Renée Estée: An Echo, A Prayer
Current exhibition
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COMA is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Australian artist Renée Estée (b. 1992), titled An Echo, A Prayer, on view from Friday 5 September to Saturday 4 October 2025 at 37 Chapel Street, Marrickville, Sydney, NSW 2204.
This new body of work reflects Estée’s contemplation of home as a terrain of emotional resonance and geographic complexity. Rooted in the upheaval prompted by her mother’s second cancer diagnosis, the exhibition is both elegy and echo: paintings confront loss while weaving a chorus of remembrance, ritual and familial intimacy.
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Renée Estée
All the stars are orange, 2025
oil paint, oil bar, mica on canvas
175 x 164 cm 68 7/8 x 64 5/8 inchesHome, once a place of departure, has become a site of reckoning within Estée’s painting. In Endless Loop, fragments of domesticity crowd the canvas; a lone chair, an open window and a tin roof frame a solitary figure in a moment of tender familiarity. These personal objects provide representational moments of relief amidst layers of loose, gestural marks—like points of clarity or remembrance surfacing within memory. Estée positions ‘home’ as an anchor point, a motif that extends beyond the canvas and materialises in the exhibition’s installation elements. Pieces of furniture positioned throughout the gallery take on apparitional qualities; they linger as spectres of the past, portals through which the viewer steps to access chapters of the artist’s life at different points in time. -
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While contending with the notion of loss, Estée depicts recurring double figures that reach toward one another in gestures of tender embrace, articulating the intimacy that can exist within grief. In Reason to Believe, two silhouettes appear to move through and within one another, their limbs intertwined in a perpetual echo. A distinctive aspect of Estée’s practice is the pairing of painting and text, in which language and memory are brought into dialogue. Figures are held within the words that surround them—maybe the houses remained, maybe you were still there—evoking a closeness that persists even as circumstance fractures existence.
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Artworks
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Installation Views
