Search / thomas brisbane

A head for business and a heart for love

For love, not money

The last bushrangers

Brothers in harms

Pamela See (Xue Mei-Ling)

Born: 1979, Brisbane
Works: Brisbane

Yanni Floros

Yanni Floros is an Adelaide based artist who trained at the National Art School in Sydney graduating as a sculpture major. Since then he has shown his work both locally and internationally in Berlin, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide.

Dylan Mooney

Dylan Mooney, a proud Yuwi man from Mackay, Queensland, based in Meanjin/Brisbane, works across painting, printmaking, digital illustration and drawing, visually translating stories of resilience, survival, connection and love.

She saved his life. He showed her painting.

Leaders, painters, friends

Oz Punk

In 1976, without having been blooded on the Sydney or Melbourne pub circuit, The Saints recorded a single – ‘(I’m) Stranded’ – earning them the distinction of releasing a punk single before The Sex Pistols did.

Jan Nelson

Jan Nelson was born in Melbourne. She graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1983 and has been exhibited her work in both solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia since that time including at the MCA, Sydney, National Gallery of Victoria, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane and the Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide.

Christopher Bassi

Known for his representational painting, Meriam and Yupungathi man Christopher Bassi, based in Meanjin/Brisbane, addresses issues surrounding cultural identity, alternative genealogies and colonial legacies.

Friendship’s rhyme and reason

Poetic trio

Oz Rock

Two of the music industry’s highest-selling performers originated in suburban Australia. The Bee Gees started out in Brisbane, for instance, and AC/DC played their first gigs at a nightclub in inner Sydney.

Leah King-Smith

Born: 1957, Gympie, QLD
Works: Brisbane

Carol McGregor

Born: 1961, Hastings, New Zealand
Works: Brisbane

Mia Boe

Mia Boe is a Narrm/Melbourne-based artist known for her haunting and evocative painting practice, informed by her Butchulla and Burmese ancestry.

Li Cunxin, 2017–2018

Commissioned with funds provided by Tim Fairfax AC 2018

Australian racing legends and best friends

The mane thing is trust

Literary lovers’ life liaison

Desire drives forbidden love

Who is Lillie Roberts?

Talented wife for a talented husband

Of Pansy, plastiques and prudes

Near-naked subversion

To coin a (farewell) phrase

A penny for their thoughts

Immediately, there was a crackle

A meeting of minds

Street fare

The late Georgian and early Victorian working classes often bought their food in ale-houses, chop-houses and ‘penny pie shops’, or purchased their meals day after day in the streets.

Anthony Anderton

An interview with the photographer.

Davida Allen

Going around a gallery with a child, we point to a painting of a dog and brightly ask ‘What’s that?’ If they don’t say ‘A dog’, we tell them that’s what it is. We don’t say it’s a shape inscribed by an artist that’s popularly understood to signify a dog. That’d only serve to foster a smarty-pants.

Tim Fairfax, 2018

Commissioned with funds provided by The Calvert-Jones Foundation 2018

William Robinson

Unique in the world, perhaps, is a bronze sculpture that fuses the age-old human portrait bronze tradition, and the later genre of the bronze pug figurine: that’d be William Robinson’s Self-portrait with pug.

Mal Meninga, 2018

Commissioned with funds provided by Maliganis Edwards Johnson and Alan Dodge AM 2018

So Fine

The National Portrait Gallery is pleased to announce its winter exhibition is So Fine: Contemporary women artists make Australian history. It will open to the public from 29 June 2018.

So Fine

Ten women artists explore the possibilities of portraiture as a contemporary art form; and reinterpret and reimagine Australian history in the Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition So Fine: Contemporary women artists make Australian history.

Allow me to introduce...

These full-length figures in watercolour, gouache and pencil date mostly from the 1820s, and almost all come from the collection of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart.

Alfredo Esquillo Jr

Born in Manila in 1972, Alfredo Esquillo Jr majored in painting at University of Santo Thomas.

Twenty new portraits marking Portrait Gallery’s twentieth birthday

To celebrate the National Portrait Gallery’s twentieth anniversary as an institution, twenty portraits of outstanding Australian individuals have been commissioned for the permanent collection. This is the largest undertaking for the Gallery’s commissioning program in its twenty-year existence.

