FireWorks Gallery is pleased to present Pat Hoffie: Party Gone Bad, a new exhibition of large-scale paintings by one of Australia’s most incisive and enduring painters. This exhibition follows Hoffie’s acclaimed solo exhibition at QAGOMA and her installation The Yellow Line (the institutional laboratory of fear) UNSW Galleries last year. Party Gone Bad features large scale paintings produced between late 2025 and 2026. The imagery responds to a contemporary world where navigating free-speech, negotiating anxieties, and confronting the fractures of the online "Hateosphere," are part of the hyper-mediated nature of daily life. The artist states,

I guess there’s really not much use in making a statement about the title of a show called “Party Gone Bad”. We’ve all been there. We’ve all witnessed it. We’ve all been part of it.  And right now, we’re all caught in the middle of it. The jokes are falling flat. The host has turned into a schmuck.  It’s about that time of night when you look around and wish you didn’t know as much as you do. You know it’s time to leave but you can’t find the exit.

The works in Party Gone Bad are commanding in both scale and energy. Hoffie drips, scrapes and squeegees paint across the canvas, building layers of darkness over lighter, more colourful imagery beneath, as in iPhone Flashlight. The physical process of obscuring, disrupting and almost attacking the painted surface mirrors the premise of the exhibition itself: what began with colour, energy and possibility becomes darker, layered and more complex.

Hoffie populates her canvases with multiple characters, fragments and narratives. In Melee, the complexity of the image invites prolonged viewing, with stories and relationships emerging and receding as the viewer moves through the painting. The paintings reward close attention, revealing new details and possible narratives within their dense and inviting surfaces.

At its core, Party Gone Bad is also an exuberant celebration of painting. Throughout her long and influential practice, Hoffie has consistently returned to the vital, noncompliant pleasure of painting on canvas. Her new works are a continuation of that lifelong commitment, embracing the capacity of paint to construct immense visual worlds and the freedom to stage impossible scenarios.

Drawing historical energy from the social satire and dark scepticism of Weimar Germany’s Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, Hoffie’s vibrant new canvases refuse to turn away from the crises of the present. Instead, they confront this turbulent shared historical moment with indefatigable optimism, energy and a palpable passion for paint.

Gallery Director Michael Eather comments, “Pat Hoffie manages to always put her fingertip on the zeitgeist of our existential drama. There is darkness here, but there is also colour, humour, absurdity and an unmistakable pleasure in making. Party Gone Bad is ultimately not a retreat from the world, but a way of looking directly at it.”