andrew browne artwork

andrew browne

artist in residence 2019

Andrew Browne is a Melbourne based artist. He works primarily in painting, but also across graphic mediums including drawing and printmaking, as well as photography.

Since 1981 he has had over 35 solo exhibitions and been included in over 100 group exhibitions at both commercial and museum and public galleries. Career survey exhibitions have been held at Bendigo Art Gallery (1999) and Gippsland Art Gallery (2012), and in 2016 his parallel photographic practise was the subject of a survey installation at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne. In 2013 Andrew received the Australian Print Workshop - Collie Print Trust Fellowship, resulting in the Six Intaglios exhibition in May 2013. As well as participating in numerous prize exhibitions including multiple Wynne Prizes at the Art Gallery of New South Wales he won the Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing in 2016, and in 2018 he was awarded the prestigious Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, an acquisition prize for the Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria.

His work has featured in such public institutions as National Gallery of Victoria: Every Brilliant Eye: Australian Art of the 1990s (2017) and Negotiating this world: Contemporary Australian Art (2012) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales: Wilderness - Balnaves Contemporary Painting (2010). As well, his work was included in Luminous World - Contemporary Art from the Wesfarmers Collection at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (and touring throughout 2012-16 to National Library Canberra, Samstag Museum of Art in Adelaide and Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne amongst other venues); Photographic Abstractions at Monash Gallery of Art (2012); and Panorama (2016) and Depth of Field (2003) at TarraWarra Museum of Art.

His work is held in a number of state and many public and regional gallery collections as well as university collections across Australia including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Edith Cowan University and Murdoch University WA. As well, his suite of prints "Seven Apparitions" is held in the British Museum in London.

Artist Statement:
"Over decades my work has explored the phenomena of light, a landscape alienated from the picturesque, and a nuanced painterly collision between the natural and the artificial. Based on direct observation and aided by the photographic form, my paintings abstract from the real, teasing out an emblematic and suggestive symbolism - whether close to the fidelity of the observed, or alternately gravitating toward an evocative non-objective. My work has been identified as "psychic landscapes of apprehension", "cool" and "uncanny", "eerie and spectral", but I am primarily engaged with the psychological realm – the evocative sources, including the happen chance and everyday, manipulated to conjure surreal, ambiguous yet resonant fictions.

Recent works have continued an enduring interest in natural and artificial phenomena - the sum total of an accumulation of glimpses extracted from the observable landscape, their drama amplified by a reductive palette and nocturnal otherworldly light"

Andrew Browne