Sally Ross opens a new exhibition at Murray White Room with new landscape works inspired by 15th and 16th Century Flemish painting. Displayed behind an arrangement of Cotinus coggygria (smoke bush) created by florist Hattie Molloy, the works reside in a private oasis in a contemporary approach to exhibiting, encouraging visitors to take pause from the bustle of everyday life.

Sally Ross, Landscape (Tree and bushes II), 2018, oil on wood panel, 100 x 80cm. Courtesy the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne
The exhibition brings together the past and the present. Using contemporary techniques of pastiche and appropriation, painting exclusively from photography and found images, Ross uses traditional painting styles to place her work in conversation with more historical approaches to art. For this forthcoming show, she has collaborated with artist Matthew Harris to create Vanitas paintings, a symbolic genre of historical painting popular in 16th Century Europe.

Sally Ross, Landscape (6 trees), 2018, oil on wood panel, 100 x 80cm. Courtesy the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne
Time, focus and elaboration are central to Ross’ art-making practice. Viewers connect to the works with an innate sense of slowness, enhanced by the cool blue palette used. ‘You can’t swipe left on a painting,’ says Ross, ‘There is a sense of time enduring within this slower medium.’ Our attention is drawn away from the constant stream of information fed to us, to the permanence of a painting and the patience it requires to be fully understood.
In addition to the buffer of smoke bush, Ross has curated a selection of antique carpets and furniture, provided by Bob Cadrys and Geoffrey Hatty, which directly connect the exhibition to the past. History is in direct dialogue with the present as Ross pulls together postmodern techniques with modernist sensibilities towards the practice of painting and exhibiting.
Murray White Room
9 November to 20 December, 2018
Melbourne