LON Gallery is thrilled to present Stinging Nettles, an exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by Tim McMonagle.

Stinging Nettles is on view from Wednesday 1 April to Saturday 25 April. Please join us for the artist’s celebration on Wednesday 1st of April from 6-8pm.

Stinging Nettles comprises a suite of seven artworks by Tim McMonagle, each drawing from a verse of the traditional Irish Folk song, Seven Drunken Nights. The song recounts the misadventures of a drunken husband who, returning home night after night, encounters mounting evidence of his wife’s lover, each discovery met with an increasingly improbable explanation. As the narrative unfolds, it slips from the plausible into the surreal and absurd.

McMonagle’s paintings echo this tonal drift, moving between the haze of intoxicated perception and the immediacy of the present. Through a distinctive and assured handling of oil paint, the artist constructs scenes that hover between observation and invention, where gestures and forms remain open to multiple readings. The works conjure a charged, speculative space in which humour, suspicion and fantasy intermingle.

Alongside these paintings is the artist’s debut foray into sculpture, marking an exciting development in the artist’s practice. Extending the exhibition’s narrative register, the work marks McMonagle’s first engagement with sculpture while deepening the project’s atmospheric and conceptual framework.

Over three decades, McMonagle has exhibited across the country at public, non-profit and commercial art spaces including exhibitions at ACCA, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Bayside Gallery, the National Gallery of Victoria, MUMA, and the Ian Potter Museum of Art. A finalist in Australia’s most prestigious and lucrative painting prizes including the Archibald, Wynne, Bayside and the Arthur Guy Memorial Prize, McMonagle was the recipient of the Fletcher Jones Art Prize in 2010.

His artworks are held in key private, public and university collections, most notably in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Geelong Art Gallery, Monash University, Gippsland Art Gallery, Newcastle Regional Gallery, Ballarat Art Gallery, Wollongong Regional Gallery, Edith Cowan University, University of Queensland Art Museum, Artbank, Michael Buxton, Joyce Nissan, UBS and the Macquarie Bank collections.