I get the sense from Gregory Hodge’s latest series of paintings that they have been waiting to emerge for some time. The artist was once synonymous with bold abstraction, his signature gestural strokes exhibiting in galleries across the country and featuring on the cover of Amber Creswell Bell’s Australian Abstract (published by Thames and Hudson Australia in 2023). But in his latest show at Sullivan+Strumpf in Sydney, Hodge describes how, “For the first time in a long time, it’s a show that isn’t about abstraction. For the first time there’s been a real progression in the work. They’re much more related to imagery and figurative painting, representational painting.”

The scenes are often personal: interiors of his home in France, featuring stacked bookshelves and potted plants, glimpses into family life. In Evening (2024), Hodge’s wife, fellow Australian artist Clare Thackway, reclines serenely, eyes closed, possibly sleeping. Cubby (2024) takes place in a wooded area, children building a fortress from sticks. “They allude to a loose narrative,” he says. “They don’t necessarily have any personal reading, but they’re loosely bound to a personal allegory.”

The feeling I get of slow emergence has been built through his work over the last few years. What were once pieces of pure gestural abstraction became expressive strokes laid over figurative scenescapes that were hidden behind, which became the scenes themselves, finally revealed to us in their entirety.

“Abstraction acted almost like an interruption of the narrative,” he says. “It was like a duality of things happening at once on the surface. And these feel much more laid bare. The images are much more open.”

Hodge agrees that the change has been happening, gradually, for some time. “I haven’t shown a body of work this big that’s all figurative before, but it hasn’t been a huge leap, it’s been a slow progression,” he says. “And I do see this relationship between abstraction and representational painting in my practice staying bound. I don’t see it as one or the other. It’s something that I feel I can move across fluidly and happily.”

What remains present, even heightened, is the textural quality that has long permeated much of his work. Hodge has been building textures in paint to varying degrees for some time, but his recent focus has been on creating the essence of fabric. Living and working in France and two residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts has contributed to an interest in French tapestries and 19th-century painters interested in texture and light, such as Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.

But the process of creating paintings that evoke tapestries is, Hodge maintains, a purely painterly fixation. “While the interest in tapestries was a really important part of the research I was doing here, I feel like the new paintings are circling back into a conversation about painting.” It was an effort in problem solving—starting with bright bases and layering translucent paint with specially adapted tools and brushes to create a woven effect. “Even though they look like tapestries, they’re not bound to the rules of what a tapestry might look like. I love that about painting, that you can work out systems and rules and then break those rules to make these new things.”

There are still glimpses of abstraction, references to what came before. Bloom II (2024) is a scene of floral abundance. It could be plucked from a flower market or florist exterior, baskets and pots on the ground suggesting a root in representation. But scattered throughout are the familiar sweeps of paint, those expressive gestures again. Once they would have dominated over the scene, masking most of the backdrop, but here they simply nestle between marigolds and fall lightly from roses, retreating slightly but not abandoned.

It has the slight reminiscence of earlier forays into collage, which Hodge acknowledges, “is a really important link with the abstract paintings and what I’m doing now.” Abstraction can often be something projected onto art when the viewer doesn’t perceive what the artist might. Hodge describes always feeling his abstract paintings to be “bound to something concrete, whether that be a physical collage that I would make first, or a digital collage. And so there was a kind of mimicry or a sense of illusions. They were always referencing some sense of reality.”

It takes time to fully appreciate a painting. To evaluate a scene, match the signifiers, find everything that has been built in, and then perhaps build in your own motifs. “You don’t get everything from one time, you don’t see it all at once,” Hodge says. “They’re the antithesis of a fast-paced moving image. What I love about painting is that it’s about slowing an audience down.”

Gregory Hodge
And Then Together
Sullivan+Strumpf (Sydney/Eora)
27 February—29 March

This article was originally published in the March/April 2025 print edition of Art Guide Australia.