GARRY SHEAD Australian, B. 1942

Private collection, New South Wales

Garry Shead is one of Australia’s most successful modern figurative painters, represented in the National Gallery of Australia, in state and regional galleries and in international collections. In 1993 he won Australia’s most prestigious portrait prize, the Archibald; and in 2004 the Dobell Prize, for drawing, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Images of Queen Elizabeth and references to her 1954 Royal Visit to Australia (when the artist was twelve years old) first appear in Shead’s work of the 1960s but culminate in the major ‘Royal Suite’ of the 1990s. Although the series has a basis in historical fact and does speak to issues of the recent republican debate, readings are invited on several different levels. Dr Sasha Grishin has written perceptively of these works as a ‘quest for beauty and a lost innocence… It is a tale about the gradual process of disillusionment where realisations of reality gradually dissolve the illusions of the absurd’.¹

1. Grishin, S., Garry Shead, Encounters with Royalty, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, p. 27.