Mia Behrens
Mia Behrens is an Adelaide based artist, working primarily with oil paints to create still life and portraiture paintings, with a strong feminist theory background. She received a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the Adelaide Central School of Art in 2023, and attained the Hillsmith Art Advisory Award for Painting and Drawing at the conclusion of her studies. Mia began her studies at ACSA with the 2020 School leavers Scholarship, and the Dux Award for Visual Arts alongside her SACE. This year, she received the Margaret Raymond Drawing Award, Merit Award, and the M&M Carbins Trust Young Artist Award at the Royal Society of the Arts South Australia. She was the featured emerging artist of the year at Loretto SpringArt, amongst many other emerging and established artists. She has also been in a variety of group exhibitions including Loretto SpringArt (Loretto 2024) Youthscape (RSASA 2024), 6th Biennial Portrait Prize (RSASA 2024), Members’ Spring Exhibition (RSASA 2024), Limitless Fundraiser (The Mill, 2024), FELTauction (Feltspace, 2024) Graduate Exhibition (ACSA 2023), and more. Finally, Mia has experience as an art teacher, is currently illustrating a sustainability children’s book, and has been completing commissions and other sales since 2018.
Artist statement
My emerging practice explores experiences of body, femininity and sexuality through depictions of personal narratives, contextualised within feminist theories. My painting sits between realism and expressionism, subtly distorting an image of reality to depict my inner narratives. I render still life and figurative paintings to mirror real life textures and imperfections but remove worldly comfort by allowing subtle slippage of recognisable traits such as lighting, shadows, perspective and spacial expectations. Heightened colours, enhanced by a repetitive pink underpainting and grey, empty background, further values this distortion of reality and extracts a bodily empathy from the viewer. This unsettles the comfortable norm, opening a viewer's reading from an object-based documentation of body and domestic items into a feeling-based reflection of sensation and subjective truths.
Through depictions of neglected domestic chairs and my own body, I comment on the social expectation of sexualised purity impressed on the female body. I paint myself, exposed, to portray my forced vulnerability to the male gaze, but maintain agency in denying the seductive view commonly seen in artistic representations of women. I always shield the most personal parts of myself. I repetitively paint chairs to question limitations of usefulness with absence and interaction. The sole intended use of the chair is to support our bodies (equally conforming to us, as we do it) posing questions of usefulness, or rather uselessness, when the intention is shifted. The protective, yet vulnerable, depiction of self, alongside the suspension of operativity in neglected chairs interrupts the habitual feminine eroticism too often illustrated in the arts, and wider social culture.
Painting representations of personal experiences moving within the male gaze, I sit with these memories and strengthen my connection to self.
CV
Education
2023 Bachelor Degree in Visual Arts, Adelaide Central School of Art
2019 Year 12 SACE, Kildare College, Adelaide
Awards
2024 Margaret Raymond Drawing Award ($250), work ‘Making Order’, Royal Society of the Arts South Australia, Adelaide
M&M Carbins Trust Young Artist 19-30 Years Award ($6000), work ‘Own’, Royal Society of the Arts South Australia, Adelaide
Merit Award, work ‘Untitled’, Royal Society of the Arts South Australia, Adelaide
2023 Hillsmith Art Advisory Award for Painting and Drawing ($5000), Adelaide
2020 School Leavers Scholarship ($4000), Adelaide Central School of Art
2019 Dux Award for Visual Arts, Kildare College, Adelaide
Group Exhibitions
2024 Youthscape Exhibiton, Royal Society of the Arts South Australia, Adelaide
6th Biennial Portrait Prize Exhibition, Royal Society of the Arts South Australia, Adelaide
Loreto SpringART, featured emerging artist of the year, Loreto College, Adelaide
Members’ Spring Exhibition, Royal Society of the Arts South Australia, Adelaide
Limitless - The Mill Fundraiser Exhibition, The Mill, Adelaide
FELTauction, Feltspace, Adelaide
2023 Graduate Exhibition, Adelaide Central School of Art
2021 Colour Exhibition, Adelaide Central School of Art
Out Exhibition, Adelaide Central School of Art
2020 Wish You Were Here, Adelaide Central School of Art
2018 Fashion Illustration, Art Gallery of South Australia
Other
2022 Art teacher, Alice Music and Art Academy, Adelaide
Illustrating Sustainability Children’s Book (to current)
Standard Member, Royal Society of the Arts South Australia
2018 to current Commission work and original sales
Social media and newsletter design experience
Chairs have long been a subject of my work, starting to emerge a few years ago when they found their way into my practice through sculpture, video, and painting. Over time, they have evolved into a personal symbolic narrative, but I appreciate them just as much as objects filled with personality. My ever growing collection is currently at 25 (and a bit).