Gothic Romanticism Group Exhibition

29 Oct - 9 Nov 2025

Opening Night

Friday 31 October | 6 - 9 pm

G3

Curator’s Statement

Curator - Tammy Honey

Honey has curated artworks from each artist’s collection that embody the essence of the Gothic Romantic — works that evoke the beauty within life and death, light and dark, love and loss, and the emotional resonance found in their delicate balance.

Gothic Romantic brings together a group of contemporary artists whose artworks echo the aesthetic, thematic, and emotional undercurrents of the Gothic, Romantic, and Symbolist traditions — moving through shadow and splendour in an exploration of darkness, beauty, and mystery through a modern visual language.

In this exhibition, life and death are not opposites but intertwined forces, each revealing the other’s fragile splendour. The works presented embrace melancholy and desire, decay and renewal, the sublime and the spectral. From the expressive mark of ink and paint to the tactile weight of clay and the luminescence of digital light, each artist traces a path through the emotional terrain of the Gothic imagination.

Together, these artists summon a space where emotion deepens into atmosphere — a celebration of the beautiful and the macabre, the eternal and the ephemeral. Gothic Romantic invites viewers to linger in the shadows, to find tenderness in darkness, and to rediscover wonder in the mysteries that surround us.

Artists

Andy McIntyre, Bella Insch, Francesca Goldspring, Freya Skarsgard, George Alamidis, James Annesley, Nick Stella, Pinggot Zulueta and Sandra Ann Minchin.

Freya Skarsgard

Artist Statement

Freya Skarsgard’s artistic practice explores the emotional resonance and perceptual shifts evoked by solitary encounters with nature, using reimagined painting techniques to construct immersive, sublime-inflected environments. Her work bridges the elemental and the dreamlike, translating physical intensity and ecological change into a visual language that merges observation with imagination. Each piece invites viewers into a poetic space where ancestral memory and contemporary perception intertwine, awakening a sense of belonging to something ancient and enduring.

Artist Biography

The art of Freya Skarsgard is defined by her deep affinity for moody, expansive landscapes and her imaginative interpretation of the worlds they evoke. Born in Northern Europe, Freya began her formal training at the Watercolour Art School under the guidance of Y. Kharchenko. She later earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

Her first exhibitions took place during her years of study, and she has continued to exhibit her work as a full-time artist ever since. Freya’s research explores the intersection of contemporary romanticism and ecological thought as a means of processing personal experience through the dialogue between human and nature.

Drawing inspiration from the natural world, she suspends bias and prior knowledge to transform familiar realities. Her work investigates the liminal space between reality and constructed genre scenes, rendering these thresholds tangible through painting, video art, and sound.

James Annesley

Artist Statement

These photographs reflect on the transient beauty of the human form and the illusory nature of time. Shot on black and white film to evoke a timeless aesthetic, the ghost-like appearance of the figures was achieved through long exposure techniques, with no digital manipulation. A special thanks to Elli and Kate, the models who appear in these images.

Artist Biography

James Annesley is a Melbourne-based photographer working across digital and 35mm film formats. His practice spans a range of styles, from urban landscape to ethereal nudes, in which he often employs long exposure techniques for a ghost-like effect. Originally from Adelaide, James has a background in music but has made photography his main creative outlet in recent years. He aims to avoid intellectualism, instead exploring the aesthetic and emotional qualities of the medium.

Francesca Goldspring

Artist Statement

Francesca Goldspring's work explores the beauty within darkness — the spaces where light meets shadow, love meets loss, and life touches death. Inspired by Celtic mythology, fairy tales, and fleeting moments of stillness, she paints to capture the emotion that lingers between the real and the imagined.

Influenced by Manet, Sargent, Nicholson, and Caravaggio, her oil paintings evoke quiet intensity through light and atmosphere. Guided by her background as a makeup artist and taking photographs of what she finds beautiful, each work becomes a meditation on memory, tenderness, and the fragile poetry of existence.

Artist Biography

Francesca Goldspring is a London-born artist based between the UK and Melbourne, working in oil paint to explore the beauty that lingers within darkness. Inspired by Celtic mythology, fairytales, dreams, and the symbolism of life and death, her work drifts between the real and the imagined — a quiet study of love, loss, and the poetry of existence.

