Book Launch: Moya McKenna

Join artist Moya McKenna, and Elspeth Pitt, Senior Curator, Australian Art, NGA, in conversation as we celebrate the launch of Moya McKenna: Branch line at Bookrunner. Moya McKenna: Branch line is the first comprehensive publication on the acclaimed Naarm/Melbourne-based Australian painter. Since she began exhibiting in the early 2000s, McKenna has established a practice that builds upon a slowly unfolding vocabulary of repeated image fragments. Her work is known for its distinctive emotional edge, one in which finely observed details—a particular photograph, a figure or form appropriated from another artist’s work, a cluster of found objects arranged in the studio—are offset by dream-like passages of painted reverie. The book features an in-depth conversation between McKenna and Jane Devery, Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, a major essay by writer and art historian Quentin Sprague, and a short story by Franz Kafka, drawn from his posthumous collection, The Lost Writings, and re-printed with permission from New Directions Publishing, New York. McKenna has shown widely in Australia, and her work is held in public institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of Western Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Monash University Museum of Art and Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne. Published by Drill Hall Gallery Publishing in association with Neon Parc (Naarm/Melbourne). Signed copies will be available for sale on the day.