Fiona Lowry - Artist Residency

Sunshine Coast Art Prize 2023 - Artist Residency

_{[Image courtesy of the artist]}

Fiona Lowry | In the colour-blind night | 2021 | acrylic on arches (framed) | 54 x 56cm

Value is up to $5,000 - Sponsored by Montville Country Cabins

Artist Statement

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. As one of Australia’s leading artists, Lowry is best known for her skill in evoking the beauty of her subjects laced with a sense of foreboding. Sensuous and cryptic, her large-scale canvasses are a beguiling point of entry into a world where we consider the magnanimous force and frailty of the Australian bush, its mysticism and the human parallels of a fecund physical form and a complex inner world. Conceptually and visually rich, her paintings are celebrated for their colour, tone, narrative, experimentation and ambiguous lens. Citing influences such as Nick Cave, William Blake and the Old Testament, Lowry meditates on the dualities of existence; what is complicated and simple, love and hate, life and death.

Fiona 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 – measuring over 5 metres long – was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia. Her work is held in a number of other public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Portrait Gallery, Artbank, the University of Queensland Art Museum and the Macquarie Bank Collection.