It was grief that drew artist Julia Gutman to textiles. Born in Melbourne in 1993, she originally trained as a painter, before moving to the U.S., for an MFA in sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design. Then, returning to Australia and recovering from the loss of a friend, she found herself wanting to try something new. “We had shared a studio, and all of the materials of hers that I had kept felt really charged,” Gutman told Artsy. “Using these stand-ins for her became a very literal way to bring her into the work, to move through the loss.” Today, the multidisciplinary Australian artist sews and paints intimate portraits, using her friends as models to reimagine historical artworks and images from her life.
In the last two years, Gutman’s success as a figurative artist has skyrocketed. In 2023, at the age of 29, she became one of the youngest people to win the prestigious Archibald Prize, Australia’s biggest portraiture award administered by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She followed this triumph with her first institutional solo show in 2024, “life in the third person” at The Art Gallery of Western Australia. The same year, she created her first-ever video piece, Echo (2024), a reimagining of the myth of Narcissus that was displayed along the iconic sails of the Sydney Opera House. On the heels of these successes, Gutman’s work quickly entered prominent museum collections across Australia.
Now, Gutman’s work is featured in “A fine line,” her latest solo show at Sullivan+Strumpf’s Sydney location. The exhibition brings together new textile portraits, suspended works, and a suite of so-called “shadow paintings,” which depict ambiguous figures. Throughout, Gutman uses doubling, fragmentation, and shifting perspectives to explore how identity is shaped or obscured. The show draws inspiration from a number of literary sources, including British novelist Zadie Smith and the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with an angel and himself.
The show, Gutman said, “developed out of my ongoing interest in duality, in the delicate thresholds between opposing states: intimacy and violence, light and dark, self and other.” Each work is meticulously crafted through a labor-intensive process alluded to in the exhibition title, “A fine line,” a reference to the thousands of minute stitches in each piece. Gutman always starts with drawing, making small sketches or studies. Translating these into textile portraits is a process that is both intuitive and physical. “The sewing itself feels very much like painting, layering, blending, obscuring. It’s a slow process that allows for a lot of discovery; I never really know what the final work will look like until it’s there in front of me,” Gutman said.
The impetus for “A fine line” began with a series of self-portraits in which Gutman portrayed two coexisting versions of herself. “Through that doubling, I wanted to explore how the self is constantly shifting, projected, refracted through relationships and through time,” she said.
While some works in the show hang flat on the wall, the titular piece hangs freely from the ceiling with chains. Two female figures make up the composition, one seated and the other lying down with her head on the seated figure’s lap, grasping her knee. Their expressions are tender yet inscrutable. It’s unclear whether these are friends, lovers, or perhaps the same person repeated.
The impetus for “A fine line” began with a series of self-portraits in which Gutman portrayed two coexisting versions of herself. “Through that doubling, I wanted to explore how the self is constantly shifting, projected, refracted through relationships and through time,” she said.
The exhibition also features new works Gutman refers to as “shadow paintings,” in which figures that are sewn or painted appear to be dissolving into a landscape. As opposed to the multiplying and fragmented figures in other works, the shadow pieces are more elusive. In these, the figures appear as faint, withdrawn silhouettes—sometimes stitched in muted fabrics—and other times painted to blur into the surrounding environment. Limbs dissolve at the edges, swallowed by fields of brown earth, pale sky, or soft, atmospheric color. In one, a blue silhouette is suspended in clouds. In another, a body is camouflaged, each part mirroring the colors of the background.
Gutman embraces the used nature of her materials. She often receives the textiles from friends and envisions them as standing in for someone or something, like an artifact. “I think of textiles as carriers of memory,” the artist said. “They come from people close to me, clothes worn, bedsheets slept in, pieces of fabric with a life before they reach the studio.” Bringing these fabrics together, she explained, they become like a collective memory. “I think that’s a nice metaphor for how unstable and porous the idea of the individual is,” Gutman added. “We are all made of the collective, after all.”
