Helen Johnson

Painting serves as a critical departure point for Helen Johnson’s practice, as a set of tools that work beyond language to encircle a range of contemporary issues. Her works engage a broad visual vernacular, including spasming stock market graphs, fragments of text from the bygone days of pre-mechanised mining and logging, desert islands and the layout of the Australian Parliament House. Both loaded and contextually specific, the imagery is treated with an insistently aesthetic approach, with an implicit claim for the continuing possibility of critical engagement through reflective aesthetic experience. The building up of layered surfaces is not merely a technically-driven choice, but also serves as a metaphor for some of the complexities and interplay that operate in the ongoing formation of Australian identity—including ‘the persistence of denialist accounts of colonisation, the relationship between personal and official histories, and more fleeting cultural trends that spike the mix, becoming ever present as we lean into the internet’. ...

Pilar Corrias Gallery is a contemporary art gallery owned by Pilar Corrias. The 3,800 square foot gallery in London's Fitzrovia, designed by Rem Koolhaas, is made up of two exhibition spaces, located in the heart of London's West End. Pilar Corrias opened a second London gallery space at 2 Savile Row in July 2021, designed by London and Oslo-based architect firm Hesselbrand. Since its inception, the gallery has worked with emerging and established artists with the central aim of allowing their work to grow both in terms of production of new projects and the making of new exhibitions. Pilar Corrias now represents a total of thirty-two international artists, two-thirds of whom are female. ...