Geoff Dyer
Born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1947 Geoff Dyer is regarded as one of Australia’s most respected and collected contemporary landscape artists. After graduating from art school in the late nineteen sixties, he worked as an art educator but rapidly established a vibrant painting career.
Dyer has spent most of his career painting the Australian bush, often in the sublime wilderness of Tasmania and the islands of the Bass Strait. His seascapes painted from this notoriously rugged stretch of water have been the subject of more recent works. Dyers evocative, broody and almost abstract paintings seem to embody the nineteenth century romanticism of landscapes artists such as Turner, alongside a more contemporary vision which owes much to Australian modernists such as Fred Williams. Painted with a palette knife Dyers paintings are thickly loaded with texture and often present on a huge scale of nearly two metres in dimension.
His art is infused with the power and majesty of the natural world, marking him as a witness to the ever-present landscape at the heart of the Tasmanian experience.
Over the past decades he has covered much ground, taking in locations from the west coast through to the rugged islands of Bass Strait, and the dense timbers of the Franklin River. In recent years, his work has become increasingly abstract, yet remains invested with immediacy, familiarity and inquiry. Geoff’s ability to extract beauty within a seemingly barren and arid landscape bears testimony to his talent.
Dyer’s institutional recognition has been well documented. He has been a finalist on nine occasions in Australia’s premier landscape prize, the Wynne (Art Gallery NSW) and in 2003 he was the winner of the country’s premier Art Prize, The Archibald with his portrait of author and fellow Tasmanian Richard Flannagan. He is represented in many major collections, both in Australia and overseas. In 2010 Geoff had a hugely successful exhibited in New York in the American Embassy and the following year made finalist in the Archibald for the tenth time.
