Artist biographies

Karen Black works across painting and sculpture, traversing the line between abstraction and figuration to broach the scope of human relations. Atmospheric, metamorphic, and transitional, Black’s vivid compositions produce novel representations of the body, figured as a subject in flux and a pliable framing device that entangles latent historical narratives, mythologies, and personal experiences.

Having worked as a costume designer for the theatre and opera, Black’s interdisciplinary practice employs a painterly language that holds space for ambiguity and uncertainty. Together with an idiosyncratic approach to sculpture characterised by elements of chance and intuition in the studio process, Black’s paintings feature thick impasto and energetic brushstrokes as a means to fracture pictorial space and disrupt traditional delineations between the figure and the inhabited world. Importantly, Black understands the painted surface as akin to the public sphere: a fluid zone where the self is inscribed, constructed, and navigated.

Born in Brisbane, 1961, Karen Black lives and works in Sydney, NSW, where she is a Sessional Lecturer at the National Art School. Since receiving a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Queensland College of Art in 2011, Black has exhibited widely across Australasia. Her work has been included in important institutional surveys, including The Intelligence of Painting, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2025); Thin Skin, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2023); undo the day, National Art School Gallery, Sydney (2023); Once more with feeling, Ngununggula, Southern Highlands, NSW (2023); Art in Conflict, Australian War Memorial, Canberra (2022); Painting. More Painting, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2016), among others. In 2025, Black presented a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, as the recipient of the annual NGV x MECCA Holiday Commission.

Black has undertaken residencies across Australia and Europe, such as the prestigious Glasshouse/Stonehouse Residency in Chenaud, France (2019); Flack Studios Ace Hotel residency (2022), and the Artspace Studio Residency, Sydney (2017). She has been a finalist in multiple national art awards, including the prestigious Archibald, Wynne, and Sir John Sulman prizes several times, organised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

Examples of Black’s painting and sculpture are found in significant public collections in Australia and Asia, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Australian War Memorial, Canberra; Shepparton Art Museum, Shepparton; Museum of Brisbane, Brisbane; Ipswich Art Gallery, Ipswich; Griffith University Art Museum; Brisbane; Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Brisbane; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Artbank, Australia; and the Salsali Private Museum, Dubai.

Peter Robinson is widely recognised as one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s leading contemporary artists. Working across sculpture, drawing, printmaking and installation, Robinson’s studio-focused practice facilitates the play between order and disorder, density and lightness, dispersion and compression. Historically known for a critical exploration of identity politics, Robinson’s early artworks rigorously examined the valences and inheritances of his Māori ancestry and biculturalism. Over the past two decades, the artist has eluded this rhetorical paradigm and weight of interpretation, focusing more exclusively on opening profound lines
of enquiry into the mediums with which he works, such as polystyrene, steel, aluminium, felt, and paper. Investigating both the material and metaphoric potential of the medium, Robinson’s recent practice explores the resulting poetic nuances of his tangible investigations, while proposing art history as an open language that develops and adapts via its own twisting web of cause and effect.

Born in Ashburton, Aotearoa New Zealand in 1966, Peter Robinson is an artist of Ngāi Tahu and Pākehā decent living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He studied sculpture at the Ilam School of Fine Arts (1989) and is currently associate professor and Dean Māori at Te Waka Tūhura Elam School of Fine Arts and Design. Robinson’s work has been exhibited extensively in Aotearoa New
Zealand and internationally. He was New Zealand’s representative at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), participated in the 5th Auckland Triennial (2013), 13th Istanbul Biennale (2013), 11th and 18th Biennale of Sydney (1998/2012), the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2018) and the 8th Baltic Triennale of International Art, Vilnius (2002).

Robinson’s work has been the subject of significant solo presentations in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and internationally, including the Auckland Art Gallery, Christchurch Art Gallery, Whangārei Art Museum, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Artspace Aotearoa, Stedelijk Museum, Artspace Sydney and the Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, among others. His work has been included in major international touring exhibitions including Continental shift, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen (2000); Toi Toi Toi: three generations of artists from New Zealand, Fridericianum, Kassel (1999); and Cultural safety: contemporary art from New Zealand, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main (1995).

For his exhibition ACK (2008) at Artspace Aotearoa he received the Walters Prize, Aotearoa New Zealand’s preeminent contemporary art award. He has undertaken prestigious residencies across Europe and Australia including the Musee Gassendi, Dignes-les-Baines; Ludwig Forum, Aachen; Goethe Institut, Düsseldorf; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, and Artspace, Sydney. His work is included in significant collections internationally including the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland; Musee d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, Lyon; Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain – FRAC Alsace, Lorraine; Denver Art Museum, Denver; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, among others.