Influenced by artists such as Edouard Manet, John Singer Sargent, Sir William Nicholson, and Caravaggio, Francesca’s paintings are rich with mood and light, revealing emotion through their stillness and intensity. A former makeup artist, she brings a deep sensitivity to light, shadow, and the human spirit. She captures what she finds beautiful — fleeting light, delicate stillness, and moments that feel like memory — transforming them into timeless, dreamlike worlds. Her work has been exhibited at Mario’s Fitzroy,  group exhibitions across Melbourne and continues to evolve within a darkly romantic and ethereal aesthetic.

Sandra Ann Minchin

Artist Statement

Sandra Ann Minchin’s Forever, Amen series examines the intersection of anatomy, ornament, and endurance. Drawing on traditions of vanitas and reliquary art, Minchin renders the body as both specimen and sanctuary. Graphite drawings of hearts, skulls, and birds are meticulously adorned with pearls, red thread, and crystal embellishments, creating objects that oscillate between the medical and the devotional. Presented under glass, these works evoke preservation, reverence, and the aestheticization of vulnerability. The accompanying sculptural heart, encased beneath a glass dome, extends this inquiry into material form—suggesting a contemporary relic where beauty and mortality coexist in fragile balance.

Artist Biography

Sandra Ann Minchin is an Irish Australian interdisciplinary artist whose practice traverses performance, sculpture, and drawing. Her work explores the aesthetics of care, fragility, and endurance through a visual language that merges medical anatomy with devotional ornamentation. Working with materials such as pearls, red thread, and glass, Minchin transforms symbols of the body into contemporary relics that question beauty, resilience, and the politics of adornment. Her recent series Forever, Amen continues her ongoing investigation into the relationship between healing and aesthetics, situating the body as both sacred object and site of repair. Minchin’s practice is informed by her lived experience with chronic illness and her background in performance art, producing works that are both intimate and critically engaged. She is currently researching the intersections of care, art, and corporeal identity. She has exhibited in London, Ireland, Berlin, Uae, China, Australia, won a number of awards including a City of Melbourne Grant and Minchin has given talks at the St. Barts Pathology Museum, London. The Ngv, Melbourne and the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.

Pinggot Zulueta

Artist Statement

Pinggot Zulueta’s works inhabit a space where the organic and the spectral intertwine. Through meticulous linework and dense, symbolic imagery, he explores themes of mortality, longing, and transformation. Rooted in personal memory and cultural mythologies, each drawing becomes a site of introspection – where veiled figures, skeletal remnants, and entangled flora evoke both decay and sacred beauty. 

In this series, he approaches the gothic not merely as an aesthetic, but as an emotional landscape charged with ambiguity, spiritual unease, and the sublime. The red accents serve as visceral disruptions – signs of life, death, or desire – punctuating the otherwise muted terrain of the soul. By confronting the shadowed recesses of the human condition, he invites viewers into a quiet reckoning with fragility, permanence, and the mysteries that outlive us.

Artist Biography

Pinggot Zulueta is a Filipino visual artist, editorial illustrator, and photographer whose interdisciplinary practice engages with themes of cultural memory, urban displacement, and the evolving role of visual language in contemporary society. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts, major in Painting from the University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines and has maintained an active exhibition record since the early 1980s.

Zulueta’s recent solo exhibitions include OBSKVRA (Art Cube Gallery, 2024), Infinitum (West Gallery, 2022), and Melankolia (The Saturday Group Gallery, 2020), alongside earlier presentations such as Asinta (2002) and Aotearoa Series (New York, 2005). His work has been included in notable international group exhibitions, including the Langkawi Art Biennale (Malaysia, 2014), Art Filipino at Towson University (USA, 2013), and Smash Hits at Parramatta Artists Studios (Australia, 2007).

Currently living and working between Melbourne and Manila, Zulueta continues to explore how figuration, abstraction and documentary approaches intersect within contemporary visual culture.

George Alamidis

Artist Statement

George Alamidis’s work for Gothic draws from his digital drawing series Empty Nest, where each nest—rendered in fine detail against a black void—becomes a reliquary of loss. These images echo natural history illustrations while invoking the aesthetics of mourning: delicate forms suspended in darkness, traces of what once held life. The nests are real, found or gifted, and carry layered personal and ecological histories. As a child in northern Greece, Alamidis witnessed—and contributed to—the cycles of birdlife and its eventual decline, an arc that informs the emotional weight of this work. In the context of Gothic, the nests become haunted objects: remnants of disrupted cycles, symbols of fragility, and silent elegies for vanished worlds.

