LYDIA WEGNER

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LYDIA WEGNER's practice explores staged photography and visual abstraction. Wegner’s works emerge from the tabletop of her studio as the artist carefully layers and balances found objects, coloured and transparent papers, and other visual materials to form ephemeral assemblages.

For Wegner, “There’s a kind of magic which happens when I use the camera. You get an image that you may not be able to see by the eye.” There is a reason the artist often uses the word “magic” to describe her process. Wegner’s work has an alchemical quality, turning nothing into everything.

There are many ways you can think about Wegner: a painter using photographic gels, a stage director, a maximal minimalist. These designations hint at her studio practice, which involves selecting, arranging, lighting and photographing objects on a table-top in her studio. Her compositions, however, reveal a sculptor’s eye for balance and dimension, and a birdwatcher’s eye for significant colour. And like a birdwatcher, Wegner is open to chance. A sparkle of reflected light, an animated shadow. She uses these momentary effects to inspire her before, as she says, “my hand takes over”. What we see in Wegner’s photographs is the taut orchestration of accidents accepted and refined.

Recalling the history of formalism, particularly the Bauhaus geometry of László Moholy-Nagy (1895 – 1946), and the conceptual photography of Barbara Kasten (b. 1936), these sculptural studies dissolve reality into pure abstraction.

Lydia Wegner’s work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash Gallery of Art, Gippsland Art Gallery, Artbank, Gold Coast City Gallery, HOTA and the Price Waterhouse Cooper Collection. Since graduating with Honours from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2011, Wegner has held six solo exhibitions, including showcases at the Centre for Contemporary Photography and Bus Projects. Additionally, she was featured in the landmark group exhibition, Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, 2013—14, while in 2019 she was commissioned by the Monash Gallery of Art to create a series of works in homage to Robin Boyd, in a Portrait of an Australian House. She has twice been a finalist in Australia’s most important photography prize, the Bowness Prize, in 2019 & 2022. She has been a finalist in the 2022, 2016 & 2015 Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award, and the 2015 Churchie National Emerging Art Prize. In 2010, she was a Finalist in the Wallara Travelling Scholarship Prize, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, and in 2013 she was a Finalist in the Keith and Elizabeth Murdoch Scholarship Prize. Wegner was also awarded a Hill End Artist Residency through Bathurst Regional Art Gallery in 2013.