NEWS
HIGH PLAINS DRIFT
17 March- 7 May
Painted from both photographs and memory, Tony Lloyd presents High Plains Drift, a selection of his paintings from the past two decades inspired by hiking trips around Australia, New Zealand, and Switzerland. Evoking the vast and epic landscapes of the High Country near to Benalla, these hyperreal landscapes go beyond pictorial representation. They occupy the same rarefied air as the landscapes themselves, and through their exacting execution, have audiences questioning the slippery space between reality and fantasy.
High Plains Drift Exhibition catalogue with forward by Eric Nash, director of Benalla Art Gallery and essay by Professor Peter Hill (PhD) artist, writer, independent curator and Honorary Enterprise Professor at the VCA, University of Melbourne
& MARS present
LUX
An exhibition of serene and crystalline paintings by award winning artists Tony Lloyd and Magda Cebokli. Lloyd’s singular meditations on light and atmosphere in mountainous terrains are distillations of time experienced at high altitude. Cebokli meticulously explores light and the structure of space with oscillating frameworks of pure geometry.
25 - 27 November
MEZZ55, 55 Rundle Street, Kent Town
Art Collector Magazine
Issue 102 October-December 2022
The Colour of Space
by Briony Downes pp 146-149
Most of Tony Lloyd's recent paintings are focused on landscapes of epic proportions. Awe inspiring snow-capped peaks rising from dense wilderness into vast expanses of blue sky are frequent subjects. Painting these vistas both from photograps and memory, Lloyd seeks to capture a feeling rather than geographical accuracy. "The specific locations are not as important to me as the creation of a psychological space," he says. "The landscape is so much bigger than us. Looking at it you feel small. It's connected to the sublime but not in a dramatic way, in a quiet way."
The Garden Of Forking Paths
12 OCTOBER - 5 NOVEMBER 2022
MARS Gallery 7 James St Windsor
MARS presents a new exhibition of serene and crystalline paintings by artist Tony Lloyd. The Garden of Forking Paths is a journey through landscapes both real and imagined. Based on photographs taken on recent trips to New Zealand’s South Island, the Berner Oberland region of Switzerland and the Victorian High Country, Lloyd’s works capture essential aspects of these locales, each painting is a distillation of time experienced at high altitude. Some images are singular meditations on light and atmosphere in alpine terrains, from the transparent blue of midday to the darkening pinks and mauves of evening. In other works, the artist subtly manipulates his landscapes, moulding mountains into human profiles and creating visual palindromes. Although based on real places, Tony Lloyd’s paintings portray a world that is more psychologically evocative than it is geographically specific.
OVERVIEW
SEPTEMBER 2021
MARS Gallery 7 James St Windsor
IN TOO DEEP Ep. 72
I had a great conversation with artist and podcaster Jack Rowland.
Listen to it here.
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[MARS]
@SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY
September 2020
Sustaining Creative Workers Initiative
Grant recipient
Regional Arts Victoria
[MARS]
Celebrating 15 years
12-20 December
MARS Gallery 7 James St Windsor
R & M McGivern Prize
Anthropocene
23 November 2019 - 2 February 2020
Mass Movement has been selected for the R & M McGivern Prize. The prize is held every three years, with a different theme each year, the $25,000 acquisitive prize for painting calls for artists across Australia to consider the impact of human habitation on the environment. The winner will be announced 23 November 2019.
Skystone
from 9 September
State Library of Victoria
North rotunda
Dark Mofo 2019
Chris Henschke: Demon Core
Curated by Tony Lloyd
Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize
Bayside Gallery
24 May – 21 July 2019
Art Central Hong Kong
[MARS]
27 - 31 March 2019
ANALOGUE ART IN A DIGITAL WORLD
07 Dec 2018-19 Jan 2019
How do artists find new content in digital media? How has technology altered the nature of analogue art practices? Analogue art in a digital world, curated by Sam Leach and Tony Lloyd, presents a survey of contemporary artists who use the analogue practices of painting and drawing to create artworks that engage with or are influenced by digital visual culture.
Artists Monika Behrens, Natasha Bieniek, Chris Bond, Andrew Browne, Magda Cebokli, Simon Finn, Juan Ford, Stephen Haley, Michelle Hamer, Kate Just, Sam Leach, Tony Lloyd, Amanda Marburg, Viv Miller, Jan Nelson, Becc Ország, David Ralph, Datsun Tran, Darren Wardle, Alice Wormald.
