Opening Event
Sunday 17 May, 2–4 pm
Exhibition Dates
Thursday 14 May – Sunday 14 June 2026
Deborah Wargon’s Ancestral Portrait Gallery and Reflections on Time I, II & III unfolds as a lyrical meditation on memory, lineage, and the cyclical nature of time, bringing together works from her 2022 series The Busts, reimagined here as Ancestral Portraits, alongside new large-scale paper sculptures. Meticulously cut from single sheets of black paper, the works traverse recurring motifs of rhythm, movement, melody, interior and exterior states, light and shadow, absence and presence. Wargon’s distinctive visual language, composed of sensuous lines, fragmented geometries, floating forms and recurring disc motifs, evokes both musical notation and cartographic tracing, suggesting ancestral pathways that extend across generations and into imagined futures. Her sculptural cut-outs carry an unmistakable sonic quality: suspended forms appear to pulse, levitate and cast shifting shadows, as though holding within them echoes of journeys, landscapes and inherited memory. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, melancholy and exuberance, precision and wildness, the works inhabit an uncanny space where personal and collective histories converge. Through these intricately cut forms, Wargon traces a continuous thread between the primal and the contemporary, the intimate and the universal, revealing identity itself as something constantly forming, dissolving and reforming, fragile yet unbound, like a poem momentarily held in space before taking flight.
Opening Hours
Thursday, 14 May 4 – 8pm
Friday, 15 May 12 – 6pm
Saturday, 16 May 12 – 6pm
Sunday, 17 May 12 – 4pm
Sunday, 17 May 2 – 4pm Opening Event Celebration
Friday, 22 May 12 – 6pm
Saturday, 23 May 12 – 4pm
Sunday, 24 May 12 – 4pm
Friday, 29 May 1pm – 6pm
Saturday, 30 May 11am – 1pm
Thursday, 4 June 12pm – 3pm
Friday, 5 June 12pm – 6pm
Saturday, 6 June 11am – 4pm
Sunday, 7 June 11am – 4pm
Thursday, 11 June 12pm – 2pm
Saturday, 13 June11am – 4pm
Sunday, 14 June 11am – 4pm

Born in Melbourne, Australia, Deborah Wargon is an artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, drawing, installation, music and scenography. Following the completion of a Master of Arts in Scenography with Distinction at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, and the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht in 1999, Wargon has exhibited extensively in group exhibitions across Barcelona, Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Kiev, London, Melbourne, Mexico City, Mannheim, Paris and San Francisco, and has presented solo exhibitions in Berlin, Istanbul, Köln, Linz, Rome, Stuttgart, Tel Aviv and Vancouver. In 1995/96 she was awarded a residency stipend at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. Her work is held in the collections of the DeKaBank Kunstsammlung des 21. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt, the Jewish Museum Berlin, Sammlung Dirk Lehr, Berlin, and numerous private collections. Wargon has regularly exhibited with another vacant space, Berlin, and is a member of both the artist collective HilbertRaum Berlin and the Deutscher Künstlerbund. Alongside her visual art practice, Wargon trained as a violinist at the Victorian College of the Arts before moving into composition, subsequently creating music for theatre companies across Melbourne, Berlin, Bern, Hamburg, Cologne, Stuttgart, Saint-Étienne, Vienna and beyond.
Goldstone Gallery presents four solo exhibitions running during Melbourne Design Week and beyond.
Discover more about each exhibition and artists:
Ilan El Deborah Wargon Chaya Joffe Ryan Abramowitz
The exhibitions explore the relationship between material, perception, ritual and memory. Working across glass, paper, light and ceramics, the artworks move between the intangible and the tactile.
Ilan El’s luminous glass works transform architecture through colour, transparency and the emotional resonance of light, while Berlin/Melbourne-based artist Deborah Wargon explores line, shadow, time and ancestral memory through intricate black paper installations that shift between positive and negative space.
In dialogue with these immersive spatial works, Chaya Joffe and Ryan Abramowitz present ceramic vessels and Jewish ritual objects grounded in lived experience, ceremony and material connection.
Their works draw on traditions of gathering, passage, healing and sacred domestic practice, reimagining ritual forms through contemporary ceramic language.
Together, the exhibition creates a powerful presence of contemporary Jewish artists whose practices are connected through themes of light and shadow, transformation, ritual and the poetics of handmade form. Across all four exhibitions, material becomes a carrier of memory, spirituality, and human connection.
Curated by Nina Sanadze.
Goldstone Gallery acknowledges the traditional owners of this land and pays respect to their elders; past, present, and emerging.
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