Intimate figures, bold modernity
Mirka Mora 'Figures with Bright Sun'
The human figure remains a central subject in modern and contemporary art, even as artistic styles expand through abstraction, conceptual practices, and new media. Across painting, sculpture, photography and performance, many artists continue to engage with the body - not simply to record likeness or anatomy, but to explore ideas of emotion, identity, presence and what it means to be human. This enduring interest reflects the figure’s unique role in visual culture: a site where personal experience, social narratives and cultural meaning converge.
Philippe Le Miere 'Alice the First-class marksman'
This selection from our Director’s Choice exhibition brings together figures that are expressive rather than resolved. Among these works is Mirka Mora’s 'Untitled (Angel)', a delicate and dreamlike figure that hovers between innocence and unease. Rendered in Mora’s characteristic fine linework, the angel appears imagined rather than observed, embodying the artist’s recurring interest in psychic, symbolic and inner-world imagery. Rather than depicting external reality, Mora’s figures channel an intuitive, internal narrative that continues to define her place in Australian art and visual culture.
Dorothy Braund’s 'Two Figures on the Beach' offers a quieter, more contemplative approach to figurative painting. Set against an expansive coastal landscape, the figures are solid yet reserved, absorbed in their own interiority. Braund’s characteristic restraint creates space for reflection, allowing the human presence to register without being overstated.
Dorothy Braund ‘Two Figures on the Beach’
Reg Mombassa’s 'Self Portrait with Beard and Plastic Ring' adopts a more confrontational mode of figurative representation. In this work, the artist’s own image becomes a site of irony and self-scrutiny, collapsing the distance between subject and maker. The portrait feels both personal and performative, inviting viewers to consider how identity, self-image and public persona are constructed and seen. With his quintessential satirical voice, Mombassa creates a work that addresses the complexities of self-representation within contemporary Australian art.
Reg Mombassa ‘Self Portrait with Beard and Plastic Ring’
In George Baldessin’s 'Night Personages', the human figure becomes fragmented, stylised and theatrical. Rather than portraits, these figures function as archetypes, hovering between dream and observation. The work reflects Baldessin’s sustained interest in the symbolic and psychological charge of the human form, a hallmark of his contribution to 20th-century Australian printmaking and sculpture.
George Baldessin ‘Night Personages’
Together, these works demonstrate that in modern and contemporary art, the human figure is rarely concerned with straightforward resemblance. Instead, the body functions as a conceptual tool for thinking about the self, relationships with others, and what it means to exist within a changing social and cultural landscape. As viewers, we are invited not only to observe these figures, but to recognise aspects of our own identity and experience reflected through them.
Norman Lindsay 'The Revellers'
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