Andrew Sullivan: Painting Now 2024

Sulman Prize-winning artist Andrew Sullivan arrives in Painting Now with five extraordinary new works, representing the culmination of a brilliant career spanning more than 30 years and encompassing numerous accolades. In addition to his triumph at the 2014 Sulman, he has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize, the Blake Art Prize and the Mosman Art Prize and has exhibited widely across Australia and abroad.

Sullivan renders his paintings with meticulous, masterful precision and a distinctive treatment of pictorial space – one that splices collagistic, trompe-l’oeil effects into tapestry-like landscapes reminiscent of Ukiyo-e prints. Against soft tonal gradations, his paintings present a wonderfully idiosyncratic array of motifs, allusions and allegorical figures, forming curious connections and enacting dioramic narratives tinged with humour, melancholy and vivid colour.

These symbolic details play out across Sullivan’s canvas like an exploded cabinet of curiosities. Traversing a vast spectrum of knowledge systems – from the scientific to the superstitious – as well as various aesthetic modes and moments in evolutionary history, they seem drawn together as if by the strange logic of dreams, memories, discursive trains of thought or the encyclopaedic parataxis of the digital sphere.

Sullivan’s paintings are held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, Artbank, Ballarat Regional Art Gallery, the National Art School and Buxton Contemporary. We are excited to present his latest body of work and invite collectors to register their interest below to receive priority access to his Painting Now series.

For more, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au