Thinking with Animals

22 November 2024 – 15 January 2025

In partnership with Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney

Curators: Tom Murray and Leonard Janiszewski

Humans have been painting animals for at least 45,000 years. We celebrate and honour them, we fear and plead upon them, we employ, deploy, and eat them, and we are them. And never more so than in the work of Joanna Braithwaite. Beautiful, pompous, ridiculous, shy, curious, smart, sexy, funny, social, hierarchical, scared, lonely, competitive, and companionable - with a fantastically wry imagination Braithwaite paints a human-animal menagerie of situations, emotions and connections.

In each image lurks a world in miniature, a politics of the superficial and the existential. And as a body of work Braithwaite offers us both a humorous question and a seriously political proposition: humans and animals, self and other, you and I, how do we navigate these challenging times?! Like this?!