Damien Minton Gallery

The Damien Minton Gallery, Sydney, Australia, presents Peter Gardiner, an emerging Australia artist who is establishing a strong reputation amongst Australian collectors and art enthusiasts, as well as receiving accolades through art prizes and artist residencies. Based in the post-industrial city of Newcastle, Peter Gardiner has painted a series for the Hong Kong International Art Fair 2012 called: Ravensworth (Swamp Lantern).

In 2010, Peter was part of an Australian artist tour and residency in China called Hard Sleeper. Coinciding with ‘Imagine Australia – the year of Australian Culture in China’, Hard Sleeper included a residency and exhibition at the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing. In the same year, 2010, Gardiner undertook a three-month residency in Barcelona supported through the peak national arts funding body, the Australia Council for the Arts. During this residency he was seduced by the European masters like Boucher and the French Romantic landscape artists he absorbed at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. Australian art critic and writer Una Rey commented Gardiner’s opportunity to engage with major works from the Renaissance to the Baroque was “timely” for the influence they would soon have on his Ravensworth paintings.

“The country around Ravensworth, typical of the upper Hunter Valley, is scored by mining activity, feeling its age, losing its edges. The emphatic mountains of Gardiner’s early years are a compositional watermark throughout his work, but the delicacy of the Ravensworth landscapes rely on micropattern and detail as much as their far-reaching aspect. The lyrical trees owe a debt to Claude and Gainsborough, the miasma of clouds pointing to Turner, but the archaic forest is ultimately universal. Surrealism, after Dali, thy name is muddy. But the sensibility, which draws from dreams and the unconscious as antidote to a dry secular view of nature, is fecund and welcome. Searching for an Australian equivalent, Gardiner’s sensual marks are mirrored in Sidney Nolan’s prickly and slippery revelations and James Gleeson’s visceral skies. But the heaven bound embers also recall Whistler’s once radical Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875), making these quieter paintings, landscapes as witness, reaching backwards into prehistory and forwards into future mystery. [...] The paintings hint at an imminent climax, but a fin de siecle reading is too finite. Defiant and ambitious, Gardiner’s pictures lick and dance around the spectacle of decay giving hope of restitution.”

(Ravensworth catalogue essay by Australian art critic and writer, Una Rey, 2011)

Education

1983-1990Bachelor of Arts (visual arts)
High Distinction in painting University of Newcastle

Selected Exhibitions

2012Salon des Refuses, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney 2011The Ravensworth Series, solo exhibition at Damien Minton Gallery, Redfern
The Dobell Drawing prize, Art Gallery of NSW
Muswellbrook Open Art Prize
Callen Art Award, Cowra Regional Art Gallery
Hard Sleeper Group Exhibition, Damien Minton Gallery2010Tempest, group exhibition with James Gleeson and Andy Devine, Newcastle Region Art Gallery
Muswellbrook Open Art Prize, Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre
Temple Drum, Red Gate Gallery, Beijing
Landscape, Damien Minton Gallery, Redfern
Barcelona Studies, Damien Minton Gallery, Redfern2009First letter of St Paul to the Corinthians, Damien Minton Gallery, Redfern 2008The Kooragang Series, solo exhibition at the Damien Minton Gallery, Redfern 2007Dobell Drawing Prize, finalist, AGNSW
Solo exhibition, Damien Minton Gallery, Redfern
Mosman Art Prize, finalist 2006Kilgour Art Prize, Newcastle, finalist
Mosman Art Prize, finalist
Solo exhibition, debris fields, at the Damien Minton Gallery, Redfern
Winner, Maitland Art Prize 20052005: The Year In Art, invitation group exhibition at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney
Solo exhibition, new work at the Damien Minton Gallery, Redfern 2005Mosman Art Prize, finalist
Solo exhibition, as the population grows, at the Damien Minton Gallery, Newcastle
Mosman Art Prize, finalist
12 Artists from Newcastle in Sydney, the Depot Gallery, Waterloo presented by the Damien Minton Gallery 2002Ten artists from Newcastle in Sydney, The Depot Gallery, Waterloo, Sydney presented by the Damien Minton Gallery, Newcastle
Solo exhibition of new work, Damien Minton Gallery, Newcastle 1999Legge Gallery, Sydney 1998Arcania Canberra Contemporary Art Space 1997new work Tin Sheds, University of Sydney 1996Arcane Reverie 3, Rocket Art, Newcastle 1995Arcane Reverie 2, Airspace, Canberra
Arcane Reverie, Rocket Art, Newcastle

Awards

2011Winner, Callen Art Award, Cowra Regional Art Gallery
Highly Commended, Muswellbrook Open Art Prize2010Winner, Muswellbrook Open Art Prize
Australia Council Studio, Residency, Barcelona
Hard Sleeper project, Residency and exhibition, Redgate Gallery, Beijing2007Finalist, Dobell Drawing Prize, AGNSW 2006Finalist, The Kilgour Art Prize, Newcastle
Winner, Maitland Acquisitive Art Prize 1998Studio Scholarship, Artspace, Woolloomooloo, NSW Ministry of the Arts 1990Sulman Prize finalist, AGNSW and touring show 1989Sulman Prize finalist, AGNSW and touring show

Collections

Art Bank, Australia
Cowra Regional Art Gallery
Gippsland Art Gallery
Muswellbrook Regional Gallery
Maitland Regional Art Gallery
Macquarie Group Art Collection
Newcastle Art Gallery
The Australian Club, Sydney
Private collections in Australia and China