RMIT Gallery
Art Collector Magazine
Issue 86 2018
What Now for Tony Lloyd
by Ashley Crawford pp92,93
I N T E R G L A C I A L
25 October - 24 November 2018
“Lloyd’s works are insistently of the here and now – placing us squarely in the present – but speak of time immemorial; of all time.”
Simon Gregg, Director Gippsland Art Gallery
Lost Highways Ex. Cat.
Tony Lloyd is an explorer, of mountains, highways and in his imagination, space. His realist paintings have a cinematic majesty and a dreamlike strangeness to them. They are epic visions of landscapes at singular moments in time; sunrise creeping across a rock face; a car’s headlights illuminating the darkness, a weightless asteroid hovering in empty space.
“In these paintings by Tony Lloyd, the artist evokes the uncanny in a collage of visual elements that don’t quite sit together, and that gives the pictures their palpable sense of eeriness. This is the true other and contemporary art at it’s best.”
Andrew Frost, The A to Z of contemporary art ABCTV
Last year Lloyd spent three weeks hiking through the Swiss Alps looking for new landscapes to paint.
“All the superlative things that have been said about mountains are quite true; that their vastness is humbling, that they have a sense of the numinous, and that they are the embodiment of the sublime.”
The paintings in Interglacial have come out of that time.
It has been five years since Tony Lloyd’s last solo exhibition in Melbourne and this will be his first show at MARS Gallery.
Tattersall's Club Landscape Art Prize
September 2018
Earlier this year I was invited to participate in the Tattersall's Club Landscape Art prize. I have submitted Near Earth Asteroid with Highway (Eros) for the judges consideration. Four judges form the judging panel; one judge is from interstate, one represents the public gallery administration, one is a practicing artist and the fourth judge is a representative of the Tattersall's Club Committee. The award attracts up to 80 artists to participate each year. The award is acquisitive and the winning entry becomes the newest addition to Tattersall’s Club's art collection.
ART GUIDE
FOCAL POINT: NEW REALIST PAINTING
“Painting is always fictional,” says Tony Lloyd when discussing the links between photography, painting and realism. While the artist is interested in the various realities that can be depicted through paintings, he’s also invested in how photography can be a tool for painting. Lloyd is exhibiting in Focal Point: New Realist Painting, alongside prominent Australian painters: Ben Howe, Camilla Tadich, Matthew Quick, Robin Eley, Shannon Smiley
FOCAL POINT: NEW REALIST PAINTING
Hill Smith Gallery
10 May - 26 May 2018
"Focal Point is obviously a reference to photography, a very important tool for the realist painter. We often mimic the optics of the camera lens, adding sharp and soft focus to our paintings for effect.
Realism in painting has been around for a long time (paintings don’t look more real than the works of Jan Van Eyck from the 15th century), and Realism has meant different things at different times. Now the term is usually applied to any painting that looks something like a photograph, but in this CGI augmented world, a picture can look realistic without looking like reality.
Many painters like myself use digital technology, we manipulate photographic imagery to plan our paintings. The process of careful observation and translation of pixels into paint is still necessary to create the illusion of realistic objects in realistic space, but we are always looking for new realities to paint. Contemporary visual culture is expanding our notion of what reality looks like, from Instagram to IMAX, from the iPhone to the Hubble telescope, it’s all grist for the mill of Realist painting."
Tony Lloyd
IMAGINE
Gippsland Art Gallery
6 January - 18 March 2018
One of the most exciting, ambitious, and beautiful exhibitions ever staged in regional Australia will be the first mounted in the new Gippsland Art Gallery, following a two-year, $14.53 million redevelopment. Titled Imagine, the exhibition of 134 works from 81 local, national, and international artists will take visitors on a journey through five centuries of art making. Cumulatively, Imagine reveals a history of the earth as told through the human imagination, from the fires of first creation through to the science and technology of today and beyond.
Conceived by Gippsland Art Gallery Curator Simon Gregg.
timeFRAME
JAHM
3 September - 6 December
This exhibition of works from the collection of Susan Taylor and Peter Jones at the Justin Art House Museum aspires to open a window on a living collection that is still growing and expanding into new areas.
