30th Anniversary Year 1976 - 2006

Rex Irwin Art Dealer was established in Sydney in 1976. The gallery represents important Australian and international artists, and supports and encourages emerging artists. The gallery also provides valuations, development of corporate and private collections, portrait commissions and restoration and framing advice.

Art fairs are an interesting way to meet new clients and to show pictures in a less formal atmosphere than an art gallery. At Art Sydney 2006, we are not only showing the work of artists the gallery represents and exhibits regularly but we have also included a number of artists who are new to us and whose work we may exhibit in the future.

Art fairs are exciting and not a little chaotic but going to a gallery regularly, where one can look at pictures in a calmer atmosphere, is the best way to continue the experience of Art Sydney 06 and find new artists to follow.

Telephone at Art Sydney:
0422 737 505

Rex DUPAIN

Rex Dupain was introduced to photography at an unusually early age but went on to study painting and drawing at the National Art School and College of Fine Arts. After many years of exhibiting and working as a painter, Dupain returned to black and white photography. Rex has continued the pictorial tradition begun by his father, Max, and is currently working on a book, Bondi Colour.

Lucian FREUD

Now in his eighties, Lucian Freud continues to produce paintings and prints of the human figure with compelling results. Since 1982 etching has come to occupy an ever more important place in Freud’s work and can be seen to be in dialogue with his paintings, one medium informing the other, both in subject matter and scale.

Lucian Freud - Nudes. Rex Irwin Art Dealer, until 8th July

Sam FULLBROOK

The great legacy that Sam Fullbrook leaves the world of art is that of a colourist and a painter of Australian life. A noted raconteur, Fullbrook would entertain with accounts of his life as a young soldier and his various jobs in the bush as a stockman, miner and cane cutter. Sam Fullbrook’s paintings and drawings remain a portrayal of a life fully lived but perhaps the final word is with Fullbrook himself - his expressed aim, ‘to paint good pictures that children will love.’

GOYA  (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes)

There is something very apposite about the prints of Goya; an expressive quality which has resonance in the modern world. They have the power to humanise emotion and to tease out contradiction and dissent. Rex Irwin Art Dealer exhibits 1st edition prints from Los Proverbios and Tauromaquia at Art Sydney.

Dave GROOM

Dave Groom is a young artist who lives and works in the landscape of mid – north Queensland. Groom’s pastels are intriguing in that they are not drawn from observation or from photographic sources. They are an amalgam of the landscape that Groom lives within and experiences on a daily basis. Groom is an avid bush walker who often guides groups on walking trips in various parts of Australia.

Philip GUSTON

Philip Guston’s pictures are autobiographical and ruminative. His imagery has been described as, ‘at once zany and sinister, part dream - world, part real.’ Trade mark Guston iconography is the lit cigarette, the light bulb, noose and the all seeing cyclopean eye. Funny, profound and moving.

Gwyn HANSSEN PIGOTT

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott’s work is now avidly sought by art collectors. She maintains a pre - eminent position in the world of ceramics, locally and internationally, and was the subject of a retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria this year.

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott - Rex Irwin Art Dealer, October 24 to November 18, 2006

Nicholas HARDING

Nicholas Harding has taken the beach as his subject, a place of ceaseless human activity and a touchstone of his and others experience. He has commented,
‘the light and space of the beach had a seminal impact on me as a child... Squinting through the glare of the sun with squeaky dunes underfoot, ocean breezes and surf, sandy cozzies, the taste of salt and milkshakes.’

Nicholas Harding - Rex Irwin Art Dealer, November 21 - December 16, 2006

Matthew HOARE

In what is an interesting departure for Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Matthew Hoare will exhibit
Perspex boxes which emit light and sound. They have various titles:, Motor music, Spark music, Relay music. With a background in composition Matthew has moved into making electronic instruments. Matthew is currently completing a PHD on the automated musical tradition.

Zigmunt JAWOROWSKI

Zigmunt Jaworowski’s pictures explore figuration through the expressive medium of  the wood block print. Ziggy’s images group figures tightly together or show individuals in isolation. His theme is containment. These pictures tilt at the order of society and fairly hint at liberation from imposed order.

Danie MELLOR

Danie Mellor is an artist whose work is in a variety of private and state collections. Exploring  both his Aboriginal and European heritage, much of Danie’s work centres on questions of identity and the iconoclasm of objects. For Art Sydney Danie has produced a new suite of shields, each representing tribal path-ways. These contour lines are then worked onto the surface of each shield with glazes.  

David NIXON

David Nixon is predominately a print maker. Like Danie Mellor, Nixon has Aboriginal forebears and formal traces of his ancestry are evident in his imagery. Nixon’s prints display an innate understanding of tone and line, their graphic sensibility evident in suites of black / grey, blue and red prints. Nixon also makes drawings from minute pencil marks

Pablo PICASSO

Picasso needs very little introduction to the world at large. Picasso is universally considered to be the greatest painter of the 20th century, an artist whose reputation is matched by his prolific output. Rex Irwin Art Dealer continues to exhibit the best of Picasso’s work on paper and this year includes in Art Sydney a very early and important etching, Le Repas Frugal 1904, from Picasso’s blue period.

Paul RYAN

Loosely thought of as one of the Sydney ‘figurative paint school’ (Nicholas Harding, Ben Quilty and Craig Waddell), Paul Ryan is a painter of the Illawarra escapement where he has lived since his early teens.  Ryan’s paintings show us his immediate locale and the changing effects of light on water and land.

Paul Ryan - Paintings, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, August 29 - September 23, 2006 

Peter SIMPSON

Peter Simpson is a painter of the Australian landscape much closer in look to Streeton and Gruner than to say John Olsen or Sid Nolan. Modernist Australian painting has often strived to add significance to forms in the landscape through abstraction or a strained form of lyricism. Peter Simpson’s paintings have a refreshing lack of heavy message. Beneath the well observed and carefully turned surfaces can be found a sense of loss which speaks of first encounter of the land and the subsequent intervention of man.

Paul SPENCER

Paul Spencer is a young Melbourne artist with a fascination for botanical forms and a strong belief in the transformative power of art. As a painter of things, Spencer takes as his source both the visible world and the world of the imagination. The forms that Spencer paints are much as one may find at the bottom of the garden, but it is the transformation of this flora, the cacti and succulents, that suggests both an inner and an outer world. Surrealism perhaps – but of a kind.

Fred WILLIAMS

Fred Williams is arguably the greatest  painter of Australian modernism. Noted for his
robust reinterpretation of the Australian landscape, Williams worked tirelessly in the mediums of oil, gouache and etching, to create a body of work without parallel in Australian art.