Artist Biography

Elizabeth Gower has worked across collage, painting and installation for more than four decades, refiguring the granular fabric of popular commercialism to create optically arresting tabulations of modern life. One of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, Gower emerged out of the burgeoning milieus of feminist and abstract artists in Melbourne throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. Known for her intricate collage-based practice, Gower’s fragmentary approach to abstraction draws much of its content from the detritus and cycles of consumption that endow advertising flyers, cardboard packaging and billboards with their conspicuous design and lurid vividity. Removed from their utilitarian focus these surplus materials are transmogrified in Gower’s work, tessellating freely across scales ranging from the monumental to the miniature.

Gower’s formal approach cites a disparate genealogy of visual culture, from avant-garde Modernist collage to vernacular sources of abstraction found in craft embroidery and ancient mosaic tiling. The resulting compositions are complex and rhythmic as Gower embraces the oppositional forces inherent to the medium: finding order through chaos, totality through fragmentation, permanence through ephemerality. Through haptic manipulations of everyday motifs, objects and materials, Gower’s innovative work co-opts the ubiquity of mass-consumption to give shape to the frenetic pace of modern life.

Elizabeth Gower (b. Adelaide, SA) lives and works in Melbourne. Since 1975, Gower has exhibited regularly throughout Australia, Europe and North America. Gower has been awarded esteemed international studio residency programmes in Paris, Barcelona, London, New York, Berlin and Tuscany, in addition to curating has numerous exhibitions for institutions across Australia and the USA. Known also for large-scale installations, the artist has undertaken major public commissions for the Metro Tunnel Project, Brisbane City Council, Sydney Olympics, Melbourne Cricket Ground and World Congress Centre, among others.

Dr. Elizabeth Gower was a Senior Lecturer at The Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, where she is an Honorary Senior Fellow. Gower was awarded a PhD from Monash University in 2014. Significant examples of Gower’s work are included in all major Australian institutions, including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.