Australian artist Pat Hoffie's latest exhibition "I have loved/I love/I will love" at the Queensland Art Gallery creates a powerful artistic intervention that confronts viewers with the ongoing humanitarian crisis stemming from the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians and the subsequent war in Gaza. The exhibition transforms daily news images of conflict into monumental print works that demand prolonged contemplation and emotional engagement.
The exhibition's title draws inspiration from Arundhati Roy's 1999 work "The Cost of Living," which calls upon people to bear witness and never look away from difficult truths. Hoffie believes art can serve as a safe space for exploring dangerous ideas, stating, "If we can get into a space and it can make us think a little more, or put us in touch with ourselves in a deeper way, then we might gain something." Her approach reflects a conviction that art maintains the capacity to slow down our increasingly rapid consumption of traumatic imagery.
The gallery's four tall walls create a cube-like space that intensifies the immersive experience for visitors. At the center of the exhibition, a dramatic installation features wreckage crashing through the ceiling with ladders stretching to the floor. This central rubble-strewn installation forces viewers to move close to the walls, where they encounter Hoffie's prints inspired by masters like Goya, Picasso, and Käthe Kollwitz, who famously addressed war's brutality in their own print works.
Hoffie's prints span all four walls, with the largest measuring 375 x 535 centimeters, while others are scaled to human proportions. The works are characterized by their darkness, with figures obscured by blackness that requires extended viewing time to reveal shapes of stretchers, individuals, and people supporting one another. This deliberate obscurity serves Hoffie's goal of decelerating the viewer's gaze and encouraging deeper reflection on the imagery.
Technically, these prints represent revolutionary and challenging production methods. Hoffie begins with monoprints, screenprints, and drypoints created initially on a small scale, incorporating scratch-marks into the plates that express her emotional response to the daily bombardment of conflict images on screens. These initial works are then digitally processed, printed at much larger scales, and hand-painted with additional media overlays, including emergency orange tape.
The physical intensity of Hoffie's process is evident in the finished works, where her marks sometimes penetrate completely through the paper. These technical "glitches" become expressive elements that communicate the artist's emotional and sometimes violent investment in the subject matter. The layered approach, combining hand-worked paint with overlaid materials, creates an aesthetic that expresses collective grief about contemporary global conflicts.
Within the predominantly dark surfaces and hovering shapes, Hoffie selectively applies color that carries symbolic weight. Sunrise orange tones suggest both dawn's hope and the afterglow of explosions, while soft pink rises in skies above groups of people reaching toward each other. In another work, a bright orange patch emerges like sunrise to balance a landscape populated by fragmented but closely positioned figures standing in an open field.
The human figures throughout the exhibition wear various identifying markers – some don gas masks while others wear a rabbi's kippah – but all share what Hoffie describes as "the posture of duress." Bodies are carried on stretchers, and every individual depicted bears the weight of crisis and suffering. The deliberately aged and ageless appearance of these works makes them difficult to locate in any specific time period, suggesting the universal and recurring nature of human conflict.
Hoffie explicitly rejected creating what she calls "an us and them exhibition," explaining that "what art is, what we're all involved in, whether we know it or not, is collective mourning, collective grief." This approach reflects her belief in art's capacity to transcend political divisions and speak to shared human experiences of loss and trauma.
Critic Quentin Sprague has written about art's role in challenging entrenched worldviews, noting that good art allows viewers to see through another person's consciousness and shift their own perspectives accordingly. Hoffie's work operates precisely in this space, inviting viewers out of comfortable echo chambers where they typically engage only with similar-minded individuals.
In an era where dissenting views face increasing suppression, these works create space for complex dialogue about contemporary conflicts. The groups of affected peoples that occupy the surfaces and depths of Hoffie's prints are rendered with seductive beauty that draws viewers into sustained engagement with difficult subject matter.
The exhibition's rich aesthetic connects to printmaking's historical tradition as a medium for sharing information and reflecting artists' investment in humanity. The works remind viewers of art's capacity for nuance and complexity, presenting images where clear distinctions between right and wrong, black and white, become impossible to maintain.
Ultimately, Hoffie's "deeply etched expressions of humanity under duress" succeed in their goal of decelerating viewers' pace and heart rate while opening possibilities for both emotional and intellectual engagement. The exhibition continues at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane through February 1, 2026, offering extended opportunity for public engagement with these challenging and necessary artistic interventions.
