Exploring the 40-year career of leading Australian artist eX de Medici, ‘Beautiful Wickedness’ focused on her meticulous, panoramic watercolours and traces the genesis of her practice through formative artworks.
Throughout her practice, de Medici has remained true to her early Punk principles — a suspicion of authority, an ethos of political agitation and a disrespect for capitalism, consumerism and mass culture. She has been similarly steadfast in her resolve to unmask misuses of power. Also present in her work are references that reveal her fascination with botanical art, illuminated manuscripts and the coded symbolism of seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting.
These complex messages permeate de Medici’s exquisitely detailed watercolours and works of decorative art that denounce the violence around us that is ‘hiding in plain sight’. In this context, her sumptuous and richly detailed artworks emerge as a carefully orchestrated strategy to entice audiences and urge them to think critically about the world around them.
Skulls are a recurring motif in de Medici’s work. They refer to her practice as a tattooist, and her engagement with Dutch still-life paintings, known as vanitas or memento mori, which is Latin for ‘remember, you must die’.
eX de Medici ‘Blue (Bower/Bauer)’ 1998–2000
eX de Medici ‘The theory of everything’ 2005
eX de Medici ‘Live the (Big Black) Dream’ 2006
eX de Medici ‘Slave’ 2004
eX de Medici ‘Skull (blue and green)’ 2004
eX de Medici ‘Desire Overcoming Duality’ 2006
eX de Medici ‘Skinny Day Ambush (Super Family)’ 2007
eX de Medici ‘Cure for Pain’ 2010–11
eX de Medici ‘Bucket for a Blood Supply’ 2020
‘eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness’ in 1.2 and 1.3 (Eric and Marion Taylor Gallery) was at GOMA from 24 June until 2 October 2023. ‘Beautiful Wickedness’ offered opportunities for dialogue with ‘Michael Zavros: The Favourite‘ presented in the adjacent gallery 1.1 (The Fairfax Gallery) and 1.2.
We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.