PERTH.- Archibald-winning artist Julia Gutman will unveil her largest artwork to date at The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA).

life in the third person is not only ambitious in scale, sitting at 12 x 3 metres, but it is also a material leap for the artist, who is known for stitching together donated garments to create narrative tableaux.

This work is jacquard woven, a first for the artist, and composed on a 3-metre loom at the Textiel Lab in the Netherlands.

“Collaborating with the Textiel Lab created an entirely new way of approaching my work. Watching strands of mohair and cotton twist together into an image is honestly mystifying. The more I learn about the various processes of textile production, the more they seduce my imagination,” said Julia Gutman.

AGWA commissioned writer and art historian Tai Mitsuji to explore the significance of the work.

Mitsuji notes the shift in Gutman's process, which is usually a “…manually driven practice [that] typically involves the sewing together of old garments. However, for this exhibition Gutman rebuilt her process digitally, meticulously recreating the layers of her hands-on aesthetic. The Jacquard looms computer-programmed process of weaving involved a completely new mode of working for the artist.”

The result is a truly massive work weaving together cotton, mohair and wool that encompasses an entire gallery at AGWA.

“This incredibly refined and layered work is as carefully constructed as Gutman’s hand-stitched works. It required her to travel to the Netherlands to work with a specialist textile producer, and to think how new technologies can extend what she is capable of producing. Especially around the ways woven threads can enliven surfaces in unexpected ways while holding their form in large exhibition spaces like AGWA’s” said Colin Walker, AGWA Director.

Gutman’s practice has been described as “painting with fabric.” Her Archibald Prize win represented an institutional acknowledgement of this approach as an expanded painting practice. Her work draws on motifs from historical painting to reflect on the interpersonal, projection, intimacy and the performance of selfhood.

In life in the third person, Gutman inverts the notion of the self-portrait via an irreverent use of historical references. The work plays with imagery from Francisco Goya, Jan Willem Pieneman and the Ancient Greek figure of ‘Janus.’

As Mitsuji explains, “Gutman’s image is in every one of the scenes, yet because of this repetition the individual person also ceases to really be in any of them. The monumental textile is not a retreat into narcissism, but a push to understand the limits of our own image.”

“life in the third person has a new complexity, a depth and a textural form that sees the artist making real and lyrically felt themes of fragility, connection and expressivity that drive her output. We are excited to present the work at AGWA and to have been able to assist such a talented young artist to push their practice in such a dynamic way,” said Walker.

One of Gutman’s inspirations for life in the third person came from Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s 1847 short story, The Shadow.

It tells the story of a man whose shadow one day abandons him. The shadow returns years later to the man, and switches places with him, pretending to be the man himself. The shadow ultimately has the man killed, in a critical act that suggests how the image of the man has overtaken his actual existence. Andersen’s parable moves into the fantastical, yet it captures the very real threat of our image moving beyond our likeness and turning against us. Put simply, the abiding threat that our shadow will one day no longer follow us.

Responding to the cultural obsession with identity, literary trends of autofiction and a generation defined by digital self-marketing, Gutman’s work suggests a futility embedded in the urge to define the self.

“I think a big part of artistic eros comes from this desire to express who you are, to make a deeper part of yourself known to the other. But what we ‘are’ is in constant flux. And how that thing is perceived and transformed by another is completely out of our control. There’s an irony here that I find really interesting – this urge to be known can be the very thing that flattens us and makes us unknowable – even to ourselves,” explains Gutman.

life in the third person opens at AGWA on Saturday 5 October 2024. The exhibition will be officially launched at a special event with the artist on 25 October, to coincide with the opening of AGWA’s Rooftop featuring a performance by Julia Gutman’s friend and Archibald-muse, the singer Montaigne.

Julia Gutman is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is anchored by an experimental textile process, with which she interrogates her own relationships and the performance of selfhood. Her figurative works are made primarily from donated fabric – worn clothes, slept-in sheets – and often replicate compositional moments from historical artworks, using her friends as models to respond to and reinvent the originals. Garments often become physical artifacts of the past – stand-ins for those we have lost, or relics of who we once were. In this sense, Gutman works with the textures of memory, using found textiles as a vehicle for connection and collaboration.

While Gutman’s process is labour intensive, it is not precious; edges are rough, seams are wonky and images are frayed all over. Her mode of sewing is at once tender and aggressive. She brings together disparate things in an act of ‘mending’, but violently punctures and rips the materials to do so. Not a seamstress in the traditional sense, her process is much like painting. The stories of the materials intertwine with the imagery to create a layered narrative. life in the third person marks Gutman’s debut solo institutional exhibition, presented by the Art Gallery of Western Australia. In 2024, Gutman was commissioned by the Sydney Opera House and Vivid LIVE for the iconic Lighting of the Sails, creating her first video work, Echo.

In 2023, aged 29, Gutman was awarded the Archibald Prize, making her the youngest winner in 85 years. She was one of six exhibiting artists in Primavera 2022: Young Australian Artists at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. She was a finalist in the 2021 Ramsay Prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia and the 2020 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship at Artspace Sydney. Her work has been exhibited across Australia and internationally in Rome, Milan and New York.