05/09/2026
Discover works by Babette Robertson at this year's Sydney Contemporary presentation with Olsen Gallery. Discover the full catalogue of works here: https://olsen-gallery.primer.gallery/prv1sv5
Babette Robertson is a paris-based Australian artist whose practice explores the relationship between landscape, memory, ecology and the unconscious. Each painting begins with written dream accounts, moving through watercolour studies that distil its logic, atmosphere, and shifting symbols of the dream state. These distilled fragments eventually expand into large-scale paintings, treating dreams not as intimate narratives but as shared symbolic architectures drawn from a collective unconscious.
Featured works
Then a man lowered me down a mountain face on this pulley-like system towards a lake. I was going so fast. Everything was out of my control, 2026
oil on linen
130 x 97 x 2.5 cm
We are watching the trees in the old campsite at night, as if we are spectators of a film. Then someone pulls out a painting I did and asks what it is. It's dark with super bright lights in the sky. Like the northern lights - but also artificial. There are some fields in the foreground of the painting but when we look at them they disappear and are replaced by the same eucalyptus trees we are looking at in the campsite. The painting is supposed to be a bushfire but no one believes me, 2026
water-based pigment and oil on linen
130 x 162 x 2.5 cm
THEATRE PAINTING #2: I dreamt again about sneaking into the opera theatre in Zurich. This time, I had to jump over many fences, each row of seats was a fence. Then I had to sit on a balloon that burst when I sat on it and the popcorn in my hand went everywhere on the floor. All the posh people around me starred as they were sipping champagne, 2026
oil on linen
114 x 162 x 3.5 cm
But the carpark was in this cave with bright lights from above shining through. It was hard to tell whether it came from industrial fluorescent strips or from openings in the rock letting in daylight, 2026
water-based pigment and oil on linen
130 x 97 x 3.5 cm
