JULIE RRAP: Past Continuous @ MCA

"At the beginning, my work was critiqued through self-conscious feminism. Now, I don’t know how it will be received. And when I have used a body it’s been my own, but you don’t find out much about me in that personal sense. You just see a body moving through time. I also think that this show is as much about time as it is about a body. I show a body through time."

Head to Art Guide to read a fantastic interview with Julie Rrap by Lauren Carroll Harris. In a conversation Rrap discusses her current survey ‘Past Continuous’ at the MCA, which exhibits ‘Disclosures’ with newer works that consider the cultural invisibility of the ageing female body.
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Read the full interview here >


Julie Rrap: Past Continuous
📅 28 June 2024 – 16 February 2025
📍Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

JULIE RRAP featured in Artist Profile

Ahead of the artist's solo exhibition ‘Past Continuous’, opening in June at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, ARTIST PROFILE has devoted a cover story to the astounding 40-year career of JULIE RRAP.

"Julie Rrap was in her late teens and living in a share house in South Brisbane when she and a group of friends took magic mushrooms. An image she hallucinated while studying her reflection in a glass windowpane at night has never left her. It was the face of an older woman she understood to be her her future self..."

Read more of Lilian Cameron’s cover story, accompanied by Anna Kučera’s exclusive portraits, in Issue 67 of Artist Profile.

JULIE RRAP Interviewed by Jennifer Higgie

Julie Rrap interviewed in Ocular by Jennifer Higgie. In the interview Rrap discusses the evolution of her latest commission - a double cast of her body in bronze - and evaluates its place amongst four decades of feminist practice.

Rrap is the recipient of the 2024 Melbourne Art Foundation Commission. Her work, titled 'SOMOS (Standing On My Own Shoulders)', is a life-sized bronze sculpture that will be unveiled at Melbourne Art Fair next week, before travelling to the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) where it will be included in Rrap's solo show, 'Past Continuous', opening in June 2024, and later to its permanent home in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

Read the article here >

JULIE RRAP in 'Suppose You Are Not' at Arter in Istanbul, Turkey

JULIE RRAP is part of 'Suppose You Are Not' a group exhibition at Arter in Istanbul, Turkey. The exhibition, drawn from the Ömer Koç Collection is curated by Selen Ansen, will be on view at Arter between 19 January–29 December 2024.

Suppose You Are Not, the first private collection exhibition held at Arter, spans a wide and deep territory not only in terms of the artworks and objects it encompasses but also the diverse mediums and themes that these artefacts are concerned with. Titled with inspiration from a line in Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat [Quatrains], the exhibition which brings together over 600 works, functional objects, rarities, furniture, and books produced in different periods explores the relations that emerge through the juxtapositions formed by a collection.

Suppose You Are Not delves into the passionate striving to collect and preserve the traces of humanity, the good and the evil, the ephemeral gestures, states, allusions and movements ranging from the most sublime to the most mundane, from the most permanent to the most ephemeral, which manage to persist by being conveyed from the dead to the living.

PAT BRASSINGTON, JULIE RRAP, HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT on display in 'In the Arms of Unconsciousness: Women, Feminism & the Surreal' at Hazelhurst Arts Centre

In the Arms of Unconsciousness: Women, Feminism & the Surreal features a selection of works including Pat Brassington, Julie Rrap, Honey Long & Prue Stent, among other significant contemporary Australian artists on display at Hazelhurst Arts Centre from 1 July 2023 to 10 September 2023.

Sitting within a renewed global interest in women artists and Surrealism, this ambitious exhibition explores ideas of feminism and the surreal, proposing an intrinsic between the two, particularly in contemporary Australian art practice over the decades.

Installation view of a selection of works by Pat Brassington, In the arms of unconsciousness: Women, feminism and the surreal, Hazelhurst Arts Centre

JULIE RRAP work 'Drawn Out' acquired by the National Gallery of Australia

Drawn out (2022) is one of Julie Rrap’s most recent performative self-portraits, the latest in a performative project that began almost fifty years ago.
 
