Neon Parc

From the quiet intensity of an early watercolour featuring the warm light of a tiny, collaged candle (‘Untitled’, 1990), to the almost blinding glare of fluorescent tubes mounted on marine ply (‘Untitled’, 2007), Newman renders light as both material and conceptual. Other works, inscribed with evocative fragments—‘So much darkness’, ‘Made of light’, ‘Filled with light’—borrow from philosophical and spiritual texts, yet remain ‘Untitled’, inviting open interpretation rather than fixed meaning.

At the heart of the exhibition is the diptych ‘Lights On, Lights Off’ (2009), a formative historical painting that juxtaposes the glowing orange text ‘Lights On’ against a luminous cream ground with the deep, absorptive purple-black of ‘Lights Off’. Referencing Martin Creed’s conceptual language, the work expands into a meditative exploration of light and dark as metaphors for existence and consciousness.

Psychologically suggestive and emotionally resonant, the exhibition taps into streams of thought and feeling within the viewer, evoking our ecological, cultural and political moment: a time of both crisis and clarity, where darkness looms and light emerges as a fragile, essential force.

Born in Melbourne, 1962, Elizabeth Newman has been making and exhibiting art throughout Australia and overseas since the 1980s. A painter by training, she expanded her practice over the years to include wall works, objects, text-based works and writing. Her innovative and experimental work has been of significant influence upon her contemporaries and, further, on younger generations of artists who regard her practice as exemplary. Newman’s work is regarded as a significant advance to formalist-conceptualist discourse in Australia, and her writing is turned to as incisive articulations of this aesthetic and psychological terrain. Her broader conception of practice has also been influential and has seen her working beyond an individual subjective position as collaborator, project-space board member, and vocal and intellectually rigorous member of the art community.

Elizabeth Newman has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Loss of World’, Neon Parc, Melbourne, 2023; ‘Un-titled: Elizabeth Newman’, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2022; ‘Elizbeth Newman’, Neon Parc, Melbourne, 2021; ‘Elizabeth Newman: Is that a ‘No’?’, Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, 2020; ‘Elizabeth Newman’, Neon Parc, Melbourne, 2019; ‘So many lights and so much darkness’, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, 2018; ‘Mira Gojak / Elizabeth Newman’, Neon Parc, Melbourne, 2017; ‘Elizabeth Newman: Pop Up Store’, Knulp, Sydney, 2017.

Two major publications on Elizabeth Newman’s work titled ‘Still makin’ history’ and ‘Drawings’, co published by Neon Parc and Discipline, were published in 2023. The artist’s monograph ‘More than What There Is’ was published in 2013. Newman’s work is included in major Australasian public and private collections such as The National Gallery of Victoria, The Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery, The National Gallery of Australia, Artbank, The Kerry Stokes Collection, The Dobell Foundation. Collection, The Sir James and Lady Cruthers Collection, Monash University Museum of Art, Hewlett Packard Australia and The William Bowness Collection.