Next Exhibitions:
“Sleep of Reason: Paintings After Goya” June 2024 Fox Galleries, Melbourne
“Richard Dunlop: Ten Beautiful Reefs and Rose Period Paintings” Gallery One, Gold Coast (maybe December 2024)
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Please note: Prices, availability of works and other information on this website may change without notice. This site contains quotes referring to Richard Dunlop, and also art history more broadly.
“There is much art at any time and in many countries which is dogmatic, propagandistic or even appears to use human suffering as biodiesel to fuel art careers, submitting to the will of the State. But anyone who has been truly elevated by artistic expression, whether it be via a painting, a novel, movie, or passage of classical music will ‘know’ that it was an almost incomprehensible aesthetic and emotional experience and not the outcome of being brow-beaten to conform to a given view. While it should be self-evident to intelligent people that we need to conserve our remaining wilderness areas, relish living with diverse species, express wonder at the prescience of ancient wisdom, and be suspicious of equating ‘new’ art with ‘better’ art for example. But as Kahnweiler (Picasso’s dealer) pointed out, the communication of such must dwell predominantly in an aesthetic realm to have any triumphal effect”. – Richard Dunlop
“I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Dunlop’s recent exhibition at your gallery. Dunlop’s growing achievement interpreting landscape has no real parallel among the work of his contemporaries, dealing as it appears to do with the stubbornly unfashionable subject of natural beauty converging subtly with environmental and broader moral concerns. I think his work will survive beyond the current fixation with the passing parade of narcissistic identity politics in which some artists opportunistically see a parade coming down the street and jump out in front. If anyone needed reminding of my favourite Keats quote “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” – Professor Bernard Smith, 1998
“You’ll have to wait ‘til 2020 for the rush of the curatorium.” – Ray Hughes, Sydney Art Dealer, 2001
“One is aware that the eye is always a motivating, controlling factor in Dunlop’s work. The visual excitement that the materials and elements of painting – gestural line, glowing colour and sumptuous surfaces – may directly express in themselves, as he says, the integral issue in his art. The indivisibility of colour, space and gesture is stressed in each of his pictures and when they are seen in series, as in this exhibition, this feeling of interconnectedness increases, linking the paintings one to the other and creating an overall sense of the artist’s organic process.” – Sue Smith 2001, on the occasion of an early museum retrospective
“If anything, Richard’s work is completely original by way of its singular vision.” – Alison Kubler, 2007
“This is an arts manifesto.” – Sophie Mann 2014
“One cannot help but think of Dunlop as an artist with a keen eye for detail and composition, but rather than create work slavishly to these watchwords, he chooses invocation”. – Dr Jonathon McBurnie, 2018
“He painted stream-of-consciousness, creating an entirely unique literature. A pictorial diary to which he could return geographically, but more importantly, mentally.” – Tristram Shandy experimental novel by Laurence Sterne 1759