Painting

Susan Andrews is a painter whose geometric artworks explore perceptions of spatial uncertainty through line, plane, structure, colour and shape. Andrews has exhibited her work in commercial galleries, regional galleries and artist run spaces (ARIs). Her work has been exhibited in numerous art prizes including the Grace Cossington Smith Art Award, Jacaranda Drawing Prize, Dobell Prize for Drawing, Blake Prize, Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize and the Sulman Prize. Andrews has undertaken artist residencies in Beijing (2008), Paris (2000, 2006, 2016) and Bundanon Trust (2005).

Dr Andrew Donaldson’s career spans over two decades with a profound interest in abstraction. From 1990 until 1992 he studied with Prof Klaus Rinke at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, Germany. From 1994 to 1995 he studied with Prof Claus Carstensen as a Samstag Scholar at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. In 2009 he was awarded a PhD in art history by the University of Sydney.

Since his first exhibition in 1988 he has held more than 25 solo exhibitions and participated in more than 60 group exhibitions locally, nationally and internationally. A survey of his work was held at The University Art Museum (UAM), University of Queensland in 2002.

Donaldson’s work is represented in national and international collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria and in other state museums, university art galleries and private collections. Donaldson is currently writing a history of 20th century Australian art with Rex Butler and is a lecturer in the Painting Department at the National Art School.

Steven Harvey was born in 1965 in Sydney, Australia. Harvey completed a Bachelor of Art (Education) at the City Art Institute, Sydney in 1986 and completed a Post Graduate Diploma in 1989. In 1994 Harvey graduated with a Masters of Art (Painting) from the University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts.

From 1994 to 1998 Harvey held solo exhibitions at the Coventry Gallery, Sydney including Walking Through (1994), Works from the Riverina (1996), Float (1997) and Summon (1998). Harvey also featured in annual group exhibitions at Coventry Gallery from 1994 to 1999. In 2000 Harvey held a solo exhibition titled Lure at Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney. Other notable solo exhibitions include: Grace (2002) at Martin Browne Fine Art, Apostle (2003), The Precipice Sessions I (2005) at Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, Night Bird (2004), Australian Limbo (2007), Finn’s Raft (2008), Ark 44: The Night Bird Prophecies (2009), and Neanderthal Scholar (2012) at Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney.

In 1997, Harvey was awarded an Artist in Residence at Arthur Boyd’s Bundanon Trust Studio in New South Wales. In 1998, Harvey was selected as the inaugural Artist in Residence at the University of New South Wales, Sydney which culminated in a solo exhibition titled Latitude held at the University.

He has participated in a number of key touring and invitational exhibitions, including Painting (2002) at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, The National Trust, Sydney and A Tribute to Western Australia (2003) at the Holmes à Court Gallery, Perth featuring works that explored the Western Australian landscape alongside those by Peter Sharp and Kate Turner.

Steven Harvey is represented in public collections including Artbank, The University of New South Wales, Tamworth Regional Gallery, The Macquarie Group Collection, New England Regional Art Museum, and private collections in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. Steven Harvey lives and works in Sydney.

Dr Elizabeth Pulie has been exhibiting her work since 1989. She achieved a PhD from the University of Sydney’s Sydney College of the Arts.

She has presented papers at eight conferences and symposia since 2014, both within Australia and internationally. Elizabeth’s theoretical research, writing and presentations extend the idea of ‘the end of art’ to contemporary art discourse and practice. Her work encompasses material forms such as painting, weaving, political banners, collage and embroidery.

Elizabeth is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney and Neon Parc, Melbourne.

Rolande Souliere’s transdisciplinary art practice explores the social, political, and cultural aspects of Indigeneity in contemporary society and its linkages in western art.  Utilizing repetitive process strategies of wrapping, binding, and layering, Souliere’s artworks incorporate mass produced items such as reflective road signage, automobile headlights and brake lights, variable message boards, construction materials and household items. These universal materials are stripped from their usual contexts, manipulated, and repurposed into dynamic installations.

Souliere’s technique combines abstraction and the assisted readymade with handmade processes to discuss Indigenous narratives.  She views contemporary art, mass production and “craft” process as inseparable from the flows of production and consumption under global capitalism.  Yet importantly also have connections to race, cultural identity, and sovereignty.

