Mathew Lynn | Opunohu
Opunohu | 2022
122 x 92 cm
Oil on linen
$ 4,000
Pacific Infinite Series 2022
Mathew Lynn explores his love of Pacific saltwater life and places with intense colour, strong forms and suggestions of abstraction. At times there are echoes of Pop Cultural elements, but only as a means to identifying something truthful and resonant within them, not exoticism but actual heightened experience. The pure resonance of colour and strong forms in and of itself acts as a parallel intention in the work, but is nevertheless transposed onto these places that are so dear to us, imbuing them with power, and a sense of transcendence in a very fragile world.”
Mathew Lynn
Bio
Mathew Lynn lives and works between Sydney and the Blue Mountains, Australia. For over twenty years he has been one of Australia’s best known and successful portrait artists. Whilst this continues, his practice focuses primarily on contemporary figurative painting and his representation with Nanda\Hobbs, Sydney. His first exhibition (Coogee Is Everywhere, August 2019) and his most recent exhibition The Silver Expanse (August 2020) explore contemporary representations of the figure, the phenomenon of personhood, racial structures in society and the nature of phenomena as meditative experience.
Since obtaining his master’s degree in art from the University of New South Wales in 1996, he has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize seventeen times, including this year with his double portrait of community leader and close friend Muyambo Isaac Kisimba and himself, Apprentice – self-portrait with Papa K (aka I do see colour). He has twice been Archibald runner-up, and won the People’s Choice Award in 1997 and the Packers’ Prize in 2013. He has also been a finalist in the Wynne and Sulman Prizes. In 2010 he won the Shirley Hannan National Portrait Award, in which he has been a finalist five times. In 2018 he was a Doug Moran National Portrait Prize finalist with a portrait of curator Tony Bond. He was a finalist in the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award in 2012 and 2014 and the Dobell Prize for Drawing in 2012. In 2013 and 2014 he was a finalist and commended in the Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing. In 2013 he was selected as a finalist and the Kedumba Collection of Australian Drawings acquired his work. He has held solo exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney and been included in group exhibitions, including Bell Shakespeare’s ‘The Art of Shakespeare’, 2014. In 2018 his portrait of Catherine Livingstone AO was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery Canberra as part of 20/20 portraits. Since 2014 he has been an Artist Trustee for the Kedumba Trust. His portraits are in major collections, including the National Portrait Gallery Canberra and Government House Sydney.
