Anna Schwartz Gallery has announced it will present a monumental new floor work by significant Australian artist Rose Nolan from 11 September – 16 October 2021.

Known for her distinctive reduced palette of red and white, and use of utilitarian materials, Nolan’s latest installation comprises a large carpet and mirrored panels that will occupy the Gallery for the duration of her month-long exhibition. The new solo exhibition, titled Parlour Games, continues Nolan’s exploration of the possibilities of painting, shifting her work from the wall to the floor to inhabit a new space.

Nolan’s practice is known for its investigation of the formal and linguistic qualities of words, directly using language to transform the architectural spaces they inhabit. A recent example is the towering public art work ‘Screen Works – ENOUGH-NOW/EVEN/MORE-SO’, for the Munro Site, Queen Victoria Market Renewal, City of Melbourne, with Six Degrees Architects. Proposed as verbal-visual puzzles, Nolan uses text as material object, derived from the everyday where words are chosen for their visual presence, formal qualities and linguistic content. By making language concrete in this way meaning is allowed to be approached differently. This same approach is applied to the new installation in Parlour Games.

Image: Rose Nolan, Big Words – to keep going breathing helps (circle work), 2017, synthetic polymer paint, hessian, velcro, steel, 425 x 598.6 x 515.5 cm, Photo: Felicity Jenkins, © Rose Nolan. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery.