CELIA GULLETT

A fine balance

09 Sep 2025 – 27 Sep 2025

"To arrive at a work she feels is finally ‘whole’, painter [Celia Gullett] goes to lengths. The glazing of the deep vivid magenta that falls like dusk into a bass line of blood plum and Vermillion took months to resolve, but decades to conceive. And to yield further depth from her contrasts, Gullett electrifies the seams of her compositions, so that no colour simply ‘ends’ but rather joins another chromatic contrast...For some, the primary focus of this work might appear to be colour, but none of that is possible without the artist’s knowing attention to light. The volume, weightlessness and tactility of these paintings rely on a light source that appears to be pulsing beneath the earthy weight of the linen. The light Gullett summons is not the scorching solarised sky but something more dispersed like night clouds or ash after rain. Her use of light is there to invert what we know rather than delineate what we want to see...In this work it is distillation rather than description that invites our immersion. And in this context abstraction can be seen as something stratified and rich rather than reduced and polished. Here are paintings whose dimensions and detail expand as the eye draws closer. They look furry, like the pelt of an animal or iridescent like a moth wing up-close and then assume an architectural or portal like quality from a distance...In a context of contemporary painting growing ever more gargantuan, flippant or gesturally grotesque these works hold their ground. Celia Gullett is not prolific. Her practice is sensate rather than sensationalist. But the reward of formalist restraint is meditative depth and an almost sculptural presence."

- Excerpt from essay by Anna Johnson 'Shaping Colour' for solo exhibition by Celia Gullett at South East Centre for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Bega, NSW, 2024

Celia Gullett has held solo exhibitions since 2002 and participated in group exhibitions since 1996. Gullett was the Winner of the Allan Gamble prize Mosman Prize in 2025, and has been a repeat finalist in Sydney’s Mosman and Paddington Art Prizes (2002-16) and exhibited in Singapore (2013), London (2017, 2018), Los Angeles (2017, 2018) and Sweden (2017). Her paintings are in the Macquarie University Art Collection, as well as SECCA in Bega, and numerous private collections both nationally and internationally.