"Tony Lloyd is generally classified as a realist painter, one of the top five in Australia according to Andrew Frost in the latest Art Collector magazine. The attraction to us of his work at this time was not only the precision of the painting, but his selection of particular scenes and their cinematic treatment: lonely roads at night, subways, eerie mountain landscapes. Swerve catches a moment of tension between something that has happened and something that is about to happen, a driver losing control of his vehicle, witnessed only by the deep blue of the night sky through the treetops. VERY Twin Peaks!"
ART MONTHLY
Issue 302 October 2017
ART GUIDE
Telaesthesia: Reality, painting and technology
“We have exchanged the reality of the world we see with our eyes for the reality of the world we see through screens,” says curator and artist Tony Lloyd when explaining the motivation behind Telaesthesia at Hill Smith Gallery. The consequence of this, argues Lloyd, is “that the virtual and the actual have equal weight.”
Telaesthesia is an exhibition that explores how technological realities have altered the practices of both painting and how we perceive the world. "
TELAESTHESIA
Curated by Tony Lloyd
Hill Smith Gallery
Sept 23 – Oct 14 2017
Telaesthesia, or perception at a distance, a term once outside the domain of rational discourse, is an increasingly appropriate way to characterize how artists understand and see the interconnected world. Where once they had no choice but to work directly from life, now, images from around the globe, across the universe and from simulated worlds, stream into their studios. Drawing on an expanded world view, artists incorporate this technological extra sensory perception into their work, infusing their imagery with the aura of our digitally augmented reality.
This exhibition at Hill Smith Gallery explores the theme of Telaesthesia through the works of five painters, Stephen Haley, Tony Lloyd, David Ralph, Camilla Tadich and Darren Wardle. Digital technology plays a critical part in all of their practices. For them photography, video, Photoshop, 3D design and the many world views of the internet have replaced the sketchbook as the starting point of painting. These painters could be categorised as representational or realist but the interesting question is, which reality are they representing? Together with their shared interest in exploring the mediated world, these artists also celebrate the physicality of paint. They experiment with Paint’s ability to depict convincingly while at the same time making a feature of its malleability; for these five artists, the surface of the painting is a crucial aspect of the artwork as object.
Le Belle Arti
Chapman & Bailey Gallery
Aug 31 – Sept 30 2017
This year, the history of the Belle Arti Prize will be celebrated with Le Belle Arti, an exhibition featuring all the past winners of the Belle Arti Prize. Tunni Kraus (VIC) 2016, Tony Lloyd (Qld) 2014, Karen Black (Qld) 2013, Marie Hagerty (ACT) 2012, 2011, Lewis Miller (VIC) 2010 and Jacqui Stockdale (VIC) 2009 will be coming together in presenting new works alongside their original 35 x 35cm winning canvas.
Art Collector Magazine
Issue 81 July-September 2017
Painted with an eye to detail but avoiding the bland surfaces of exact replication of a found image, Lloyd imbues his paintings with an aura of the uncanny, suggesting a connection to the grand surrealist tradition of Rene Magritte...
Andrew Frost writes about the five most interesting realist painters in Australia.
KILGOUR PRIZE 2017
Newcastle Art Gallery
5 August - 15 October 2017
Mt Assiniboine with jet and my shadow has been selected for the prestigious Kilgour Art Prize.
The KILGOUR PRIZE 2017 is Newcastle's annual art prize for figurative and portrait painting.
HADLEY'S ART PRIZE
15 July 2017 – 25 August 2017
Near Earth Asteroid with Highway (Ida) has been selected for the prestigious Hadley's Art Prize.
Kate Swinson writes about Tony Lloyd for the Artist's Edit.
ART GUIDE
Tracey Clement previews Tony Lloyd’s exhibition The Distance at Gallery 9 for Art Guide Australia.
The Distance
Gallery 9
17 May - 10 June 2017
The Distance, Tony Lloyd’s second exhibition with Gallery 9, continues his fascination with mountains, highways, darkness and space travel.
In this exhibition, immense mountains are contrasted with high altitude air travel, jet vapour trails are likened to road lines, and footprints in the snow read as an indecipherable Morse code. In other works, asteroids appear out of the darkness above endless highways, melding night and space into a single perspective.
Lloyd’s meticulously painted images have a cinematic quality. These enigmatic scenes of remote and unpopulated landscapes are difficult to locate as actual places in time. The curator and author Simon Gregg wrote of Lloyd that, “His paintings have a sense of time frozen, and haunt us through their penetrating ambiguity, speaking of nowhere and of no-when.“
