Heralds unites Australian artists Lucas Grogan and Luke Thurgate for their first dedicated exhibition at Bergman Gallery Auckland.

Grogan’s ongoing shelf series of works that have previously included libraries and ornaments, has moved on to address the home medicine cabinet. Normally enclosed behind a mirrored door, these collections of unique medicines instead reflect our shared existential anxieties, our most secret desires and shameful realities. Instead of being perfect and clinical, these groups of snake oils and cure-alls appear very much used on a daily basis.

Ditching the cabinet mirror, the every-day grind is reexamined in a new series of Brain scans. With x – ray precision and his signature wit, Grogan excavates the mundane conundrum of modern existence, arresting the billion daily thoughts, emotions and stimulus crammed into our overloaded skulls.

Raw passion vibrates through Luke Thurgate’s powerful small-scale paintings. Sexuality, romance, power and identity are concealed behind strange masks of aesthetically desirable male actors in his religiously inspired cloud-scape compositions. Painted in the style of the late Renaissance, “a sincere love letter to the history of western figurative art” the artists states, Thurgate delivers an absorbing visual experience, exploring tensions between parody, sincerity, menace, pathos, transgression, and vulnerability.