Untitled (the filthy infected queer knows echinacea)

Peter Maloney is an Australian artist who is most widely known for his long commitment to abstract, gestural painting that also integrates photocopying and screen-printing techniques. His fluid, yet linear mark-making is not simply a formal play; Maloney’s work has always had narrative undertones as well as a wry wit, with the artist often using text and abrupt references to pop culture and personal experience to turn the composition into an oblique commentary on contemporary life.

Throughout his painting practice, Maloney has also experimented with photography and collage, amplifying the subjects alluded to in his paintings so they become figurative and foregrounded. Chief among these subjects is gay male intimacy and the spectre of the HIV/AIDS crisis. This series of photographic montages from the mid-1990s memorialises love, connection and loss as shaped by Maloney’s lived experience of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He began the series in early 1996 during a three-month residency at Cité internationale des arts in Paris. Many of the resulting works include images from Maloney’s experiences throughout this time, although he later drew from a wide array of sources and locales in what became an ongoing project.

Each work pairs two photographs that show fragments of people and place – images of men, domestic scenes, found and archival photographs, the sea or sky. These couplings speak to deeply personal moments of communion with friends, lovers or oneself. Yet they simultaneously allude to something distant and disembodied. Many photographs are blurred, layered, or embellished with hand-painted text, while others show ‘Moon writing’ created from long exposures that capture the camera’s movement when facing the Moon. Through these techniques Maloney gives form to the intangible and the otherworldly, reflecting his interest in photographical indexicality – how photographs hold tangible connections to the subjects in the image. Within Maloney’s works are traces of presence or absence through time, whether friends and lovers lost to HIV/AIDS, or the legacies of activists, survivors, and those living with the disease today.

Of these photographs, American author Lynne Tillman writes; "Illegibility and blur connote that time, and in Peter Maloney’s photographs their use represents the impossibility of capturing those years, those losses – the way people were stunned again and again by rapid death. The work speaks to the daily horrors people felt. Maloney’s impressive body of work moves me. The images are indelible, they stay with me, and remind me of so much I can never forget."