Presenting… Shirley Purdie’s Ngalim-Ngalimbooroo Ngagenybe

The National Portrait Gallery this week launches an online exhibition of Shirley Purdie’s remarkable self-portrait Ngalim-Ngalimbooroo Ngagenybe to coincide with Reconciliation Week.

Macquarie Digital Portraiture Award media information

The National Portrait Gallery recently announced the finalists for the Macquarie Digital Portraiture Award 2013.

Tony Shaw, 2018

Commissioned with funds from the Patrick Corrigan Portrait Commission Series 2018

Melanie Faith Dove

I had been watching Agnes with intrigue, her face and profile were so mesmerizing. On our final day together I pulled her aside and convinced her that she had such an amazing face that I needed to get a photograph for myself. It was very spontaneous in that I decided quickly how it would best look and shot it in only two frames.

Michelle Simmons, 2018

Commissioned with funds provided by the Sid and Fiona Myer Family Foundation 2018

Andrew Gaze, 2018

Commissioned with funds provided by Trent Birkett 2018

Forum participants

Biographies of participants in the Writing lives, revealing lives forum.

Noel McKenna

It’s a matter beyond dispute that in the entire history of Australian art, it’s Noel McKenna who’s painted the liveliest rendition of the head of a Chihuahua.

References

About the exhibition curator Claire Roberts, and writers Eugene Wang and Zhang Letian.

Architecture

Natural light and human proportions – the design by Johnson Pilton Walker

2023 Annual Appeal

In 2023 the Annual Appeal was focussed on a work by one of Australia's best loved and most successful portrait painters, Judy Cassab AO CBE, depicting model, entrepreneur and deportment icon, June Dally-Watkins OAM.

Rugby great a fine addition to Portrait Gallery Collection

A portrait of Australian rugby great, Dr Mark Loane AM MBBS FRANZO FRACS, is the latest addition to the National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection. The work is the final in a series of three commissioned portraits of Australian rugby luminaries funded by Gallery benefactor, Mr Patrick Corrigan AM.

Portrait Donors

Memories

The second row of paintings recall stories relating to specific sites, experiences and activities.

Uncommon Australians

Sarah Engledow writes about Gordon and Marilyn Darling and their support for the National Portrait Gallery throughout its evolution.

Jose Legaspi

Jose Legaspi was born in 1959 in Manila. He achieved degrees in zoology and biology before turning to fine arts in the mid-1980s.

Arcadia: Sound of the sea

One night in the spring of 1970 in an old house in Whale Beach, north of Sydney, John Witzig, Albe Falzon and David Elfick put together the first issue of Tracks, playing Neil Young’s album Harvest over and over again as they pasted up galleys of type.

The Board

The Board oversees the Gallery's strategic directions, objectives and governance.

Robyn Sweaney

Robyn's parents had two terriers, Wuff and Snuff. In spite of Snuff’s ominous name and a couple of close shaves – once, he jumped out of a moving car, and another time, on a long road trip, he was accidentally left behind at a petrol station – he outlived Wuff.

NPPP 2016 exhibition essay

Penny Grist, National Photographic Portrait Prize judge and curator, introduces the 2016 Prize.

History

How the National Portrait Gallery and its unique collection came to be

Nicholas Harding

Over the years the young Nicholas Harding got his hands on various mice and guinea pigs, but they served mainly to illustrate the concept of mortality. 

Nicholas Harding: 28 Portraits

Sarah Engledow looks at three decades of Nicholas Harding's portraiture.

A non-material and non-physical portrait

Inner Worlds features the recently commissioned portrait of world-renowned philosopher of consciousness David Chalmers by Melbourne-based artist Nick Mourtzakis.

The Bare story

Curator, Penny Grist, reveals how this exhibition came to be

The art of Inner Worlds

Dr Christopher Chapman NPG Curator of Inner Worlds explains the development of an exhibition that spans from Surrealism to contemporary art.

Rick Amor: 21 Portraits

Sarah Engledow chronicles Rick Amor's work and accomplishments in this extensive essay in conjunction with the exhibition Rick Amor: 21 Portraits.