In 2021, Souliere is one of the artists commissioned by Artspace, Sydney for “52 Artists 52 Actions” and is also included in the group exhibition “States of Collapse” at Dunlop Art Gallery, Canada.  In 2020, The Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver and Translink BC commissioned her for three large -scaled site specific temporary public art including a double length public transportation bus. Other permanent and temporary public art include Indigenous Womxn Banner Project (2019), Mediating the Treaties (2017-2018) by The City of Winnipeg and Bringing Back Wabakinine (2015) commissioned by City of Toronto, Canada.

Social art is also part of Souliere’s art practice, she has worked with North American and Australian Indigenous peoples on her Collage of Indigenization social art project (2013-2018) as well as on an international street art project, Coyote Responds (2016-2018) in Toronto, Berlin, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Sydney for Or Gallery.

Souliere is a member of Michipicoten First Nation, born in Toronto, Canada and is also an Australian citizen. She has a PhD form Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.

Nick Collerson combines figuration and abstraction in his experimental, improvisational and poetic painting practice. Nick studied for a term at the Royal College of Art in London during his Masters of Fine Art, which he completed in 2013. Painting most days, Nick has a very active studio practice and has exhibited with the Hughes Gallery; he currently exhibits with Liverpool Street Gallery in Sydney. He is a lecturer in the Painting Department at the National Art School and also presents private courses.

Paul Higgs is an eminent artist, working primarily in collage, who has exhibited extensively in Australia since the late 1970s.

Higgs studied painting at the Sutton College of Art and Winchester School of Art in the UK, before moving to Australia in 1977. He has shown extensively in Sydney and regional centres and has works in the collections of The Art Gallery of NSW, Artbank, Wollongong University and numerous regional art galleries and private collections in Australia, the United Kingdom and Norway.

Higgs has been the recipient of many awards including the Campbelltown Art Prize (1997) and the NSW two-year travelling art scholarship which included The Dyson bequest and the Art Gallery of New South Wales Paris residency (1984).

Higgs is based in Austinmer, NSW and teaches at the National Art School, Sydney.

Mason is a Sydney-based visual artist who works across painting, sculptural reliefs, collage and installation. His practice explores the interplay between architecture, place and memory.

Selected projects include: MCA Collection: Perspectives on place, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2021), Strata, Kronenberg Mais Wright, Sydney (2021), Prologue: Tongue on tongue / nos salives dans ton oreille, Galerie Allen, Paris (2019), Future Relics, Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne (2018), Slanted Mansions, COMA, Sydney (2018), and NEW16, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2016).

Mason is currently a PhD candidate at UNSW Art & Design and holds a Master of Fine Art (painting) from the National Art School. He has been a finalist in numerous Australian art prizes including the Sulman Prize, Churchie National Emerging Art Prize, Sunshine Coast Art Prize and NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging). He has been awarded studio residencies at the British School at Rome, Italy, Parramatta Artists Studios and Artspace, Sydney and is a current artist in residence at Shirlow Street Studios, Sydney. His work is held in the collections of Artbank and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

In addition to lecturing at the National Art School, Mason is a tutor in Art Processes & Architecture at the University of Sydney, School of Architecture, and a lecturer at UNSW Art + Design.

Mason is represented by Kronenberg Mais Wright in Sydney and Sophie Gannon Gallery in Melbourne.

Tim Maguire is a contemporary Australian artist best known for his cinematic in scale floral paintings and prints.

Tim studied art at East Sydney Technical College, before receiving a scholarship to attend the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1985. Tim was awarded the 1993 Moët and Chandon Fellowship. Tim has exhibited extensively in Europe and Australia for more than two decades, including a 2008 major solo show at Ikon Gallery, UK. For many years he has worked collaboratively with the French master printer, Franck Bordas. His work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.

Expressionistic painter Rodney Pople completed a diploma in Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania in 1974 and later attended the Slade School of Art in London in 1978 and the New York Studio School in 1979 as a postgraduate. Pople has held solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania and China. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Pople has taught at several institutions including the University of Tasmania in 1984 and the Victorian College of the Arts in 1990. Pople was artist in residence at the Moira Dyring Studio, Cite Interationales Paris through the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1990. He was awarded the Lake Macquarie Art Prize in 1988, the Fisher’s Ghost Prize in 1994 and a National Art School travel grant in 1999. Pople won the Glover Prize in 2012 with a controversial portrait of Port Arthur and the Paddington Art Prize in 2016. His work is held by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Artbank, Sydney; several regional and university galleries and internationally by MOMA, New York.

