The exhibition GABO comprises ten works in total, eight of which are titled GABO i-viii (2022-2023). Two further works, Pulse (2023) and Hull (2026), round out the exhibition.
The GABO i-viii builds on an earlier work, Five Tattings (2022), which took as its reference The D’Oyley Show (1973), a landmark Australian feminist exhibition celebrating domestic crafts, including lacemaking, crochet, and embroidery. That lineage runs through the eight GABO works, made from highly perforated aluminium kitchenware that the artist accumulated over thirty years. Their radiating patterns, amplified by integrated LEDs, hold two visual worlds at once: the delicate geometries of lace and the harder language of industrial form.
The tension between those two worlds is not only aesthetic. It is biographical. The artist’s mother lived aboard the SS Gabo, a ship moored at Berrys Bay on Sydney Harbour in the early twentieth century, where an unlikely community made their lives amid the work of shipbuilding and wrecking. Berrys Bay was also a recurring subject for Australian modernists, including Grace Cossington Smith and Roland Wakelin, who were drawn to its industrial harbour landscape. Inside that landscape, the artist’s grandmother, Mrs Nielsen, hung lace curtains across the portholes of a home that was slowly being taken apart around her. It is the elusive image of spherical windows veiled by filigreed fabric that informs Marcus’s GABO i-viii, the motif is multiplied and geometricised in metal, transforming everyday kitchen utensils into intricate, lace-like wall sculptures.
Just as the industrial harbour landscape of Berrys Bay drew Australian modernist painters in the early twentieth century, Marcus mines this layered terrain – personal, historical, and material – to produce compositions that expand both spatially and conceptually. GABO stands as a fitting distillation of Marcus’s practice, drawing together its different strands into a single exhibition. Modernity, modularity and the domestic sphere are its chief concerns. Her artworks are made up of modules drawn from her extensive collection of aluminium kitchenware, once a common feature of the modern Australian home, now increasingly rare. Their original uses are recalled and extended through assemblage, as they are combined into modernist grids. Recognised as one of Australia’s preeminent artists working in assemblage, Marcus draws viewers into a world at once intimate and historical, where the familiar is made strange and luminous through the patient accumulation of objects and memory.
Where GABO i-viii are lit from within by integrated LEDs, Pulse and Hull are assembled from bowls, cups and tins, their colour drawn from the natural patina of aged aluminium rather than from light. Pulse is a rounded form pulsing green. Hull, by contrast, is a strong orange gold, its modernist grid resolving into a hard rectangle. GABO is Donna Marcus’s second solo exhibition with Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, following Pallet in 2024.
