Adam Elliot - All the Lonely People

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Beinart Gallery is thrilled to present All the Lonely People, a solo exhibition of personal works by Academy Award® winning filmmaker and artist Adam Elliot.

Opening Reception: October 26th, 6pm - 9pm

The exhibition will run from October 27th - November 17th 2024.

While Elliot is renowned for his meticulously crafted stop-motion films, this exhibition shifts the focus to his deeply personal and introspective artworks—intimate drawings and expressive 2D clay works that offer a window into his inner world. For the first time, these cherished works will be available for collectors to purchase, allowing art enthusiasts...

Beinart Gallery is thrilled to present All the Lonely People, a solo exhibition of personal works by Academy Award® winning filmmaker and artist Adam Elliot.

Opening Reception: October 26th, 6pm - 9pm

The exhibition will run from October 27th - November 17th 2024.

Throughout his 30-year career, Elliot’s films and their associated paraphernalia have captivated audiences worldwide. Retrospectives and exhibitions have showcased his clay characters, props, and sets, offering glimpses into the artistry of stop-motion animation. However, Elliot’s personal drawings and clay artworks, which have long remained hidden from public view, will finally be brought to the forefront in this unique exhibition.

All the Lonely People is a deeply personal collection, resonating with the same melancholy and emotional depth characterising Elliot’s film work. These pieces, much like his screenplays and poems, are expressions of his inner life—reflections of his thoughts and feelings, captured in the lines of a drawing or the contours of a clay sculpture.

Elliot finds deep pleasure and comfort in drawing pictures and sculpting clay, activities he describes as his form of “yoga.” He explains, “Making stop-motion films is incredibly complex, tedious, time-consuming, and horrendously expensive. Drawing, on the other hand, is virtually free. If I had to choose between the two, I’d choose the drawings over the films in a second.” For Elliot, drawing has always been his first love, a primal and nourishing act that provides solace, especially in tumultuous times. He believes that artists are fortunate to have the ability to escape into their work, finding refuge from the world’s challenges with their pencils and clay.

The artworks featured in All the Lonely People were painstakingly selected from a much larger body of work that now fills Elliot’s studio. Each piece, tinged with sadness and a sense of being misunderstood or marginalised, has earned its place in this exhibition. Through these works, Elliot invites viewers to empathise with the emotions they evoke, to step into the shoes of these lonely characters, and to find solace in their shared humanity.

In addition to the emotional resonance of his work, Elliot is meticulous in his artistic process. His original drawings are crafted using his beloved Mont Blanc mechanical pencil, ink washes, and concentrated ink details on A4 Archers cold-pressed watercolour paper. His clay artwork prints, on the other hand, involve sculpting, painting, and careful digital manipulation before being giclée printed on archival quality paper, with each edition limited to just ten hand-signed pieces. The clay he uses to create each piece is recycled and reused to create the next work. The works are therefore only transitory and ephemeral making them even more unique and original in concept.

Beinart Gallery is honoured to host this exhibition and bring these profound works to a wider audience. All the Lonely People offers a rare opportunity to experience the full spectrum of Elliot’s artistic talent and to connect with the poignant stories told through his drawings and clay artworks.

In conjunction with his solo exhibition at Beinart Gallery, Elliot’s new 'clayography' feature film, Memoir of a Snail, will be released on October 17th. The bittersweet stop-motion animation follows Grace Pudel, a lonely woman recounting her life story to a garden snail named Sylvia. Produced by Liz Kearney, the film continues Elliot’s signature style of heartfelt storytelling.

Adam Elliot is an Academy Award® winning independent animator and visual artist based in Melbourne, Australia. His animated films and imagery are what he calls, Clayographies, clay animated biographies based on the bittersweet lives of his family and friends. He has created six animated films including, Memoir of a Snail, Mary and Max, Harvie Krumpet, Ernie Biscuit, Brother, Cousin and Uncle. They have been voiced by some of the world’s leading actors, including Sarah Snook, Jacki Weaver, Kodi Smit McPhee, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Geoffrey Rush, Barry Humphries, Eric Bana and Toni Collette. Viewed by millions of people around the world his works have participated in over nine hundred film festivals and won over 100 awards, including the 2004 Academy Award® for Harvie Krumpet. They have won six AFI/ AACTA Awards from nine nominations. His first feature film, Mary and Max, had its World Premiere on the Opening Night of Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival, and in 2010 it was included in IMDB’s Top 250 Films of all Time, ranked amongst classics such as Gandhi and The Godfather. The film is currently being developed into a Broadway Musical. In early 2024, he completed his new feature, Memoir of a Snail, which had its premiere at the Annecy International Animation Festival, where it won the Cristal for Best Animated Feature Film, making Adam the first director in history to win the Cristal twice. His films are taught in schools and universities here and abroad, and he has had multiple retrospectives, including exhibitions in Paris, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Spain and Singapore, with more to follow. In 1999 he was the Young Achiever of the Year for Victoria and is an Honoury Councillor for the Australian Film Institute. He is the Official Patron for The Film Critics Circle of Australia, Patron for The Victorian Day Council, and Retired Patron for The Other Film Festival. He has been a voting member for the Annual Academy Awards® since 2004.

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