André de Vanny

This work will be on show at Carriageworks from 3-6 September as part of Curatorial+Co.'s Sydney Contemporary 2026 presentation.

André de Vanny explores the tension between the abject and the sublime, drawing on the ethereal qualities of early Renaissance painting and the visual language of contemporary abstraction. His practice is deeply physical, incorporating cycles of disintegration and repair that reflect the human experiences of trauma, resilience, and healing.

Says de Vanny of this work, "Developed through an extended process of automatic drawing in which accumulation, erasure and revision directed the image as much as intention. Figures surface and disappear within a shifting field of charcoal and pastel, producing a landscape that resists a stable perspective or narrative. Fragments of remembered places, rural experience and imagined characters intersect with invented forms, allowing subconscious association to shape the work’s internal logic.

"The title recalls the rusting steel roll cage of a tractor on my grandfather’s mountain farm in Victoria which became a symbolic armature within the drawing, a protective structure that hovers between shelter and entrapment, stability and collapse. The act of drawing becomes both excavation and performance, a recording of the sustained negotiation between instinct, gesture and the physical behaviour of the medium. The resulting surface operates as a palimpsest where memory, movement and material process remain inseparable."