Curated Australian artworks
Leighton House features special contemporary art, thoughtfully selected for your stay
Angus McDonald is an award-winning artist and documentary filmmaker. He is a sought after still life painter and pencil artist. For a brief period of his career, McDonald exhibited oversized Angus Bull portraits. The largest, given to the owners as a wedding gift in 2007, is centre stage to the new living wing.
McDonald has been a frequent finalist in numerous national art awards. He was selected as a finalist six times in Australia’s biggest art competition, the Archibald Prize.
Guy Maestri is an Archibald Prize-winning Australian artist. Although he is noted for his plein-air painting and strong connection to landscape, Maestri also uses still life and portraiture to investigate the conventions of painting. His work speaks of materiality, gesture and observation.
Maestri has exhibited throughout Australia and won numerous awards, including the 2009 Archibald Prize for his portrait of Australian singer and musician Geoffrey Gurramul Yunupingu. His work is held in significant public and private collections, including the National Portrait Gallery, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, Macquarie Bank, Artbank, and Parliament House.
Pamela Pauline is an award winning photographic artist. She uses her photographic practice to share the wonder of the natural world. Much of her work is steeped in Australia’s rich natural heritage, with a particular focus on the unique flora and fauna of this island continent.
Pauline’s work holds a deep message around the importance of celebrating, documenting and preserving our world’s biodiversity. Her most recent bodies of work focus primarily on endemic Australian flora and fauna that are vulnerable to extinction. She creates complex composited photographic artworks that sit somewhere within staged, conceptual and documentary photography.
Joseph McGlennon’s photographic works are majestic recreations of animals in their natural habitats. Some pieces include the first kangaroos to be seen by European eyes, parrots perching on a branch surrounded by exotic blooms, and the extinct Tasmanian Tiger fresh from killing its prey. McGlennon’s lens brings his subjects out of the realm of exotic specimen or historical curiosity and pushes them, living and breathing, into today.
McGlennon takes hundreds of different photographs and spends weeks layering and arranging them to arrive at the final image.
The landscape is as important as the animal itself – there are no blurred backgrounds or subdued foregrounds in McGlennon’s montages. The inclusion of every detail creates a hyper-real effect that pulls the viewer into contact with the flora and fauna that the planet stands to lose.