Agatha Gothe-Snape’s work engages with the politics and poetics of language and other embodied knowledge as it is performed interpersonally and is creative of our relationships with each other, with art and architecture and other histories. Rooted in performance, her work operates intuitively and is generated via improvisation and collaboration. In its visual economy and aesthetic weightlessness indebted to minimalism, Gothe-Snape’s often text-based work finds short cuts through complexity and ambiguity to arrive at fertile slippages that wed emotional impact with conceptual rigour. She employs colour fields instructionally, affectively. Performance and its strategies are a constant presence even in object-based works. Her processes are without fixed limits and foster transparency. The work inhabits spaces that are both physical and non-physical. It occupies thresholds that are negotiable. Found texts, oral histories and ongoing conversations with her family of peers and other collaborators provide navigational pathways, matrices, vocabularies for her practice. She foregrounds these relationships, asserting them as imperatives for living and as substantiating of art.
In 2020, Monash University Museum of Art in Melbourne presented Agatha Gothe-Snape - The Outcome is Certain, the first major survey exhibition of Gothe-Snape’s work, curated by Hannah Mathews. The Outcome Is Certain brought together key works from Gothe-Snape’s oeuvre from 2008 to 2020 borrowed from public and private collections and included a number of major new works - including Wet Matter a sound-based Augmented Reality work produced collaboratively with Google. The exhibition was accompanied by a new monographic publication (172pp).
Key solo exhibitions and performances include: Agatha Gothe-Snape – Trying to find comfort in an uncomfortable chair, with the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2019); Certain Situations as Agatha Gothe-Snape and Wrong Solo, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2019); Rhetorical Chorus, Performance Space, Sydney (2017); Oh Window, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2017);
Gothe-Snape has exhibited in major biennales including The National: New Australian Art (2021, 2019, 2017); Gwangju Biennale (2018), TarraWarra Biennial (2018, 2016); the 20th Biennale of Sydney, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal (2016), PERFORMA, New York curated by RoseLee Goldberg (2015) and the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, curated by Juan A. Gaitan (2014).
Gothe-Snape has been engaged by Kaldor Public Art Projects to produce a number of solo and collaborative projects since 2018 including Lion’s Honey at the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of the 50-year anniversary celebrations of KPAP and as part of Asad Raza’s Absorption at The Clothing Store, Carriageworks, Sydney (2019) as well as a number of ephemeral projects.
Other recent group exhibitions include Australia. Antipodean Stories, curated by Eugenio Viola, PAC, Milan (2019/2020), The Score, curated by Jacqueline Doughty, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne; This is a Voice, curated by Katie Dyer, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney; Art as Verb, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne and Artspace, Sydney (2014); Trace: Performance and its Documents, curated by Bree Richards, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2014).
Gothe-Snape has completed several major public artwork commissions including Here, an Echo, a large text piece installed in Wemyss Lane, Surry Hills, co-commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the City of Sydney as the second Legacy Artwork Commission and The Scheme was a Blueprint for Future Development Programs, 2015, at Monash University's Caulfield Campus in Melbourne. Several new public artworks are currently in production.
Gothe-Snape has been represented by The Commercial since 2012 and has presented two solo exhibitions at the gallery (2016, 2013) and a solo project at Frieze London (2017).

Gothe-Snape's work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney; the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art at the University of Western Australia, Perth; Griffith University Art Collection, Brisbane; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the University of Technology Sydney Collection; Wesfarmers, Perth.