Rumour has it that Marco Polo introduced velvet painting to the West. Artist Leslie Rice was introduced to it seven hundred years later when his father returned to Sydney from a business trip in Tijuana with a velvet painting among his souvenirs. The quintessence of kitsch exotica, velvet painting to this day holds a guilt-ridden attraction. With his suite of virtuosic velvet paintings Rice has reclaimed this guilty pleasure and quickly earned himself a reputation as ’one to watch’. His accolades include inclusion in the Archibald Prize and two times winner of Doug Moran National Portrait Prize.

Rice has spent more than 15 years as an established tattoo artist (from a lineage of tattooists including his father and sister) and finds the transition to velvet to be strangely familiar. Like painting the body with a needle, painting velvet with a brush is exacting and unforgiving. Rice’s subjects side-step the usual preoccupation with sunsets and pin-up girls made popular mid last century in velvet painting’s halcyon days. Instead dramatic, Mannerist tableaux including biblical and mythological references proliferate. These subjects find their source in Rice’s immediate world where friends and families close at hand are transposed into dramatis personae.

Making paintings with their longevity in mind, Rice now secures each work under glass, often choosing to pigment the glass lending the works a holographic quality where the beholder is invited into the picture.

Gemma Smith is a visual artist who’s practice explores colour, and approaches to abstraction through the expansive field of painting.

Since 2000, Smith’s work has featured in more than 100 exhibitions. Notable among them are: Know My Name, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2021; Rhythm Sequence, UNSW Galleries, Sydney, 2019; Superposition of three types, Artspace, Sydney, 2017; Painting. More Painting, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2016.

Smith’s work is held in museum, corporate and private collections, including those of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Queensland College of Art and Griffith Artworks, Brisbane; Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane; University of Queensland, Brisbane; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Murdoch University, Perth; Deakin University, Melbourne.

Smith has produced several public artworks, including Bourke Street Tangle, 2020; Triple Tangle, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia Foyer Commission, 2018; and Collision and Improvisation (ceiling), 2012, Queen Elizabeth II Courts of Law, Brisbane.

Smith has lived and studied in Sydney, Brisbane and Pittsburgh. Since 2014 Smith has been based in her hometown of Sydney.

Smith has exhibited regularly with Sarah Cottier Gallery since 2006; with Milani Gallery, Brisbane since 2008; and Starkwhite, Auckland, as of 2020.

Jelena graduated with a Master of Visual Arts in Painting from the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. She has extensive experience teaching painting at the University of NSW and Sydney College of the Arts. Jelena has exhibited extensively in Australia, England, and Japan. A major new suite of paintings will be exhibited in the 2022 Adelaide Biennial.

Paolo has worked within many facets of the arts industry; starting in theatre both on and off stage, then in film and the arts department at The Film, Television and Radio School he went on to work on low budget films and commercials, from there he followed his passion for music and pursued work on long running festivals such as BigDayOut, Homebake and Splendor In The Grass. His tasks were varied from photographer, curator, decorator, artist liaison, rider captain and merchandise coordinator. He helped in the setup of festivals as well as working in the production team. He then turned his focus to the visual arts, beginning studying a BFA in Photography at The National Art School, graduating in 2002. Paolo was then employed casually as a technician in Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Art History and Theory and assistant to the gallery manager. During this time he has gathered experience in multiple disciplines, finally establishing himself permanently in the Painting Department at the National Art School when he still works today.

Areas of Specialisation:

Woodwork construction, exhibition install and hanging, framing and organization and management of the Painting studios.

Subjects and Courses Taught:

Frame making and stretching canvas, use and induction of machinery and tools in the campus workshop.

Sydney-based artist Fiona Lowry is known for her contemporary renderings of two traditional genres; landscape and portraiture. Using her signature airbrush technique the artist both abstracts our view and summons a distinct other-worldly atmosphere.

Lowry was awarded the Archibald Prize for her portrait of Penelope Seidler in 2014, and has been a regular exhibitor in the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes. She won the Fleurieu Prize in 2013, and the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2008. In 2019 her painting The ties that bind was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia. Her work is held in a number of other public collections including Artspace, The Art Gallery of NSW, Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Portrait Gallery, Artbank, the University of Queensland Art Museum and the Macquarie Bank Collection.