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.
Home, 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.
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.
The constellation of orange stars that cascade across the top of All the Stars Are Orange speaks to navigation and guidance, negotiating spaces of correspondence and transition into otherworldly realms. “I think that as a result of living in different places, I see the stars as pointing to somewhere else, a reminder that things exist outside of you,” Estée reflects. In both cosmic and literal terms, stars continue to emit light long after they have died. For Estée, this provides solace when contending with the imminent loss of her mother: the knowledge that someone or something can continue to exist and persist, never fully gone.
