Australian Artists – Contemporary Art

SOHO Galleries represents a roster of established and emerging Australian artists working across painting, sculpture, and large-scale canvas work. Some work in oil and acrylic, others in bronze, stainless steel, or mixed media. A few move between several. Browse by artist below to see current work, read their background, and buy Australian art in Sydney online or at our Woollahra gallery. If there’s an artist we represent who isn’t on display right now, or someone we don’t list at all, get in touch and we’ll see what we can find.

Famous Australian artists — a short guide

Australian art has a shorter written history than the European tradition and a far longer one than that suggests, and it splits into a few clear chapters. This is the quick version — the painters most often named, and why.

Aboriginal artists — the oldest continuous tradition

Indigenous Australians have been making art for tens of thousands of years, and the most significant names in Australian art belong to this tradition. Albert Namatjira (1902–1959) was the first to become widely known outside it, painting the MacDonnell Ranges in Western-style watercolour and founding the Hermannsburg School. Emily Kame Kngwarreye (c.1910–1996) took up painting on canvas late in life at Utopia in Central Australia and produced, in barely eight years, one of the most admired bodies of work in Australian art. Minnie Pwerle (c.1910–2006), also of Utopia, painted Awelye women’s ceremony designs with a directness that made her instantly recognisable. Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Rover Thomas are the other names most often cited.

SOHO’s own Aboriginal collection comes from that Utopia line directly: Betty Mbitjana is Minnie Pwerle’s daughter, and Freddy Purla is Minnie Pwerle’s grandson and — in Aboriginal law — Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s adopted nephew. See the Aboriginal art collection.

The Heidelberg School — inventing an Australian way of seeing

European painters arriving in the nineteenth century found their inherited visual language didn’t fit the country: the light was harder and the bush less orderly than anything in a British or French tradition. By the 1880s the mainly Melbourne-based Heidelberg School had stopped trying to force it. Tom Roberts painted the working bush and the pastoral industry — Shearing the Rams, A Break Away! — while Frederick McCubbin, the first Australian-born painter to build a major reputation, took the melancholy side of the same subject in The Pioneer and Lost. Arthur Streeton, later knighted, pushed furthest into the dazzling high-key light that still reads as instantly Australian. Charles Conder completes the core group.

The modernists

Margaret Preston turned to Australian native flora and to woodblock and stencil printing, and did more than anyone to give Australian modernism a local subject. Grace Cossington Smith brought post-impressionist colour to Sydney and painted the Harbour Bridge under construction. Russell Drysdale made the drought-stricken outback a serious subject; John Brack turned a cold eye on suburban and city life in Collins St., 5 p.m.; Sidney Nolan stopped describing the country and started using it, turning Ned Kelly into the most recognisable image in Australian painting. Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker belong to the same generation.

So does Charles Blackman (1928–2018), whose Schoolgirls and Alice in Wonderland series are among the best-known Australian paintings of the 1950s. Blackman won the Helena Rubinstein Scholarship, was awarded an OBE in 1977, had a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1993, and is held in the National Gallery of Australia and every state gallery. SOHO represents Charles Blackman — see his limited-edition sculptural works, which carry the same figures as the paintings into powder-coated steel.

Post-war and contemporary

Brett Whiteley (1939–1992) remains the most romanticised figure in Australian art, and his Lavender Bay paintings the most imitated. John Olsen spent six decades on the country seen from above, most famously in Five Bells. Fred Williams reduced the Australian bush to marks on a field and changed how every landscape painter after him worked. Jeffrey Smart found his subject in road signs, apartment blocks and empty urban geometry. Among living artists, Del Kathryn Barton and Ben Quilty are the most widely recognised, both Archibald Prize winners.

Famous Australian women artists

The canon has historically under-represented them, which makes the correction worth stating plainly. Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Minnie Pwerle stand among the most significant Australian artists of any era. Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith are central to Australian modernism rather than adjacent to it. Clarice Beckett, long overlooked, has been substantially reassessed in recent years. Bronwyn Oliver (1959–2006) is among the finest sculptors Australia has produced. Del Kathryn Barton has won the Archibald twice.

See our fuller guides to Australian female artists and painters and Australian female sculptors.

Australian artists represented by SOHO Galleries

The names above mostly hang in public collections. What follows is the part we can speak to first-hand — the artists we actually show and sell, browsable by name below.

On the painting side: Conchita Carambano, whose textured abstraction has been refined across four decades; James Willebrant, five decades of the Australian eastern seaboard, with prints held in the NGV and the Art Gallery of NSW; Phil Stallard on the Hawkesbury and Sydney’s waterways; Yosi Messiah, Peter Griffen, Michael Whitehead, Gino Campagnaro, Geoff Coleman, Alison Mitchell and Amanda Ketterer.

On the sculpture side: Sonia Payes, winner of the McClelland Achievement Prize, with permanent public work in Western Australia and a solo exhibition behind her at Shanghai’s Urban Planning Exhibition Centre; David McCracken, exhibited at Sculpture by the Sea; Mela Cooke in bronze; Lucas Guilbert in carved timber; and Greg Johns in corten steel.

Buy contemporary Australian art in Sydney

Australian contemporary art in Sydney runs from major institutions like the Art Gallery of New South Wales down to small commercial galleries showing one or two artists at a time. SOHO Galleries sits in the middle of that range. We’re not large enough to mount museum surveys, but we carry enough depth across painting and sculpture that most collectors find more than one artist worth following.

If you’re new to buying Australian art in Sydney, start with a few artists rather than trying to take in the whole collection at once. Click through to a couple of pages, look at how a single artist’s work changes across a few paintings or pieces, and see what holds your attention longer than the first glance. That’s usually a better filter than price or size.

Our gallery in Woollahra, Sydney carries a rotating selection of the artists listed here. We try to keep the site up to date, but what’s in the gallery isn’t always online yet — call ahead if you’re after a specific artist or piece and we’ll let you know where to find it.