The Human Comedy : Marie Hagerty
Current and Forthcoming exhibition
Overview
Lennox St. Gallery is delighted to show New works by Marie Hagerty for her first solo exhibiton at the Gallery. Please join us on the 25th of July for the Exhibition opening from 2-4pm
In The Human Comedy, Marie Hagerty’s inaugural solo exhibition at Lennox St Gallery—following a stellar debut at last year's edition of Sydney Contemporary, we see a painterly transgression that can be explored through a literary one.
The exhibition title plunges us directly into the grand architecture of Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. (The original French, of course, lends a certain necessary gravitas, does it not?) Balzac’s monumental realist project was famously provoked by Dante’s Divine Comedy. Yet this reference immediately prompts a post-modern shudder: Hagerty is no realist, and we are certainly not navigating the bourgeois debris of post-Napoleonic France. What, then, binds her to Balzac? It is the trajectory of the line itself.
Consider the frontispiece of Balzac’s text, A whimsical flourish from Laurence Sterne’s 1759 novel Tristram Shandy: a loose, undulating line whipped through the air by a character attempting to visualize the absolute freedom enjoyed "whilst a man is free." Hagerty’s entire practice occupies precisely this conceptual curve.
We might map her abstractions through Balzac’s original tripartite structure (threes are easy) a taxonomy divided into Études de Mœurs (Studies of Manners), Études philosophiques (Philosophy), and Études analytiques (Analytics). Where Balzac used manners to observe life, philosophy to find its causes, and analytics to deconstruct its underlying principles, Hagerty translates this trinity into plastic forms.
Line (Mœurs): Captures the outward choreography of the social animal—the posture, the contour, the social performance.
Her Palette (Philosophiques): Employs cool, clinical tones that diagnose the emotional temperature of these interactions, finding a strange, muted affect beneath the surface.
Her Abstraction (Analytiques): Dissects the body entirely, breaking it down to its underlying geometric principles.
How else can we decode these completely abstracted figures lurking in the central margins of her compositions? Contorted, displaced, and pushed far beyond literal representation, they suggest a tripartite reading. The human remains stubbornly imperceptibly apparent.
Then comes the comedy;or rather, the comedic dispositif. On the surface, a cool, clinical removal of Hagerty’s palette does not immediately announce itself as humorous. Instead, it operates as profound ironies: the cool grotesque of the human form, its awkward anatomies, its clumsy social choreographies. Comedy born of ironic de-attachment.
[Constructivist / De Stijl Rigor]
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(Stylised Doubt)
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[Baroque / Modigliani Form]
The American philosopher Richard Rorty championed "ironic detachment" as a supreme interpretive strategy (An ironic choice in itself, perhaps, given the historic American allergy to sustained irony). For Rorty, irony is the prerequisite for self-creation and personal freedom. In Hagerty’s work, this detachment is not static; it is the primary motor of the compositionNotice how these forms refuse the tyranny of a standard skeleton; it is a graceful, calculated evasion. Rorty’s ironist operates under the sign of radical contingency: the awareness that nothing is fixed, nor permanent. Hagerty’s line moves in total solidarity with this doubt: every line is a stylish skepticism. She synthesizes the rigid DNA of Russian Constructivism and De Stijl modernism only to subvert them, deploying their strict geometries to outline voluptuous, soft contours reminiscent of the Baroque or the elongated elegances of Modigliani.
These figures embody a quiet disquiet, a trauma that is never performative because it remains elegantly unapparent. Caught in their own pristine contortions, they exude a cool, aloof dignity. A limb stretches into impossible spatial rhetoric—not in a spasm of pain, but towards a pure gesture of style. If manners are a bodily expression, Hagerty’s looping arms and displaced torsos represent a refusal to be captured by the gaze. It is a sophisticated, painterly shrug at literal representation.
The body here is not a temple; it is costume, an ironic performance of the social animal playing its part in the ecosystem. What emerges is a haute couture geometry, drawing its impetus from biological specimen mapping entwined with a weightless social body. Ultimately, these works function as metaphysical compositions of the "Human" as a social species; a fluid, beautifully stung & strung drama of the fleeting body caught in the historical net of Art History.
By Freddie Wright
Works
