Catherine Bell Outlier

Catherine Bell has been making, exhibiting, curating, teaching and thinking about art for more than 35 years. Yet the Naarm/ Melbourne-based artist and academic’s interdisciplinary oeuvre defies easy categorisation. Outlier is the most comprehensive presentation of Bell’s work to date, and the second in Linden New Art’s series acknowledging the significant contribution of mid-career artists to Australia’s contemporary visual arts ecology.

Outlier spans the full breadth and trajectory of Bell’s practice, bringing together drawings, objects, and performance videos of the 1990s, that engage with questions of gender and the body. The exhibition brings together more than 40 works in a range of media, reflecting the continually evolving nature of the artist’s work, which has consistently engaged with the major, and often messy, milestones of life: birth, family, relationships and motherhood, through ageing, death, and remembering; and what it means to be a woman artist. In its scope and ambition, Outlier celebrates the career of one of the most singular and shape-shifting artists working in Australia today.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the first monographic publication dedicated to Bell’s practice, featuring newly commissioned texts by Jennifer Higgie, Dr Stephen Zagala, and exhibition curator, Hamish Sawyer.