Richard Dunlop
100% Botanical
2 – 28 June 2022
Opening | Saturday 4 June 3 – 5 pm
Building kinship in troubled waters, this is 100% Botanical. These paintings have become logographic, a letter exchange between prominent Australian artist Richard Dunlop and years of conversation between lived land, past art history dwellers and the climate of 2022.
Whether you love or hate the 100% emoji, its is synonymous with cultural conversations and the power of the paralinguistic; Intentions and emotions behind information. Fox Galleries will present 10 years of Richard Dunlop’s vivid, romantic, luscious and thoughtful ‘letters’ to the botanical places on our lived lands and in our lived inner sacrarium.
Richard States;
“Throughout art history, there have been repeated attempts to visually translate the fleeting splendour of the change of seasons, with nature’s physical transformations having strong resemblances to cycles of human experience. I like to paint transparently in numerous layers, sediments laid down over several months or years, and which hopefully, convey a passage of time.
As Michael Fox and Richard Dunlop are old friends, the project at Fox involves a series of exhibitions over forthcoming years, collectively titled Rare Recordings and New Releases. The first of these, 100% Botanical contains works which deal with a variety of themes – growth, decay, seasonal change, form, the notion of beauty, ephemerality, perseverance, natural history expeditions, abundance, faith intertwined with interpretations of nature, scientific botanical illustrations, and formal artistic concerns and art history references. The exhibition takes a cross-section of works from different decades, all dealing with the challenges of depicting nature and landscape in a unique way.
While each image is individually contained and unique, it is also a member of a larger body of work exploring various aspects of the same botanical territory, the interconnectedness of all elements and forces, the connections between sowing and reaping, whether a painting can represent a seed planted with the expectation of a future harvest.”
Richard Dunlop has had a distinguished professional practice for over three decades. His work is in the collections of several universities (QUT,UCQ, UTAS, Griffith, UNSW), many public collections, and private collections of the highest calibre, within Australia and internationally.Â
NOTABLE AWARDS
2012 Winner, Painting Category, Waterhouse Prize, South Australia Museum (Tour to National Archives, Canberra)
2005 Arts Queensland Major Grant
RECENT AWARDS
2018 Finalist, Glover Prize, Tasmania
2018 Finalist, Bruny Island Prize, Tasmania
2016 Finalist, Waterhouse Prize, South Australia Museum
2015 Finalist, Tattersall’s Invitational National landscape Prize
2014 Finalist, Tattersall’s Art Prize, Tattersall’s Club, Brisbane
2014 Winner, Paintings Category, Waterhouse Art Prize, South Australia Museum
2014 Finalist, Blake Prize, University of New South Wales, Dec 2014 – Jan 2015
2013 Finalist, Willoughby National Sculpture Award, New South Wales
SELECTED RECENT SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2019 James Makin Gallery, Melbourne
2019 Garden in the Mountains, Somewhere near Deloraine, Colville Gallery, Hobart
2018 Richard Dunlop: A Northern Survey, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville
2017 Made on Location James Makin Gallery, Melbourne
2017 Crossing the Rubicon River, Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane
2016 The Arab Spring and other Natural History Notes, Hill-Smith Gallery, Adelaide
2015 Shunga: Pictures of Spring, Jan Murphy Gallery, Sydney
SELECTED RECENT GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2018 Works on Paper, Despard Gallery, Hobart
2018 The Village People, Brisbane series, QUT in conjunction with Gympie Art
2017 Long Hot Summer, Despard Gallery, Hobart
2016 Queensland Indie, Fox Galleries, Melbourne
2016 Art from the Heart, Toowoomba Regional Gallery
2015 Officework, Parliament House, Canberra
2015 A Permanent Mark: The Impact of Tattoo Culture on Contemporary Art, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery
2015 Right Here, Right Now: Contemporary Art from the Collection, Rockhampton Regional Gallery