> Kaput
10 October – 15 November 2026
Solo exhibition: 1301SW, Sydney
Kaput is Jelena Telecki’s second solo exhibition with 1301SW, and first major presentation in her home city of Sydney since her 2024 exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. An exhibition primarily composed of painting, Kaput overarchingly explores the experience of being done for; as the artist herself notes:
“What came first: the never-ending cliché of doomscrolling, or did it all emerge from within? At the same time sudden and slow in coming, this now-familiar sense of a collapse didn’t come as a surprise. Yet I was surprised: not ready for it. Kaput is a series of work tracing the experience of being done-for: finished.
My fall was by no means heroic, meaningful, or brought upon by a loss (of a loved one, good health, or livelihood). Rather unceremoniously, I became être capot; I ran out of all the “tricks.” The world that previously offered a pleasant distraction could no longer do it. And painting, which was always a way out, migrated somewhere I had no access to. There was no sorrow to this discovery – it simply arrived to me (or perhaps it was me arriving to it) gradually, like greying hair and smokers’ lines. As a result, I became interested in what felt like an endpoint, so turning to artists proclaiming the end of painting and art seemed like the only possible destination.
”https://www.1301sw.com/exhibition/jelena-telecki-2/
Image: Brace (2026), Oil on canvas, 100 × 75 cm, Photo credit: Jessica Maurer
> Skywriting Stanzas in Thunderstorms
18 February – 02 Apr 2026
Group exhibition: 1301SW, Melbourne
Artists: Tim Bučković, Gino De Dominicis, David Egan, Simryn Gill, Patrick Hartigan, Jelena Telecki and Cathy Wilkes
A presentation of artworks holding subtlety and deception, a unique dialect with a sentimentality for nostalgia and a pining for the present — where “the past reappears because it is a hidden present”. An exhibition oscillating, where isolation, emotion, solitude and silence sit within a subplot, one notwithstanding the surreal humour of societal extremity, the autobiographical and tender intimacy of everyday life.
Emotionally and atmospherically between Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and Monk by the Sea, with each painting’s protagonist being taken and supplanted into Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
A deceptive dialect,
an allegory, all together for an announcement … to be forgotten;
drifting, but calm;
to be both precise and liberated from … I’ve forgotten.
Deceptively sentimental, somehow something remains sinister… oscillating;
looking at the sea and a sea of fog (a sea within a sea) … see.
A figure or a tree, a form remains with the seas,
peering into its solitude and its own deception;
within and without an imaginary world … I’ve forgotten.
Not forgotten,
rather soft or serene, just there …
https://www.1301sw.com/exhibition/skywriting-stanzas-in-thunderstorms/
> 16 August - 2o September 2025
Solo exhibition: STARKWHITE, Auckland NZ
Posing, peering, perching, pondering, and posturing.
The artists, gimps, aristocrats, lovers, and anonymous individuals found in this selection of Jelena Telecki paintings, crafted with a masterful manoeuvring of oils, stretch across the past five years of production. Connected by an overarching atmosphere, though in some cases years apart, the feeling each work possesses is a constant. Exploring a kind of absurdity fused with both the personal and political, the cinematic greys and sepia tones associated with the Eastern Bloc — Telecki’s place of birth — run throughout each painting. But Telecki’s works seem to sit closer to the stage than film, between Beckett and Ionesco’s individual takes on the Theatre of the Absurd and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty; themes of black humour, abstraction, and extremity are played out in differing acts or scenes as part of a larger play whose duration continues to extend.
Presenting this cross-section of recent works shows the constant contained within Telecki’s larger play — the aforementioned feeling, with the individual narratives of each act (painting) highlighting key points of reference or concern for the artist: from a pleasurable release, overthinking, or feeling a state of unease, to being a poor party guest. These figures play their roles in an unassuming way, not overly apparent, yet richly gesturing to something more holistic and grand.<
> 09 March - 25 May 2025
Solo exhibition: Oil and Water
Curator: James Gatt, Te Uru Contemporary Gallery, Titirangi, Auckland/ NZ
Oil and Water reflects on the first two decades of my practice (2005–2025) through the development of a new suite of paintings, retracing the figures and ideas central to past works.
https://teuru.org.nz/products/oil-and-water-jelena-telecki
