Karen Woodbury Gallery opens its new premises on Flinders Lane with Heather B. Swann’s first solo show since her recent Australia Council residency in Rome.

Swann was overwhelmed by the weight of human history in the Eternal City, by the magnitude of jumbled, buried, layered fragments. In this new exhibition she excavates a history of the strange.

The signature piece, Bachelor, has nine larger-than-life human heads budding from an enormous tree branch. While the title of the work calls to mind the carefully-constructed enigmas of Marcel Duchamp, the branch form also refers to Swann's having made close acquaintance with several installations by the great Italian contemporary artist Giuseppe Penone. She reflects on Penone’s Arte Povera gestures yet remains true to her own artistic sensibility, which is shy, mysterious and strange.

“The exhibition typifies Swann's poetic vision. These new sculptures and drawings present an unsettling, uncanny fusion of figuration and abstraction,” says gallery director, Karen Woodbury.

Heather B. Swann has been making and exhibiting sculpture for twenty years. In 2011, she was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts residency at the British School at Rome, Italy. Her work How the mind works: Cloud won the 2012 Swan Hill Drawing prize. Most recently, she had sculpture and drawings included in the Heide Museum of Modern Art exhibition Louise Bourgeois and Australian Artists.

She is represented in various public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Australia.

The Heather B. Swann show is an exciting start for the much anticipated launch of the new Karen Woodbury Gallery in a centrally located and iconic Victorian building in Flinders Lane, on the corner of Hosier Lane, Melbourne.

Image: © Heather B. Swann, Karen Woodbury Gallery