Jonas Balsaitis: Analogue

Now showing at the Australian National University's Drill Hall Gallery, Jonas Balsaitis: Analogue is an exhibition of paintings, prints, and experimental film by Australian artist Jonas Balsaitis (b.1948 Hanau, Germany), re-examining the artist’s use of ‘imaging systems’ in the context of contemporary developments in technology. Bringing together Balsaitis’s monumental Metron paintings for the first time since their initial display at Pinacotheca Gallery Melbourne in 1972, Analogue shines a light on one of Australia’s most profound, yet underrepresented, experimental artists.

Since the 1960s, Balsaitis has been drawn to the idea that 'reality is on the screen'. The convergence of advanced technologies and the abstractions of a techno-scientific worldview created the conditions for his exploration of how we perceive and organise the world through images. Significant to the historical arc of Balsaitis’s practice over the decades since 1968 is the reconfiguration of perceived reality under the pressures of an increasingly technologised society, reflecting the conceptual evolution of the ‘image’ in The Information Age.

Balsaitis’s visualisation of information as a generative artform stands as an unacknowledged precursor to the recent wave of data art and contemporary art practices that address digital technologies and their real-world impacts. Even though Balsaitis ceased making images in 2001, the question posed by his work remains relevant: How are we to confront the challenge of visibility and virtualisation today, when so many different phenomena that impact our lives remain invisible to the human eye—either because they are too big or too small, too fast or too slow, or because they exist in magnitudes and quantities that can only be comprehended through diagrams or mathematical equations?

Oscar Capezio is curator at the Drill Hall Gallery & ANU Art Collection and the Director of Al Fresco—Fine Arts Outdoors. He completed a Bachelor of Art History & Curatorship (Honours, First Class) at the ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory in 2015, receiving the Janet Wilke Prize for Art History, and was a founding board member of Tributary Projects, Fyshwick (2013-2018).Recent curated exhibitions include Jonas Balsaitis: Analogue, DHG (2025); Clay Pit, Al Fresco, Canberra Art Biennial (2024); Backwash, DHG (2023); Out of Place, DHG (2022); Painting Amongst Other Things, ANCA Gallery (2018); and COLD LIKE CONCRETE, ANU SOA&D (2016). Oscar also writes texts for artists and reviews exhibitions for Art Monthly Australasia. His recent essay “Dead Ends and Empty Promises” reflected on the state of painting in Australia in the Summer 2024-25 issue of the magazine.

Image: Jonas Balsaitis, Imprint Image No.17 (The Newspaper), 1990. synthetic polymer paint and pencil on canvas, 122 x 172.5 cm. Monash University Collection, Melbourne. Donated by Emmanuel Hirsh, 1997.