The Subversive Stitch

About the exhibition
The Subversive Stitch was a group exhibition that explored how contemporary artists were reframing the boundaries of modernism. Featuring work by eleven Australian artists associated with alternative, non-commercial art spaces—including Store 5 and Gertrude Street in Melbourne, and First Draft in Sydney—the exhibition focused on practices grounded in intertextuality and mixed media. Selected artworks engaged with the decorative approach as historically marginalised within art, and irreverently challenged and complicated the formal limits of abstraction.

Artistic approaches included the use of unconventional and fetishistic materials—such as hessian (Rose Nolan), laminex (Constanze Zikos) and fur (Kathy Temin) —as well as so-called ‘inferior painterly devices’ such as stencilling (Bronwyn Clark-Coolee). Many artists also manipulated archetypal forms, including the grid, the sphere, the star and the stripe, as a means of disrupting modernist visual languages.

MUMA Online Exhibition Archive
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^{Image: Constanze Zikos, I Travel Your Dreams 1991, enamel on laminex, 19 parts, 340 x 173 cm. Courtesy of the artist}