2022

When the realization dawns that you’re likely doing just what the artist did when he made the work, a new appreciation of how well Dunlop shares his vision emerges. This is an artist who not only wants to share what he saw, but how he saw it”. – Andrew Harper

Richard’s paintings are always gorgeous to look at and they continue his quest for truth and beauty in a visual language that he has painstakingly developed. A language that is earthy and transcendental.” – Phil Brown

“Tuned into the world and environments around him, Richard Dunlop takes specific events, narratives and landscapes as a starting point and transforms them into paintings with continued resonance by pushing forms beyond the literal and into the elusive. The convalescing of specific references with Dunlop’s overarching perspective of their inextricable relationship to wider systems is seen in specific works such as Crossings (2021)
– which was painted during the invasion of Ukraine and refers to contemporary events all the while showing the historical influence of artists such as Grant Wood and Colin McCahon. Another work, In Search of Thylacine in the Great Western Tiers, takes the canonised and mythologised rapid extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger as the starting point to grapple with the colonial mindset in tandem with explorations of the Tasmanian landscape, where the artist lives. With art movements such as the Sublime and Picturesque – at the front of his mind, the artist lets in the layers of any given moment, Short Walks in North Tasmania is both a representation of the contemporary and the enduring.”
– Sophie Prince

“There’s a lot of beauty, but Dunlop also finds poetry – he balances the warm breath of a cow, observed as a steaming plume, with a night sky cascading with stars. It’s a beautiful, quite tiny fragment that the artist has clearly been engrossed by, and he really succeeds in capturing the wonder that clearly held his attention. Dunlop has strong ideas and is bold about following his instincts into new territory.” – Andrew Harper

“Art that can woo…Dunlop has more than earned his reputation.” – Rebecca Agnew