Artist Biography

George Alamidis is a Melbourne-based interdisciplinary artist working across digital drawing, installation, and found-object assemblage. His practice explores ecological fragility, memory, and adaptation, often drawing from personal histories and environmental loss. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Immigration Museum and in the long-running Your Documents Please exhibition series.

Andy McIntyre

Artist Statement

There’s a beauty and an inherent need for darkness. Without it we have no brightness, light or glow. It protects us if we want to hide and it allows us to highlight what we want to show.

Artist Biography

Andy McIntyre aka Little Bones is a multi-disciplinary Artist specializing in semi-realism to realism art. There is a raw honesty in what he creates where the interpretation and recreation is entirely his own. Coming from a commercial illustration background he decided to focus more on his fine art creations during his time in the US, where he exhibited in Washington DC and Jersey City. Since his return to Australia, he has previously exhibited at Red Gallery (The Bones Of A City), the North Gallery (An Incoherent Connection) and The Standard X Hotel (For One Night Only).

Nick Stella

Artist Statement

In recent years, form and detail of anatomy have become a strong feature in Nick Stella’s work. After visiting an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical studies at Queens Gallery, London in 2012, he embarked on a new artistic journey, creating art inspired by the works and studies of the Renaissance. Recently, Stella was lucky to gain access to a real human skull, which has inspired the next phase of his artistic journey, and links to the notion of ‘momento mori’.

Artist Biography

Born in 1952, Nick Stella connected with the arts from an early age.  He always knew he could draw, and he soon developed a creative passion. During Stella’s early youth, he was captivated by artists of the Renaissance, like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, which led him to channel his energies toward the study of classical techniques and subject matter. To this day, he still has a strong interest in the Renaissance.

While at art school in the 1970’s, he identified more as a sculptor, and was fortunate to have been tutored by the Dutch sculptor, Louis Kuppers. With Kuppers, he learnt how to work in the classical tradition, using clay, with a live model in the studio, before casting his works in various mediums. Stella later became interested in artists of the 20th century such as the Futurist, Umberto Boccioni, Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brancusi, to name a few. So, for many years he toyed with abstraction, as he felt the work produced was truly his own and representing where he was in his artistic journey at that time.  

It was fairly recently, (around 2009/2010), when Stella’s interest in Realism was rekindled, and he also rediscovered paint. Using oil paint, he started to produce portraits on canvas, and no longer felt his work required further explanation, in the way that his previous abstract works did. Now in his 70’s, Stella’s work has taken yet another direction, with his interest in anatomy, and he feels his work is very much a reflection of where he wants to be at present; inspiring the next phase of his artistic journey, which links to the notion of ‘momento mori’.

Bella Insch

Artist Statement

Bella Insch’s artistic practice is influenced by seeking a fantasy based aesthetic that examines personal narratives of loss and belonging. She is concerned with the complexities of interpersonal attachments and experiences navigating romance, love, and heartbreak on both personal and global landscapes. She has developed an appreciation for ornate and elaborate depictions of sacredness; the more embellished the better. The series she has created for the Gothic Romantic exhibition combines a fantasy based exploration of botanical lushness with concepts of iconography within a pared back colour palette. The works examine connection, intimacies and notions of beauty. Bella finds creating sculptural work in this repetitive, mimetic way soothing in the face of external turmoil.

Artist Biography

Bella Insch is an emerging visual artist, working primarily in ceramic sculpture. Insch grew up on Yuin Country and currently lives and works on Wadawurrung Country {the Surf Coast}. Insch was recently a finalist in both the Muswellbrook and National Emerging Art Prizes. She holds a Graduate Diploma and Master of Art Therapy as well as a bachelor’s degree in visual arts (Majoring in sculpture and drawing). Bella is proudly a member of the LGBTQIA+ community. Her work explores the complexity of interpersonal intimacies, religious iconography, queer joy and personal narratives of loss and belonging. Bella Insch's work is exhibited and held in private collections nationally and internationally.

Contact
Phone : (03) 9482 3550
mail@redgallery.com.au

Address
157 St Georges Rd
Fitzroy North, Victoria, 3068
Map

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