Neon Parc is delighted to announce the solo exhibition ‘dirty borrowed stardust’, by Irene Hanenbergh in South Yarra from 9 February to 16 March, 2024. Please join us for the opening celebration on Saturday 10 February from 4-6pm. Hanenbergh’s seventh solo exhibition with Neon Parc brings together a suite of new, intimate oil paintings, which explore the slippage between the contemporary and historical landscape. In many of the works images of primordial forests, lakes, mountains and oceans morph in and out of formation, infused with influences of the baroque, romanticism, and marginal fantasy genres. ‘dirty borrowed stardust’ holds within it a crossing of time and space and reveals to its’ audience a window of expansive micro-worlds which Hanenbergh thoughtfully builds. It is in these fleeting and repeated vistas, we have a sense of otherworldly narrative, like outtakes from unprocessed film or a distant memory. These mystical vignettes exist as moments within the lineage of her larger practice, revisiting and reworking leitmotifs throughout Art History and the natural world, that have fascinated the artist for decades. Drawing from this rich symbolic vocabulary, Hanenbergh’s works are personal and contemporary renderings of the sublime. Her work depicts nature as a setting for profound and poignant encounters. Through Hanenbergh’s continued repetition of images and mining of art historical references, she moderates freely between the History Painter, the Romantic, the anarchist and the recluse. Each of these ‘characters’ might be seen as tropes in modern painting, yet in these heroic landscapes—which are both real and imagined—each work is imbued with a unique authorship and idiosyncratic aura. As Sophie Knezic writes for Frieze Magazine; Hanenbergh’s “palm-sized paintings…unexpectedly capture the fire and brimstone of storms at sea and ice-clad mountains, abstracted into tiny coloured whirlpools of motion whose stippled, blotted surfaces summon an elemental aspect of these vaporous climes.” (2018) Irene Hanenbergh, 'Contact Twin', 2023. Oil on canvas, 12.5 x 22.5 cm.