Julia Gutman is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on unceded Gadigal Land (Sydney, Australia). Gutman reuses found textiles to produce ‘patchworks’ that merge personal and collective histories with canonical paintings to explore themes of femininity, intimacy and memory.

Selected Works
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Once More with Feeling 2022

donated textiles and embroidery, metal chain
222 × 230 cm

The black jeans 2021

donated textiles and embroidery
128 × 170 cm

Head in the sky, feet on the ground 2023

oil paint, found textiles and embroidery on canvas
198 × 213 cm

All Adults Here 2022

donated textiles and embroidery, metal chain
205 × 262 cm

Haecceity, or the Aboutness of a Thing 2023

donated textiles on stretched linen
103 × 123 cm

No one Told Me the Shadows Could Be So Bright 2020

clothes worn and forgotten by Gutman’s friends, found tablecloths, wire, thread, wooden frame, industrial chains
160 × 100 cm, 140 × 100 cm

Isn’t it all just a long conversation? 2022

donated textiles, embroidery and chains
310 × 935 cm

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About

Julia Gutman

Biography

Lives and works on Gadigal Land/Sydney, Australia
Born 1993

Julia Gutman is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on unceded Gadigal Land (Sydney, Australia). Gutman reuses found textiles to produce ‘patchworks’ that merge personal and collective histories with canonical paintings to explore themes of femininity, intimacy and memory.

The work is made almost entirely out of clothing worn and donated by the artist’s friends and family; their personal traces imbued in each garment become a significant thematic constituent. Ambitious by nature and rigorous in process, the artist diligently stitches together the materials by machine and by hand, simultaneously rendering detailed figures amid a chorus of various fabrics and textures. With each stitch, both nurture and rupture occur—the process is as tender as it is aggressive. Referencing painting in subject and display while innovating materially in a contemporary reclamation of the textile medium, Gutman’s work queries the boundaries between subject and object, compliance and deviance, past and present.

In 2023, Gutman won the prestigious Archibald Prize held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales with her portrait of singer/songwriter Jess Cerro, best known as Montaigne, Head in the sky, feet on the ground (2023). In 2022, she was selected to exhibit as a part of Primavera: Young Australian Artists curated by Micheal Do at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. She was a finalist in the 2021 Ramsay Prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia and the 2020 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship at Artspace Sydney.

Her practice has been profiled in the Sydney Morning Herald, ABC Arts, Art Almanac, Ocula and Vogue Australia. Her work has been exhibited across Australia and internationally with shows in Sydney, Adelaide, Rome and New York City. Gutman holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in Painting from UNSW Art and Design.

Photography by Magdalene Shapter

Sullivan+Strumpf acknowledge the Indigenous People of this land, the traditional custodians on whose Country we work, live and learn. We pay respect to Elders, past and present, and recognise their continued connection to culture, land, waters and community.

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