Holding tight and letting go

Patricia Piccinini's show Holding Tight and Letting Go, takes its title from two key works—The Rescuers (“holding tight”) and The Couple (“letting go”)—highlighting the central theme behind the show: a reflection on the paradox of parenting, which calls for both impulses in careful balance.

Patricia Piccinini (b. 1965) is one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists and represented the country at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Her practice resides in the complex sphere of the real and the hyperreal, the factual and the speculative, engaging deeply with ideas ranging from the uncanny and the cyborg to biopolitics and posthumanism. Driven by a profound curiosity about the natural world, Piccinini positions her work at the frontier of some of the most urgent questions of the twenty‑first century. Building on the hyperreal creatures and ecologies that have become central to her practice, her recent projects further explore interdependence, care, and the evolving possibilities of biological life.