ANU School of Art & Design free Public Lecture Program

Richard Lewer is a Melbourne-based artist known for his video and animation, paintings, and delicately beautiful drawings, which evocatively rework some of life’s less pleasant elements – crime scenes, illness, horror movies and extreme events. His work is accessible and familiar, with a critical edge that probes what is beautiful and sinister about our society without injecting a moralising tone or political message. Lewer’s focus is, however, less concerned with telling the concrete facts of a case. Instead, his work explores the way that places can become repositories for the psychic residue of extreme events, painful activities or our deepest fears.

Lewer has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally and his work is included in many important state museums and university collections in both Australia and New Zealand. Recent exhibitions include: Parnngurr, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney (2015); the Basil Sellers Art Prize, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne (2014); Dark Heart, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2014); Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2013); Inside Running – The Art of Sport, Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle (2013); Negotiating This World: Contemporary Australian Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2012); 10 ways to look at the past, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2011); and Freehand: Recent Australian Drawing, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2010). His work has also been surveyed in the exhibitions I Must Learn To Like Myself at the Waikato Museun of New Zealand (2010) and Nobody likes a Show-Off at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) (2009).

Free and open to all, as part of the SOA&D Public Lecture Program.

Please register your attendance here.

Image: Richard Lewer, The theatre of sports (detail), 2016.