The work, which is in effect a life drawing, comprises a video-performance of Rrap – shot from above, naked and holding a stick of Conté crayon – drawing on a large sheet of paper, moving under instruction of an unseen supervisor. Over a 12-minute period, Rrap’s body and the sheet of paper become covered in black marks as artist, body, sheet and drawing merge in a neat riposte to the way the genre of the nude, and life drawing in particular, usually position the artist and the naked subject. Together, the drawing and the video-performance produce a compelling, feminist self-portrait that is at once poetic and full of pathos. Key to the work’s disruptive power is the fact that this is the body of a 72-year-old woman, whose body we have looked at in the process of making art and ageing since the late 1970s.

JULIE RRAP finalist in the 2023 Dobell Drawing Prize

Congratulations to JULIE RRAP, who is a finalist in the Dobell Drawing Prize 2023.

National Art School presents the Dobell prize, which celebrates contemporary drawing.

Rrap’s video work ‘DRAW OUT’ is a brilliant investigation of drawing ‘the nude’:

“The drawing is a kind of haptic expression as a naked Julie Rrap rolls back and forth over paper secured to the floor. Here she marks the parameters of her body in charcoal. She can’t actually see her body as one entity in this process, it is not an object of her gaze. What we see is the writing and erasing of a body in pieces, a fragmented body, a body that wears the erasure of the drawing on its skin.” @annemarsh56, 2022

All finalists will be on show at the NAS Gallery until 10th June 2023.

JULIE RRAP, ‘Drawn Out’, 2022, video, 12 min.

JANET LAURENCE Artist Talk 'Artists on the Ice: Interpreting the Poetics of Antartica'

ARTISTS' TALK

Across an evening of storytelling, performance and conversation, JANET LAURENCE will join a panel of four exceptional artists who have documented the power and beauty of Antarctica.

Moderated by the wonderful JULIE RRAP, in her role as Director of Sydney College of the Arts, this talk at the University of Sydney is not to be missed! Other panellists include Alice Giles AM, Professor Jean McNeil, and Dr Diana Chester.

Thursday, 20 April 2023, 6PM. This is a free event, but registration is essential, and seats are going fast! Register on the @sydney_uni website.

JULIE RRAP features in Harper's Bazaar Australia

"[There] is this invisibility around the ageing female body, and it almost sends the message that a post-reproduction body doesn’t have any purpose.”

Early in 2022, Rrap exhibited her new video series DRAWN OUT at ARC ONE for the first time. This significant body of work halted audiences in their tracks:

“I think it’s the first show I’ve done where people, both male and female, were just completely absorbed by watching these videos,” she says. “It was almost like they were hungry to see this footage of an older woman drawing herself naked.”

Visit ARC ONE Gallery today to see this powerful piece in our Viewing Rooms.

JULIE RRAP 'Hairline Crack' Installed at AGNSW

Julie Rrap, 'Hairline crack', 1992, acrylic glass and hair, Installation dimensions variable.

It is fantastic to see JULIE RRAP'S key work 'Hairline Crack', 1992, installed among the permanent collection display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. 

Rrap first presented 'Hairline crack' in the 9th Biennale of Sydney. From a distance, the artwork resembles a black line drawn on the wall, evoking, perhaps, the work of Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner or other artists associated with minimalism. On closer inspection, however, it is quickly discovered that the line is in fact made from an unruly excess of human hair.

The work might be seen to meditate on the tension between the organic and the synthetic or between order and chaos. The perfectly straight, level line reveals itself to be disrupted by something organic and unpredictable; a part of our bodies associated with beauty that is also cut and discarded.

SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY 2022

Welcome to ARC ONE at SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY

From today will be showing a selection of major artworks from some of Australia's most significant contemporary practitioners, including PAT BRASSINGTON, LYNDELL BROWN / CHARLES GREEN, PETER DAVERINGTON, MURRAY FREDERICKS, JANET LAURENCE, HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT, DANI MARTI, JULIE RRAP, IMANTS TILLERS, GUAN WEI, CATHERINE WOO, and JOHN YOUNG. We are also proud to be presenting, for the first time, the work of internationally acclaimed artist DESMOND LAZARO.

Our booth is showcasing brand new artworks, alongside some of the most iconic works from ARC ONE Gallery, in celebration of these artists and their significant contribution to contemporary art in this country.

JULIE RRAP and Director Fran Clark featured in ART COLLECTOR

Artist JULIE RRAP and Director Fran Clark feature in the current issue of Art Collector, talking about the longevity of their friendship and professional relationship.

