Australian Artists

Discover Australian artists online, all hand-selected by leading curators. Learn about a selection of emerging and established artists from Australia such as Susan Schmidt and Kareem Rizk, concerned with a range of styles and mediums from graphic collage and realist painting to Pop Art portraits.

Chris Saunders is an award-winning photographer with a penchant for aerial shots. With his camera lens, he transforms the ocean into new aquatic realms. Chris’ abstract seascape series including Sand Bar Spirits and Jelly present Australian reefs in an entirely new light. The ebb and flow of waves metamorphose into abstract otherworldly figures and shapes.

Painter Vanessa Mae Livingston is also partial to seascapes. Her semi-abstract aesthetic demonstrates impressionist properties for its play with light and texture, while her impeccable attention to detail as seen in Upsurge also suggests the work of a realist’s eye.

Contemporary Realist Susan Schmidt is known for her nostalgic paintings and architectural studies concerned with cultural memory and heritage. Her Seaburbia series, containing limited edition works such as Hibiscus Break and Deja Blue, is rich with colour and an all-pervasive sense of hope for the summer months to come.

Australian Painter Elliott Nimmo was the youngest ever finalist in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2010, and for good reason. His Pop Art portraits explore the tension between consumer imagery and art history. Works such as Untitled (Kim / Fellini), oil on canvas, depict fashionable figures full of character.

Graphic designer and collagist Kareem Rizk sources his materials from old books, vintage postcards, outdated brochures and catalogues and then reconstructs them in sophisticated multi-layered collages. At the core of his practice is a deep-seated nostalgia for the past; warm pastel hues, delicate lines and charming period imagery of antique cars are motifs which feature widely in his collages, all suggestive of warmth and longing for a previous time. This can be seen in Station Wagon No. 4.

Alun Rhys Jones investigates and deconstructs truisms regarding identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His experimental installations, often themed around celebrity and fashion, question and subvert the power of mainstream media on the human psyche. Alun’s charcoal drawing Beckham of the world-famous footballer on a plastic bag, for example, analyses the presentation of masculinity in the public eye and how disposable celebrity figures are to the mass media.