Hold Tight
Solo show
Clare Thackway
Tabula Rasa Gallery London
12 April – 13 June 2025
Solo show
Clare Thackway
Tabula Rasa Gallery London
12 April – 13 June 2025
Tabula Rasa Gallery is pleased to announce its inaugural artist residency programme and a solo exhibition, entitled Hold Tight, by artist Clare Thackway. Opening on 12 April at the gallery’s London space, the exhibition will showcase a new body of work developed during Thackway’s one-month residency in London (1 April – 1 May). The second phase of the exhibition will open on 26 April and remain on view through 13 June 2025.
Having exhibited widely in Australia and France, the Paris-based artist is known for taking a narratively fragmented approach to contemporary painting, carefully withholding the entire story. The sheer beauty of the imagery and evocative feelings can be appreciated with curiosity in these mise-en-scenès, along with the many meanings implied.
At heart, ‘Hold Tight’ is a suite of richly psychological works of its subjects’ inner lives, riffing on the tradition of portraiture and Christian iconography with through the female gaze, with detours into psychology theories and the lived experiences of its subjects: friends, mothers, grandmothers, children, and the artist herself. On a naked body, a golden snake slithers forth, a form of imagery that alludes to female banishment and shame in the bible and transformation and enigma in the Chinese zodiac. Here the snake is reclaimed toward renewal, as though Eve is stepping out of paradise toward a more empowering – though uncertain – future. Held hands signal interdependence. Bruised oils are washed like watercolours and diaphanous silks carry entangled silhouettes in fluid magentas and blues.
Conventions of Western painting recur, but always with a twist: draped fabrics and crumpled blankets conceal and reveal bodies in suggestive folds, and stripes, once historically deemed diabolical and disordered, pulsate optically to point to the clashes in our collective inheritance.
The subjects of Thackway’s portraits are vulnerable and interlocking; eras of life melt into one another across generations. Their gravity-laden bodies are entwined in love and tension, in uncomfortable arrangements of human need and family relations. These are images of giving and taking, needing and being needed, serving and being served, wanting love and reciprocation, reaching out and catching.
About the artist
Clare Thackway (b.1984, Canberra, Australia) is an Australian artist who lives and works in Paris. Known for her forthright and intimate portraits and figurative paintings, the body in Clare Thackway’s paintings becomes a semaphore through which she contemplates moments of human experience, from the emotional to the societal. Informed by ideas in psychology, feminism and the history of painting, she considers how internal and collective experiences affect the ways in which we hold ourselves. The artist works with the fluid associations of cloth and pattern, illuminating the inner threads of our implicit memories and the deep and intricate connectivity between people. Her decisive and scratched back painted marks drag light off the surface of the body, exposing luminous translucent skin. This prudent use of paint gives pulsing life to flesh, revealing the layers that exist subtly underneath.
Clare holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Painting) from the Australian National University, with an exchange to Glasgow School of Art, and graduated from the National Art School Sydney with Honours in Fine Art. Since 2007, she has exhibited regularly in commercial and museum exhibitions and her work is held in private collections in Australia, the UK, Germany, and France. Her recent solo exhibitions include: Hold Tight, Tabula Rasa Gallery (London) (UK, 2025, Upcoming); Knowing, Sophie Gannon Gallery (Melbourne, Australia, 2024); Falling, Le Pavé d’Orsay (Paris, France, 2024); Patterns Changing, Sophie Gannon Gallery (Melbourne, Australia, 2023). Her selected group exhibitions include: Drape and the Weave, Le Pavé d’Orsay (Paris, France, 2025, Upcoming); Silent Presence, Tabula Rasa Gallery with Veenue Gallery (Shanghai, 2024); Winter exhibition, Sophie Gannon Gallery (Melbourne, Australia, 2024); Interconnected, New England Regional Art Museum (Armidale, Australia, 2022); L’Autre, Le Pavé d’Orsay (Paris, France, 2021); Unthinkable Fields, ANCA (Canberra, Australia, 2021). Clare has been a finalist in several Australian art awards including the Archibald Prize, the Sir John Sulman Prize, the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, the Helen Lempriere Travelling Scholarship, the Blake Art Prize, the Portia Geach Memorial Award (Highly Commended 2017) and was the winner of the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship (2009).
