Join David Humphrey,  New York based artist, as he discusses his work and life. A vital presence in the NYC art scene since the 1980's, David has contributed to the life of painting in New York and beyond through his fascinating work as well as his role as an educator in various MFA programs in institutions such as Yale, Columbia and Parsons.

The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion titled 'Why Painting Now?' David Humphrey, Amber Boardman, Kylie Banyard and Peter Alwast will discuss key ideas around the relevance of contemporary painting, its challenges as well as focus on the joys and trials of keeping an active artistic practice and career sustainable over the long term. The audience will have the opportunity to hear how practicing artists and academics negotiate the complex terrain of contemporary art, while seeking to keep open the potential for discovery and surprise in their research and practice.

DAVID HUMPHREY has maintained a forty-year commitment to making formally inventive, psycho-socially engaged paintings. Over this time he has continued to transform images from the public realm into imaginative hybrids of the social and eccentrically individual, the historic and vividly contemporary. His work celebrates the peculiar nesting within the familiar. Mixing various representational schema with improvisational abstraction, he tells stories of vexed intimacy, political/ socio reality, and imaginative projections crashing into the real. His work has been the subject of 44 solo exhibitions including McKee Gallery, NY; Sikkema Jenkins, NY; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; and Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati. His work is in the collections of several museums and public collections including Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as well as the Saatchi Gallery, London. He is currently teaching in the MFA program of Columbia. He was awarded the Rome Prize in 2008. Humphrey has had five solo exhibitions at Fredericks & Freiser.

AMBER BOARDMAN is an American-born, Sydney-based artist who creates large and layered paintings about the desire for control and the failure to attain it. Boardman combines her background in painting and animation to create narrative works that draw from the visual language of cartoons, influenced in part by her work as an animator for Cartoon Network’s [adult swim]. Amber Boardman’s 20-year history of exhibiting her work internationally includes shows in New York, London, Rome and Amsterdam. Notable exhibitions include BAM's Next Wave Festival in New York, Postmasters Gallery in Rome, and the Archibald prize in Australia. Boardman holds a PhD from UNSW and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has founded shared studio/exhibition spaces in both Brooklyn NY and Sydney Australia. Her work is represented by galleries in Sydney, Melbourne and Atlanta.

KYLIE BANYARD is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. Her artistic practice is grounded in painting and intersects with photography, video, sculpture and immersive architectural spaces. Banyard was included in The National 2019: New Australian Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and recently completed a VR Studio with Tactical Spacelab (funded by the Australia Council and Arts NSW). She has been included in significant group exhibitions including Art from Down Under: Australia to New Zealand, Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, North Carolina (2018); Another Green World, The Western Plains Cultural Centre (2017); The Mnemonic Mirror, Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, and UTS Gallery, Sydney (2016-2017). Banyard has been a finalist in the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize and was awarded the National Tertiary Art Prize and The Basil and Muriel Art’s Scholarship, Art Gallery of NSW. She has a PhD in Fine Arts from the University of NSW and is a Lecturer of Visual Art at La Trobe University. Banyard’s work is held in numerous public and private collections including Artbank, Australia.

PETER ALWAST has held over 18 solo exhibitions and has been shown in group exhibitions at the Tate Modern (London), Museum of Old and New Art (Tasmania), the Greater Taipei Biennial, the Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney), GOMA - Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, and has been a finalist in the Mosman Prize twice. His work is held in public and private collections in Australia and the United States. Alwast's practice employs a range of media including painting, video, computer graphics and drawing. In 1999, Alwast was awarded a Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship and since completing his Masters in Fine Art degree from the Parsons School of Design, New School University, New York in 2001, he has exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2013 Alwast undertook a residency and solo exhibition at Videotage in Hong Kong . In 2011 he created a solo exhibition Future Perfect at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and his work was seen in the group exhibition Experimenta Utopia Now travelling to MONA, Tasmania as well as Selectively Revealed at the Aram Art Gallery, Seoul, South Korea. In 2010 Alwast's video animation work 'Everything' received an honourable mention in Update III, at the Liedts Meesen foundation in Ghent, Belgium. His drawing work ‘Trees, Waterfall, Back’ won the Jacaranda drawing award in Grafton Regional Gallery. In 2008 he was the inaugural recipient of The New Media Art Award, hosted by The Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia.