Jonny Niesche
August 14 – September 20, 2025 | 1301SW, Melbourne
Jonny Niesche, Zig Zag Wanderer (Wax Ballet), 2025
Jonny Niesche’s third solo exhibition with 1301SW continues the artist’s playful and profound engagement with the sublime. Lava Lamp, where amorphous movements of a psychedelic vessel become static… to produce static. An exhibition of forms containing distorting sunsets.
Jonny Niesche | Broadsheet
Photo: Courtesy of Gucci and Truls Blaasmo
by Gitika Garg
Sydney artist Jonny Niesche spent a decade in New York’s electronic music scene before returning to home and turning his attention to art – at the age of 30.
“I helped my parents renovate their house and sell it, and just out of the blue, I decided to do a painting on the For Sale sign,” Niesche says. “It looked like a big canvas, so I just attacked it – and loved it.”
Since then, Niesche’s hyper-colourful abstract paintings have been exhibited across the world, from Los Angeles and Vienna to London, and most recently, at the Munich Opera Festival.
A musical sensibility still runs through his work. When recording music, “you’re creating a sonic landscape,” Niesche says. “You can push sounds really far back, or to the right and the left. It’s like constructing an audible image. "I think of painting in a very similar way. Warmer colours come forward, colder colours go back. Sharp images come forward. Blurriness goes back.”
Jonny Niesche
July 19 - September 7, 2025 | GW Contemporary, Laguna Beach
GW Contemporary’s inaugural exhibition, Lucent Ground, features works by Larry Bell, Laddie John Dill, Gary Lang, Heather Hutchison, Mark Whalen, Rosalind Tallmadge, Matthew Allen, Will Cooke, Jan Maarten Voskuil, and Line Busch. Lucent Ground explores surface, form, and visual experience - foregrounding artists whose works reward close looking. Subtle shifts in material and structure offer new ways of seeing, revealing a world where surfaces become thresholds, dimensionality is in flux, and structure and spontaneity exist in quiet tension.
Informed by movements such as Light and Space, minimalism, and post-minimal abstraction, the exhibition evokes a heightened sensitivity to light, texture, and the act of perception. Optical phenomena hover and recede; compositions unfold slowly, inviting a slowed way of looking - one attuned to nuance, reflection, and the physical presence of each object.
Jonny Niesche | Esquire
by Amy Campbell
One of the most exciting names in contemporary Australian art right now, Niesche has exhibited all over the world, from Ibiza to Amsterdam to Germany, where he was the official artist for the 2024 Munich Opera Festival. Just this year, Gucci handpicked him to reimagine its iconic silk scarves and archival motifs as part of the Italian fashion house’s 90 x 90 project. His work is held in the collections of some of Australia’s biggest institutions, the NGV, MCA and MONA among them.
But we’re not here to talk only about the work Niesche makes. In addition to being a successful working artist, he is also an avid collector. The collection he and his wife Amber have built, which brightens the walls, floors and surfaces of their two-story home, contains some of the most significant names in contemporary Antipodean art.
Jonny Niesche | Assouline Culture Lounge
Photo by Dirk Tacke.
by Sofia Quintero
In the occasion where fine art meets high fashion, few brand collaborations strike the perfect balance between heritage and innovation. But not every brand is Gucci. To celebrate its iconic silk scarves, the Italian heritage brand launched "90x90," a special campaign featuring nine international artists tasked with reimagining five archival themes: flora, fauna, nautical, equestrian, and the GG Monogram.
Among these visionaries is Jonny Niesche, an Australian contemporary artist whose vibrant works have captivated the art world at large with his hypnotic blend of romanticism, abstraction, and minimalism. Known for his explorations of light and space perceptions, Niesche brings a distinct angle to the collaboration. "I have loved Gucci since my teens," Niesche says. "The brand has always had an elegance and classic style that really resonates with me." 90x90 marks Niesche’s first partnership with a fashion label. He deliberately waited for the ideal opportunity, and Gucci was the perfect fit.