Prominent Australian artist Stephen Bush is known for his exploration into modes of representational painting and its history, implemented through the use of constraints, colour and process. In a career spanning more than four decades, his works seek to reinvent the narrative potential of painting. Revision, contradiction and juxtaposition are key elements of his practice, where costumed figures and animals often mingle with modernist forms in idealised, hypnotic landscapes. Fundamental to his practice, the artist displays and plays amid the tensions that exist between the fluid and ordered, the original and reproduction, and the arbitrary and rational.

Since graduating from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1978, Bush has developed a significant career in which his work has been included in major exhibitions throughout Australia and internationally. His artworks have been foregrounded in major exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art; and the National Gallery of Victoria. Significant solo survey exhibitions include Stephen Bush: Steenhuffel, at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne University in Melbourne in 2014, Gelderland, at SITE: Santa Fe, Texas in 2007, and Claiming: An Installation of Paintings by Stephen Bush, at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, in Melbourne 1991, among many others in the commercial gallery sector throughout Australia and the United States.

Bush recently won the Paul Guest Drawing Prize (2024), was awarded the MCA Foyer Wall Commission (2016) and was the winner of the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize (2007). Being the recipient of Australia Council residencies in Paris, New York and London enabled the artist to immerse himself in historical and contemporary painting, furthering his significant research and knowledge of the artform and ultimately informing his practice.

Bush is represented in major public and private collections including the National Gallery of Victoria; National Gallery of Australia; Queensland Art Gallery; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Art Gallery of South Australia; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; and the Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania.

His work is included in prominent collections including the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne; Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA), Perth; Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney and the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Tasmania, among other private and public collections in Australia and overseas.