Gallery representation:   kate bergin kate bergin  kate bergin kate bergin  kate bergin kate bergin  kate bergin kate bergin

Delinquent Angels at the Bendigo Art Gallery, People's Choice Winner, Arthur Guy Memorial Art Prize, 2011

An excerpt from, Painting Still the Best, (a review of the 2011 Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize) by  Rosemary Sorensen, March 18, 2011

As you walk in, you see, across the room, this year’s winner, Tim Johnson’s Community base, alongside the meticulous and lovely Delinquent Angels by Kate Bergin.

Johnson’s work is busy, pushing out against the edges of the canvas, and never resolving. ...This is a work that balances refusal against acceptance: Johnson is refusing to stay within western painting traditions (by eschewing realism, and trying to dissolve the frame as a boundary) while encouraging our acceptance of Australian Indigenous painting as valid on its own terms, with reference to other spiritual traditions, rather than the canon of fine art.

Now Bergin’s work is stuffed full of references to the canon, but within a contemporary viewpoint. This Bendigo painter is unashamedly intellectual, high-brow, the work richly allusive. The technique, too, is painterly, inviting close scrutiny just to enjoy the skill and knowledge with which the canvas has been prepared and completed.

Here we are, then: one, a winning painting that will hang in the Bendigo Art Gallery, tells us much about our social history and a lot more about the painter’s own life and beliefs. The other, which may end up in a board room, because it is so beautiful and so beguiling, tells us equally as much about the painter’s beliefs, but it has, in the end, grander intentions: its scope is mythic.

Both paintings, you’d have to say, take on a great deal, and if there is a theme linking all these works, maybe that’s it.