Garry Shead

The 1993 Archibald Prize Winner

Garry Shead was born in Sydney in 1942. Shead studied at the National Art School from 1961 to 1962. He worked as a scenic artist and then a film editor at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from 1963 to 1968 as well as editing an arts paper and drawing cartoons. In 1993 Shead completed a series of paintings based on D.H. Lawrence's book Kangaroo, which emerged after he came across letters by D.H. Lawrence on an expedition to the Sepik Highlands in Papua New Guinea in 1968.

Garry was awarded the Archibald Prize in 1993 for his portrait of artist Tom Thompson. In 1995, he turned his humorous and satirical eye to Australia's relationship with Queen Elizabeth II. Although Garry Shead consciously locates his work within the formal, thematic and technical strategies encountered in the art of the European masters – Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velasquez, Chagall, Dali and Picasso, the paintings themselves … explore a very localized and specifically Australian reality. (Ref: Dr Sasha Grishin, 2001). In 2004 he was awarded the prestigious Dobell Prize for Drawing for his diptych Colloquy with John Keats. Shead has held over fifty solo exhibitions and included in more than seventy group shows.