A Reunion Thirty Years in the Making
After three decades apart, artists James McGrath and Matthew Rogers reunite for The Long Conversation — a pop-up exhibition that explores the spaces between memory, gesture, and perception through the language of painting and digital media.
About the Exhibition
This rare collaboration marks the return of two Australian artists whose practices, while distinct, have long reflected a quiet kinship.
McGrath’s work channels a theatrical richness and architectural depth, fusing classical motifs with contemporary digital techniques. Rogers, known for his radiant abstractions, strips painting down to its essential elements — colour, gesture, and an introspective calm.
At the heart of The Long Conversation stands a monumental new collaborative piece:
A three-metre-high hybrid work that fuses painting with multi-channel digital projection. Here, motion meets stillness, and surface gives way to depth, inviting viewers into a dynamic space of visual interplay.
Why this show, and why now?
Because James McGrath and Matthew Rogers have spent decades in dialogue—stretching visual systems rather than abandoning them. With mothers steeped in the art world—one a writer, the other a painter—their shared grounding in art history runs deep. But it’s their restless curiosity and mutual respect that bring them back together after thirty years for this rare collaborative exhibition.
Though visually distinct—McGrath’s work architectural and layered with baroque echoes; Rogers’ more gestural, abstract, and chromatic—their practices converge around questions of perception, memory, and the shifting register of gesture. Both artists test how an image can carry time, how surface holds emotion, and how structure gives way to feeling.
Their monumental centrepiece—a hybrid of digital projection and painted panels—is not simply a meeting of styles, but a conversation in form. Together, these works stage a quiet drama where history folds into abstraction, and stillness tips into motion.
This exhibition isn’t about resolution. It’s about the beauty of two artists continuing a conversation that began thirty years ago—and still refuses to settle.