Julia Ciccarone
Julia Ciccarone
(b. 1967, Melbourne. Lives and works in Melbourne)
Julia Ciccarone is interested in the relationship between painting and the moving image. A strong cinematic narrative runs through her highly detailed paintings, with each work beginning as a series of storyboards mapped out in pencil.
For Melbourne Now, Ciccarone presents an installation comprising three works that meditate on nature, ecology and the human soul. In Revelation, 2022, an oil painting is reproduced as large-scale wallpaper inside the Impressionism Galleries at Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia with a log stool positioned in front of the work, inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the arresting panorama. Two other large-scale works on display draw on the Keatsian concept of negative capability, summoning the viewer to, as the artist says, ‘engage in the state of not knowing’. Somewhere between the real and illusory, present and future, Ciccarone’s work leads the viewer on a mysterious journey.
Ciccarone completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1988. Based in Melbourne, she has also lived and worked in Italy as the recipient of the Verdaccio Studio, awarded by the Australia Council. She has also worked with film director Kasimir Burgess as an art director, producer and conceptual artist, contributing to four short films, as well as videos and the feature-length film Fell (2014). Ciccarone has completed a number of commissioned portraits in recent years, including a self-portrait that won the Archibald People’s Choice award in 2021. In 2014 she was a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize, the Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize and was a semi-finalist in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize.