Peter Daverington

Born in Melbourne in 1974, Peter Daverington began his artistic life as a graffiti artist then after 12 years of travelling and painting in the urban centres of the globes most busiest cities he returned to Australia to complete a Master of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts. Now based in New York, the Australian artist’s work employs a wide range of pictorial languages, engaging with both old European masters and street art. His works are awash with an impossibly complex (and fun) cacophony of intermeshed ideas, genres, symbology, styles and techniques. A coalescence of classical figuration, religious motifs and creation myths interlock amid wild futurist fantasies and surrealist conjurings; alpine landscapes are cut clean into dimensional, geometrical segments and planes. To make these works, Daverington employs a wide range of methodologies and historical references ranging from the Italian Renaissance, Byzantine icon painting, Romantic landscape painting and occidental and oriental heraldry to pop and the graphic arts.

After completing an MFA at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2006, Daverington received the prestigious KPMG tutorship to teach in the painting department. He has received two Australia Council for the Arts project grants, in 2005 and 2010 respectively; the John Coburn Emerging Artist Award in 2008, and the Rupert Bunny Fellowship in 2011 for his first moving image work. Daverington has exhibited extensively in both solo and group exhibitions, notably Before the Apocalypse, Shanghai Mass Art Centre, Shanghai (2016); Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2015-16); The Garden, QUT Museum, Brisbane (2015); Hudson Valley Centre of Contemporary Art, Peekskill, New York (2013); and Santa Fe International New Media Festival, Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has been shortlisted for numerous prestigious art awards including the Moran Prize (2018), the Archibald Prize and the Sulman Prize (2014 and 2013); the Fleurieu Art Prize, (2013); and the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize (2012). His work has been acquired by several major collections, including Artbank, KPMG, Macquarie Bank, Geelong Gallery and Gippsland Art Gallery, as well as private collections throughout Australia and abroad.

Berlin

Sydney

Online