With an ongoing interest in how to render different material surfaces in paint, Hodge’s recent works eschew a slick, pop finish for a deliberately handmade quality designed to resemble the warp and weft of tapestries and other woven materials. He does this using specially handmade tools and brushes, working from illustrations and photographs that are digitally collaged before being painstakingly recreated in paint. These layered compositions convince as collage, with Hodge’s use of shadows and sharp edges reinforcing these intellectual as well as visual collisions, with forms and shapes seeming to hover and stack. The foremost layer of Hodge’s paintings though are the ribbon-like painterly gestures that move across the surface of the composition, standing in for figures, fabric and other restless forms. In paintings that appear to grapple with wanting to be representational, these gestures are designed to disrupt any coherent reading of the symbols and surfaces, and to return these densely packed paintings back to the subject and experience of painting.

Gregory Hodge has completed international residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris (2019-2020); The British School at Rome (2015); and Basso Berlin (2011). He holds a PhD from the Australian National University Canberra School of Art (2016). Hodge has been a finalist in numerous prizes including the Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of NSW (2023); Bendigo Art Gallery’s Arthur Guy Memorial Prize (2019); The Geelong Art Prize (2018); and the Sulman Prize, Art Gallery of NSW (2016) (2017). His work is held in a number of permanent collections including the National Gallery of Australia, The Wollongong Art Gallery, The A.C.T Legislative Assembly, and the Australian National University. He currently lives and works in Paris, France.