PRESS AND MEDIA

Media information for After The Golden Hour, a solo exhibition by Brett Moffatt at HOTA, Home of the Arts, Gold Coast, 6 – 7 November 2027. Biographies, background and a media release are below, and may be quoted or reproduced without further permission. For interviews, images at reproduction resolution, or anything not covered here, please get in touch.

THE EXHIBITION AT A GLANCE

Exhibition — After The Golden Hour

Artist — Brett Moffatt

Venue — HOTA, Home of the Arts, 135 Bundall Road, Surfers Paradise QLD 4217

Dates — Saturday 6 – Sunday 7 November 2027

The work — 33 paintings, shown with photographs, drawings and working material

Structure — six movements: Screen Test, Surface, Dressing Room, Film Noir, Aftermath, Nocturne

Catalogue — a monograph with a foreword by Charles Casillo, an essay by April Clemmer, and essays by the artist

Companion novel — After The Golden Hour, published late 2027

Representation — PoetsArtists and 33 Contemporary

MEDIA RELEASE

After The Golden Hour is a solo exhibition of paintings, photographs and drawings by Australian artist Brett Moffatt, opening at HOTA, Home of the Arts on the Gold Coast on Saturday 6 November 2027.

The exhibition takes as its subject the women of Hollywood’s golden age and the machinery that produced them. It is staged as a single large room in six movements — Screen Test, Surface, Dressing Room, Film Noir, Aftermath and Nocturne — moving from the image as the culture received it, through the rooms where that image was constructed, to what remains once the performance ends.

The paintings are large and built from an unusual process. Rather than working from archival photographs, Moffatt reconstructed the studio lighting of Hollywood’s master photographers from first principles — Fresnels and scrims set to the recipes of George Hurrell and Clarence Sinclair Bull — and photographed in period costume in the preserved 1930 interiors of Brisbane’s Inchcolm Hotel. That body of work, The Inchcolm Sessions, is the foundation the paintings are made from, and is exhibited alongside them with the drawings and working sheets that produced them.

Moffatt calls the sensibility Romantic Noir: the position that beauty and cost are inseparable, and that the glamour of the period cannot be honestly examined without first being honestly felt. The exhibition neither celebrates the studio system nor dismisses its aesthetic achievement. It makes the machinery visible while restoring interiority to the women it processed.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue conceived as a monograph, with a foreword by Charles Casillo, author of Marilyn Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon. A companion novel of the same name, following a fictional starlet from 1949 to 2024, is published late in 2027.

BIOGRAPHY — SHORT

Brett Moffatt (b. 1973) is an Australian painter and photographer based between Brisbane and the Gold Coast. His work explores the visual intelligence of Hollywood’s golden age through a sensibility he calls Romantic Noir. He is represented by PoetsArtists and 33 Contemporary.

BIOGRAPHY — FULL

Brett Moffatt (b. 1973) is an Australian painter and photographer based between Brisbane and the Gold Coast. He trained first in the technical crafts of screen glamour — a Diploma of Theatrical and Special Effects Make-up from Brisbane’s Studio B Academy, followed by years of scenic art and production work at Warner Bros. studios and across film, television and theatre — before completing a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, and a Master of Visual Arts (Painting) at Monash University.

He has exhibited since 1993, with solo exhibitions in Brisbane, Sydney and on the Gold Coast, and group exhibitions including the New York International Art Expo and, with PoetsArtists and 33 Contemporary, in Florida. He has been awarded an Ian Potter Cultural Trust Scholarship, a finalist in the Brisbane Portrait Prize, semi-finalist in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, Highly Commended in the Olive Cotton Award, and runner-up for the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship. His work is held in private, corporate and institutional collections in Australia and internationally, and his photography has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar Australia.

IMAGES

Press images are available at reproduction resolution on request, including works from the exhibition, photographs from The Inchcolm Sessions, and a portrait of the artist. Please request the set rather than taking images from these pages, which are compressed for the web.

All works are © Brett Moffatt. Please credit as: Title, year, medium, dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.

MEDIA ENQUIRIES

For interviews, images or further information, please write via the contact form on the Visit page. A direct press contact will be listed here closer to the exhibition.