Having exhibited widely in Australia and France, the Paris-based artist is known for taking a narratively fragmented approach to contemporary painting, carefully withholding the entire story. The sheer beauty of the imagery and evocative feelings can be appreciated with curiosity in these mise-en-scenès, along with the many meanings implied.
At heart, ‘Hold Tight’ is a suite of richly psychological works of its subjects’ inner lives, riffing on the tradition of portraiture and Christian iconography with through the female gaze, with detours into psychology theories and the lived experiences of its subjects: friends, mothers, grandmothers, children, and the artist herself. On a naked body, a golden snake slithers forth, a form of imagery that alludes to female banishment and shame in the bible and transformation and enigma in the Chinese zodiac. Here the snake is reclaimed toward renewal, as though Eve is stepping out of paradise toward a more empowering – though uncertain – future. Held hands signal interdependence. Bruised oils are washed like watercolours and diaphanous silks carry entangled silhouettes in fluid magentas and blues.
Conventions of Western painting recur, but always with a twist: draped fabrics and crumpled blankets conceal and reveal bodies in suggestive folds, and stripes, once historically deemed diabolical and disordered, pulsate optically to point to the clashes in our collective inheritance.
The subjects of Thackway’s portraits are vulnerable and interlocking; eras of life melt into one another across generations. Their gravity-laden bodies are entwined in love and tension, in uncomfortable arrangements of human need and family relations. These are images of giving and taking, needing and being needed, serving and being served, wanting love and reciprocation, reaching out and catching.
About the artist
Clare Thackway (b.1984, Canberra, Australia) is an Australian artist who lives and works in Paris. Known for her forthright and intimate portraits and figurative paintings, the body in Clare Thackway’s paintings becomes a semaphore through which she contemplates moments of human experience, from the emotional to the societal. Informed by ideas in psychology, feminism and the history of painting, she considers how internal and collective experiences affect the ways in which we hold ourselves. The artist works with the fluid associations of cloth and pattern, illuminating the inner threads of our implicit memories and the deep and intricate connectivity between people. Her decisive and scratched back painted marks drag light off the surface of the body, exposing luminous translucent skin. This prudent use of paint gives pulsing life to flesh, revealing the layers that exist subtly underneath.
Clare holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Painting) from the Australian National University, with an exchange to Glasgow School of Art, and graduated from the National Art School Sydney with Honours in Fine Art. Since 2007, she has exhibited regularly in commercial and museum exhibitions and her work is held in private collections in Australia, the UK, Germany, and France. Her recent solo exhibitions include: Hold Tight, Tabula Rasa Gallery (London) (UK, 2025, Upcoming); Knowing, Sophie Gannon Gallery (Melbourne, Australia, 2024); Falling, Le Pavé d’Orsay (Paris, France, 2024); Patterns Changing, Sophie Gannon Gallery (Melbourne, Australia, 2023). Her selected group exhibitions include: Drape and the Weave, Le Pavé d’Orsay (Paris, France, 2025, Upcoming); Silent Presence, Tabula Rasa Gallery with Veenue Gallery (Shanghai, 2024); Winter exhibition, Sophie Gannon Gallery (Melbourne, Australia, 2024); Interconnected, New England Regional Art Museum (Armidale, Australia, 2022); L’Autre, Le Pavé d’Orsay (Paris, France, 2021); Unthinkable Fields, ANCA (Canberra, Australia, 2021). Clare has been a finalist in several Australian art awards including the Archibald Prize, the Sir John Sulman Prize, the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, the Helen Lempriere Travelling Scholarship, the Blake Art Prize, the Portia Geach Memorial Award (Highly Commended 2017) and was the winner of the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship (2009).
Tabula Rasa Gallery (London)
Unit One, 99 East Road,
Hoxton, London
N1 6AQ
Unit One, 99 East Road,
Hoxton, London
N1 6AQ
Tuesday - Saturday 12:00 - 18:00 | Sunday - Monday Closed
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