‘Breaking Bread’: Pat Brassington’s Surreal Vision
Pat Brassington is one of Australia's most significant and influential contemporary artists, with a career spanning four decades. She has built an international reputation for photomontage work that infuses the familiar with the unsettling — combining domestic imagery, the human body, and psychological tension into compositions that sit at the border of the charming and the menacing. Her practice draws on surrealism, feminism, and psychoanalysis, and the work it produces is unlike anything else in Australian contemporary photography.
Her images open like a flower — gorgeous and suggestive — then shift into something closer to a psychological Rorschach. Narratives of sex, memory, and identity run quietly through each composition, never announced, always present. Brassington presents dream-like imagery that leads the viewer to the edges of their own imagination without ever telling them what to find there. The disquiet is the point.
Awards, Exhibitions and Public Collections
Brassington's standing in Australian contemporary art is documented across four decades of major exhibitions and institutional recognition. In 2016 she won the Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize. In 2013 she received the prestigious Monash Gallery of Art Bowness Photography Prize. A major survey exhibition — Pat Brassington: A Rebours — opened at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne in 2012 and toured Australia and New Zealand through 2016.
Her work features in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) Hobart, the Cologne Museum of Contemporary Art Germany, Heide Museum of Modern Art Melbourne, and more than a dozen other public institutions across Australia and internationally.
Major group exhibitions include Know My Name at the National Gallery of Australia (2020), The Body Electric at the National Gallery of Australia (2020), Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes at the National Gallery of Victoria (2016), the Adelaide Biennial: Parallel Collisions (2012), the Biennale of Sydney (2004), and World Without End at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2000).
About 'Breaking Bread'
Artwork: Breaking Bread #1 Year: 2022 Medium: Photomontage Dimensions: 90 × 70 cm Displayed at: The Royale, Hobart CBD
'Breaking Bread' comes from a 2022 series and carries all the hallmarks of Brassington's mature practice — the domestic object reframed, the familiar made strange, the image layered until its surface meaning and its psychological undertow pull in opposite directions. The title references a gesture of sharing and trust. What the image does with that reference is the work's own business.
This is one of the most significant pieces in The Island Collective collection — a work held in the same institutional register as pieces in the National Gallery of Australia and MONA, now hanging in a Hobart CBD apartment that guests can sleep inside.
Experience 'Breaking Bread' During Your Stay
'Breaking Bread' hangs at The Royale — a 125 sqm dual-level luxury apartment in Hobart CBD, 450 metres from Constitution Dock and Salamanca Place. The Royale carries the most significant art collection across all four Island Collective properties, with works by Brigita Ozolins and Blair Waterfield alongside this Brassington piece.
Want to explore the full collection before booking? The District in Hobart CBD displays original works by Louise De Weger. The Tempo and The Helm in Sandy Bay carry original Tasmanian paintings. Browse every artwork on The Artists page, or contact the team with any questions before you book.
