Chris Bond’s painting practice charts the decline and fall of artistic idealism, while Drew Pettifer’s photography practice explores themes of intimacy, gender and sexuality. For Melbourne Now, the artists have initiated a dialogue between their practices by collaborating on a series of diptychs and a new portrait. In the diptychs, Pettifer’s photographs of male nudes sit alongside duplicate images in which Bond has painted out the figures, summoning sentiments around presence and absence and loss and longing, while the subject of the portrait has been camouflaged by the painted hair which ‘cloaks’ his figure.
Supported by the Bowness Family Foundation
