JULIE FRAGAR: One & The Many, Melbourne Art Fair: 19–22, February 2028

Across cultures and throughout history human collectives have been shaped through rituals and gatherings that organise bodies in space, assign roles and test our belonging. Within those established structures the individual is never quite separate, finding personal meaning in relation to others.

Contemporary conceptions of self in relation to larger social networks, can however, be complicated. One the one hand we are at pains to espouse the importance of community and belonging (while also raising alarm about the dangers of social division). On the other hand, we appear, in reality, to regard the assertion of individual identity and agency as most important for human flourishing. How do those two imperatives intersect? The 20th and 21st centuries have seen the rise of a notion of the individual who, while still shaped by class, role, location, and ritual, no longer sees themself as a cog within the larger machine, but as a self for whom personal identity and expression must take precedence.

Fragar’s new body of work ‘One & the Many’ begins with people gathered together. They cluster and disperse. They perform small gestures that feel instinctive rather than posed. A turned head. A hand hovering. A body edging closer or withdrawing. Nothing here is overtly dramatic, yet everything feels charged; as all moments of social exchange are charged with a kind of performativity. While her scenes might appear carefully staged, they are deliberately unsettled. Bodies interrupt one another, gestures misfire, and what emerges are not polished collective performances but constructed records of social friction and moments where collective choreography falters and individual impulses rise to the surface. These layered images resist easy entry. Like a crowded social gathering, they ask us to scan for an opening: a point of easy access that often remains elusive.

Fragar’s paintings could be seen as an investigation into vantage point; where one stands in relation to others, and what that position allows (or refuses) us to see. In Feedback (2025) for example, one stands in front of an appraising audience where we are in the position of subject. In Trust (2026) we look down on a group of people who are carefully navigating the extent to which they connect within the structure of the gathering (and frame). In Origin of the World (or One Battle After Another), Fragar deals with one of the most enduring social networks of the family, a group we spend our lives oscillating between the desire to escape from, and the fantasy of return. Our family establishes a template for later social life, teaching us how to belong, to withdraw, and how difficult it can be to locate oneself within a group.

The figures in Fragar’s paintings are not portraits in the traditional sense, nor are they characters in a fixed narrative. They are participants in situations shaped by choreographed proximity and where social forces act upon bodies, arranging them in relation to one another.

Contemporary social life asks us to recognise others as individuals with distinct needs and inner lives, whilst simultaneously navigating the demands of larger groups that carry their own histories, expectations and pressures. No matter how empathetic or connected we might feel, we operate from within our own bodies, bound to a singular point of perception/vantage point from which all understanding begins. We become aware of our own position in relation to these images and to Fragar’s subjects, neither fully inside the group nor safely outside it, but hovering somewhere in between.

Consumed as a body of work, ‘One & the Many’ registers a familiar paradox. Each of us stands at the centre of our own lived universe, even as we move within a larger choreography that we are constantly navigating, shaping, and being shaped by. In this way, Fragar’s paintings do not so much resolve the tension between the collective and the self as they sustain it. Her images remain open and unsettled, alive to our own vantage point and to the shifting, often uncomfortable realities of being with others.

Exhibition text