"Artists need to believe in their own vision of the world and a gallerist needs to be able to come on for the ride, but their input can provide invaluable guidance when the ride gets a bit bumpy." - Julie Rrap

"We share a respect that is underpinned by a great care for each other's way of working. Julie has always supported me with solid counsel." - Director Fran Clark

Artist feature in 'Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia (1848-2020)'

IMAGE: Anne Zahalka, The Cook (Michael Schmidt/architect) from the series Resemblance, 1986, matt Cibachrome paper, unique larger size, 100 x 100cm.

Six of our artists ANNE ZAHALKA, PAT BRASSINGTON, JULIE RRAP, JACKY REDGATE, JUSTINE KHAMARA and JOHN YOUNG feature in Daniel Palmer and Martyn Jolly's publication 'Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia (1848-2020)', published by Perimeter Books and designed by Public Office.

"Installation View offers a significant new account of photography in Australia, told through its most important exhibitions and models of collection and display. By looking at what lies beyond the frame the exhibition speaks not only to pictures, but to the people and places that nurture them."
Find more information about the book here

JOHN McDONALD on JULIE RRAP at the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art

John McDonald published a perceptive review in the Sydney Morning Herald today, writing on Sebastian Goldspink's "pioneering" curation of the current Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at AGSA, which includes a focus on JULIE RRAP. Importantly McDonald pays homage to the late, great artist Hossein Valamanesh and visionary philanthropist Neil Balnaves, who are both dearly missed by friends and colleagues in Australia and abroad.

McDonald concludes with glowing praise of JULIE RRAP's installation, writing,

Julie Rrap, now one of the elders in this group, takes a more direct approach, with a multi-channel video installation called Write Me (2021-22), which features 26 images of her own face, laid out like the letters on a keyboard ... One can only admire Rrap’s bravery in creating so many self-portraits in which she has added years and wrinkles to her own face. It’s simultaneously an embrace and a defiance of the ageing process. In the context of this Biennial, in which the older artists seem to have produced the best, most coherent work, it’s also a testament to the value of experience.

READ MORE here

New interview with JULIE RRAP

JULIE RRAP recently spoke with Kerrie O’Brien from The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald about her photographic series ‘Blow Back’, currently on view at the Centre for Contemporary Photography. This series continues her observations on the representation of women in art and society ——“In advertising, women often have their eyes closed and their mouths slightly open, it’s like this vacant entry point.”

“I always argue that the portrait is always more about the person looking at it than the person being photographed,” Rrap shared in the interview, “When you photograph somebody, it’s like this awkward moment when you have this existential crisis about who you are...while a portrait carries all this weight, it’s just a moment in time. Photography captures a fraction of a second of you but fixes you in time… They could be thinking about what they had for breakfast."

Read the full interview here. ‘Blow Back' is on display Centre for Contemporary Photography as part of the exhibition ‘We, Us, Them: CCP x Belfast Exposed’ until 17 April.

JULIE RRAP at the ADELAIDE BIENNIAL OF AUSTRALIAN ART

JULIE RRAP’s newly commissioned and major installation, Write me, 2021, is currently on display in the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Free/State at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

“For Julie Rrap, technology, albeit still fraught, may ultimately provide us with a space for shared experience and accountability. Write Me (2021) examines the social contract of the public sphere. In a career that has often returned to the body as a site of action and politics, recent times have reduced Rrap to a constrained and warped vision of their familiar face. 26 times over, across a keyboard shaped grid, with its familiar, specific alignments, play out 26 versions of the artists face, each representing a letter of the alphabet.”

— Bradley Vincent, AGSA.

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Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: ‘Free/State’ is on view until 5 June.

Learn more via @agsa.adelaide bio or visit

Art Guide interviews JULIE RRAP

JULIE RRAP, Drawn Out [installation view at ARC ONE], 2022, video, 12 minutes.

Art Guide writer Briony Downes sat down with JULIE RRAP to have a conversation on women’s liberation, feminist representations and the inspiration of her new video work ‘Drawn Out', which was a highlight of her recent solo exhibition at ARC ONE.

“I imagined it as a playful gesture where the traditional nude female life model draws herself. Now, seeing Secret Strategies, Ideal Spaces together with Drawn Out, I think there is a fantastic conversation across time; not only because my body is 35 years older but because it has liberated me from having to perform historical works. Now I am simply drawing for myself. The active quality of the video also animates the stillness of the early photographs.”

READ MORE in Julie Rrap on women’s liberation, performance and being a trickster