Kathy Temin

Kathy Temin is a critically-acclaimed Melbourne-based artist who has exhibited her work nationally and internationally for the past twenty years. Temin is central to a generation of artists who influentially reasserted the use of unconventional materials and installation formats in contemporary sculptural practice in the early 1990s. Temin’s highly idiosyncratic objects embrace a do-it-yourself aesthetic, and her seemingly haphazard constructions of MDF and fake fur confront the art-historical legacies of modernism and formalist abstraction. Temin’s work engages with her personal history, Jewish cultural heritage, and with the trash and treasure aesthetics of global pop-culture. This survey of Temin’s work will consider her contribution to Australian art, achieved through an individual and biographical synthesis of materials and attachment to art, history and consumer culture.