Julia Gutman, life in the third person

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.