For Ann Debono, representational paintings are uniquely paradoxical objects. Her work makes the sheer experience of vision seem alien, melding realism with abstraction to offer a newly incomprehensible world not arranged according to normative familiarity.

Interested in the idea of a disconnect between truth and legibility, her collage-like compositions corrode pictorial legibility to try and reveal an image that is peeling away from the conventions of pictorialism. Debono’s painting plays on the impossibility of a purely faithful depiction, exposing the construction and artifice concealed within realistic images.

Collecting image material from primarily her own extensive archive of film photography, Debono extends a discerning lens to sites of construction and transport, commercial displays, museological displays, apertures, and detritus. In doing so, her painting transmits an image of the world as a field of infinite regression; images behind images through which some spectral ‘real’ is evacuating.

Born in Maitland, NSW in 1989, Debono lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne. In 2015 the artist received a BFA from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), University of Melbourne, where she is currently a PhD candidate in Fine Art (2023-present). In recent years, Debono has undertaken several prestigious residencies including the Cranbourne Fellowship at the British School of Rome in 2018 and the Gertrude Contemporary Studio Residency from 2019 to 2021.

Ann Debono has exhibited extensively throughout Australia for over a decade, presenting work in significant museums and exhibition spaces including Geelong Gallery, Geelong; The British School at Rome, IT; Hellenic Museum, Melbourne; Metro Arts, Brisbane; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, among others. Her work is included in important public and private collections throughout Australia and Asia including Artbank, Sydney; Monash University Art Collection, Melbourne; Joyce Nissan Collection, Melbourne, among others.