Euan Macleod Bio:
Euan Macleod’s practice is an extended and inward journey of the psyche. Deploying a series of timeless and universal iconographies— boats, mountains, pits, shovels, flames— the works are difficult to pin down, slippery to define, but emotive and evocative in their imbrication of referents. Macleod’s figures walk, climb, dig and submerge, always searching; ciphers upon which we can project our own thought and emotions. Executed in dense gashes, skeins and deposits of oil, Macleod’s work is a sonorous, often melancholic treatise on existence, peppered with small biographical clues which may or may not be red herrings. Macleod’s work ranges from massive, even overbearing in scale, right down to the intimate, known for their intensity and singularity of aesthetic and vision.
Macleod has been exhibiting frequently since the 1980s, featured in over 100 solo exhibitions nationally and abroad. The artist is included in many public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Gallery of Australia and the Heide Museum of Modern Art. Notably, Macleod has taken several prestigious prizes over the years, receiving gongs for the Wynne (1998, 1999 and 2003), the Archibald (1999), the Sulman (2001), the Blake (2006) and the Dobell in 2021.
Picture: Euan Macleod – Photo by Andrew Merry