About Julia Gutman

Julia Gutman is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is anchored by an experimental textile process, with which she interrogates her own relationships and the performance of selfhood. Her figurative works are made primarily from donated fabric – worn clothes, slept-in sheets – and often replicate compositional moments from historical artworks, using her friends as models to respond to and reinvent the originals. Garments often become physical artifacts of the past – stand-ins for those we have lost, or relics of who we once were. In this sense, Gutman works with the textures of memory, using found textiles as a vehicle for connection and collaboration.

While Gutman’s process is labour intensive, it is not precious; edges are rough, seams are wonky and images are frayed all over. Her mode of sewing is at once tender and aggressive. She brings together disparate things in an act of ‘mending’, but violently punctures and rips the materials to do so. Not a seamstress in the traditional sense, her process is much like painting. The stories of the materials intertwine with the imagery to create a layered narrative. life in the third person marks Gutman’s debut solo institutional exhibition, presented by The Art Gallery of Western Australia. In 2024, Gutman was commissioned by the Sydney Opera House and Vivid LIVE for the iconic Lighting of the Sails, creating her first video work, Echo.

In 2023, aged 29, Gutman was awarded the Archibald Prize, making her the youngest winner in 85 years. She was one of six exhibiting artists in Primavera 2022: Young Australian Artists at Sydney’s 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 work has been exhibited across Australia and internationally in Rome, Milan and New York.

About Montaigne

Since first emerging in 2012, Montaigne has established themselves as one of Australia’s most eclectic performers, a natural storyteller and entertainer that has captured attention across the world.

Their expansive debut album GLORIOUS HEIGHTS arrived in 2016, featuring the ARIA Platinum certified single ‘Because I Love You’. The album earned landed at #4 on the ARIA charts, and Montaigne took home the ‘Best Breakthrough Artist’ award at the 2016 ARIA Awards.

In 2019, Montaigne was selected to represent Australia at Eurovision in Rotterdam 2020, having won the Eurovision: Australia Decides competition with their stunning original song, ‘Don’t Break Me’. While the global music event was delayed due to the pandemic, Montaigne returned in 2021 to represent Australia on the world stage in May of 2021 with their kaleidoscopic single ‘Technicolour’.

Montaigne returned with their third album making it! in 2022. Key amongst making it! were two urgent and gloriously prismatic songs sculpted alongside Talking Heads’ visionary leader David Byrne. In 2023, their collaboration with Tom Cardy ‘Red Flags’ went viral on TikTok and has now amassed 140+ million cross-platform streams.

Refusing to be boxed in, Montaigne has also worked in theatre, musical comedy, podcasts and video games with an ever-diversifying portfolio. They are currently working on their fourth album.