- Garry Shead
Garry Shead is Australian artist and filmmaker who won the
Archibald Prize in 1992/93 with a portrait of Tom Thompson, and won theDobell Prize in 2004 with "Colloquy with John Keats".He won the Young Contemporaries Prize in 1967 and travelled to
Japan ,Papua New Guinea ,France ,Vienna andBudapest . He returned to Australia in the 1980s. His paintings are in many galleries in Australia and overseas.Born in
Sydney ,New South Wales , he studied at the National Art School in the 1960s. He was a founding member of theUbu Films collective in the late 1960s, with whom he made numerous experimental film works [Peter Mudie - "Sydney Underground Movies: Ubu Films 1965-1970" (UNSW Press, 1997) ] , and he also worked for the ABC as an editor, cartoonist, filmmaker and scenic painter before his first major solo exhibition with Watters Gallery in Sydney. He was a friend ofBrett Whiteley and participated in the famous Yellow House activities. He has shown in more than seventy group exhibitions and had over fifty solo exhibitions. He won theArchibald Prize in 1993 with a portrait of Tom Thompson. He also painted a portrait of Brett Whiteley's ex-wifeWendy Whiteley for the Archibald Prize, but that entry did not win. [ [http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/entertainment/picture-this/2008/02/21/1203467253439.html Picture this: Steve Meacham, Brisbane Times, 23 February 2008] ]He spent six months in Paris in 1973. In the 1980s he spent time in France, Spain, Italy and Holland.
During a residency at the Karolyi Foundation, in Vence in southern France he met Hungarian sculptor Judith Englert, and spent a year in Budapest with her before returning to Australia. They eventually settled in the seaside suburb of Bundeena, south of Sydney, in 1987. During the late 1980s his style (figurative, allegoric, lyric, moody) crystallized with the Bundeena paintings, the Queen series and the
D. H. Lawrence series. This last is based on Lawrence's novel "Kangaroo"; Shead became interested in Lawrence after he came across letters by the author on an expedition to the Sepik Highlands in Papua New Guinea in 1968. The 21st century saw him branch out into a complex set of paintings celebrating theErn Malley series of hoax poems. Shead is represented in theNational Gallery of Australia and all state galleries, many regional galleries and numerous private and corporate collections, both nationally and internationally.References
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