Superpartner is pleased to announce the gallery’s opening and inaugural exhibition, Sirens, by Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland based painter, Georgie Hill. Open from 8 December 2024 to 26 January 2025, the exhibition features new works on canvas and paper.

Georgie Hill’s paintings embody a dynamic interplay of visual systems, merging gestural and diagrammatic elements where emotion and structure coexist. This energetic exchange radiates an explosive quality, creating an optical vibration that moves in multiple directions. Characterised by calligraphic brushstrokes and atmospheric veils of vibrant colour, her work engages with concepts of communication, movement, and transition, prompting a reconsideration of boundaries and equilibrium.

Hill’s engagement with her materials—paper and canvas—through techniques like cutting, folding, incising  and adhering; combined with a physical immediacy in her application of paint and mark-making, reveals a process that dances between impulse and calculation, echoing a dialogue of call and response. Aesthetic impositions and contradictions permeate her works. Gestural bursts of jagged brushwork assert themselves against expansive fields of soft pastel curves; fluid progressions of waterborne pigment are abruptly interrupted, sliced through and confined. Serpentine curves of precisely mapped lines are scored through thick paper substrates, organising and moderating otherwise unrestrained atmospheric dispersions of colour. Each painting conveys a sense of uneasy balance, driven to a moment of turbulence beyond their physical delimitations. This increase in energy, held in check, seems fixed in a precarious equilibrium, evoking a liminal state where the paintings teeter on the verge of explosion or inward collapse.

Hill’s use of canvas fragments adds another layer of meaning to her work. She collects off-cut and salvage pieces left on the art supplies shop floor; remnants of canvases stretched to order. These segments, imbued with an aura of disregard, are transformed by her painterly freedom and gestural abandon. The cut edges of the pieces impose themselves across, while somehow becoming embedded with, her underlying fields of patterned colour. Her vibrant, highly personalised brushwork and geometric patterns reflect a deep interest in artistic practices that investigate and disrupt conventional boundaries.

Central to her practice is the exploration of the dynamics that shape human experience and perception, investigating the connections between the broad and the intimate, exteriority and interiority. Hill often titles her works after literary texts, drawing inspiration from writers like Anna Kavan and Anne Carson. These references resonate with her interest in heightened perception, where the ordinary verges on the inexplicable or sublime.

In this recent series of works Hill continues to delve into literary and artistic portrayals of female figures from Greek and Roman mythology, reflecting on the enduring archetypes that continue to influence contemporary sociopolitical currents. In, for example,  the group of paintings, Siren / Melter of Limbs 1, 2 and 3, she gestures at once to the Archaic Greek poet Sappho, and to the Canadian writer and classicist (and well-known translator of Sappho), Anne Carson. Using Sappho fragment 130 as a jumping-off point, these works contemplate the allure of the Siren, and the loss of control inherent in experiences of desire and Eros. She has also studied pop-cultural representations of the Siren/Mermaid, such as Ivan Aksenchuk’s 1968 animated interpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, and the storyboard art of Kenzo Masaoka’s uncompleted animation project, The Little Mermaid’s Crown, first published in 2017.

Equally relevant is Hill’s interest in contemporary pioneers of abstraction, including Austrian painter Martha Jungwirth, US painter Mary Heilmann, Argentine/Swiss painter Vivian Suter, and Suter’s mother, Elisabeth Wild (Austrian born, 1922 - 2020). In different ways the practice of these artists, while distinct in their painterly form, share common tendencies, such as, drawing on personal narrative, an employment of processes that are open to chance and discovery through the act of painting and a commitment to pushing the boundaries of abstract art. Wild’s collages evoke a sense of containment, walking the line between construction and deconstruction, echoing aspects of Hill’s thought and practice.

Georgie Hill has received several awards and residencies including the Olivia Spencer Bower Foundation Art Award, the C Art Trust Award and the Youkobo Art Space residency in Tokyo. Her work is held in private and public collections, including the Chartwell Collection (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki), Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, and University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau. Significant solo exhibitions include Feint at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, 2014, and the Beijing Contemporary Art Fair, 2019.

Georgie Hill lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.