. Line and colour are prioritised to re-present the graphic identity of suburban landscapes. Here, Lamb provides her audiences with just enough information, precise distillations that might well fall into obscurity with the removal of a single layer of paint. Her tight compositions are locked into a shimmering state as a result, always almost legible and not.

Stylised depictions of home have long been of interest to the Boorloo/Perth-born painter, who has exhibited to great success locally and within East and Southeast Asia for more than 25 years. During this time, her work has been acquired by countless esteemed institutions, including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Parliament House, and TarraWarra Museum of Art, as well as the Macquarie, La Trobe, Western Australia, and Edith Cowan University collections. Lamb’s seemingly mechanical eye has been trained by a lifetime of looking, following her early introduction to publishing media by a father who operated an offset-printing business. This relationship with the making and distribution of economic images was hugely influential for the artist, who continues to reckon with these same ideas. In this way, Lamb reminds of the late Dorrit (Dorothea Foster) Black, whose immeasurable contributions to Modernist Australian painting and printmaking wrangled international discussions around flatness and abstraction into something relevant to herself and her peers.

Joanna Lamb will unveil Gardens at Melbourne Art Fair (MAF), a solo exhibition of new canvases that are among her largest to date. Director of Art Collective WA, Felicity Johnston, who will present the artist at the fair, recognises the unique opportunity that this affords Melbourne buyers. She comments, “Joanna Lamb’s highly refined compositions are sought after across Australia, in particular Perth and Sydney where she has found an eager market of private art collectors, institutional and corporate collections, architects and designers.”

The body of work is iconic of Lamb’s signature preoccupations, showcasing her careful exploration of a distinctly Australian suburban vernacular. This time expressed as domestic garden plots, the artist considers nature’s reluctance to conform to the parameters imposed by well-meaning residents. Vibrant tangles of local and introduced species burst with wanted and unwanted foliage. Pots, planters, and fences are elements common between the otherwise varying scenes, enforcing their definite boundaries to little avail. For Lamb, “the works display a sense of optimism which is compounded by their scale. When hanging them together at MAF they will remind us that we are often oblivious to, or are too busy to notice, the beauty in the places we inhabit.” This thread of resilience within the paintings echoes the conditions of their making, largely the products of restricted travel due to lockdown in recent years. Accounting for this and the largely unprecedented density and scale of the works, the artist recalls, “the significant amount of studio time gifted… allowed me to show the detail in the gardens – my focus shifted from a macro view of the urban landscape to a micro view of the spaces around me.”