Lionel Bawden (b. Sydney, 1974) completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours in the painting department at The Australian National University, Canberra School of Art in 1997. During 1995 Bawden spent six months at The China National Academy of Fine Art, Hangzhou, China.
Read MoreLionel Bawden is an Australian artist working in sculpture, performance, installation and painting. Bawden’s core sculptural practice exploits hexagonal coloured pencils as a sculptural material, reconfigured and carved into amorphous shapes, mining the material’s rich qualities of colour, geometry and metaphor. Bawden explores themes of flux, transformation and repetition as preconditions to our experience of the physical world, essential to the construction of identity.
Bawden’s sculptural works harness landscape as a stand-in for the body, personal themes of desire, longing and interconnection become abstracted in a generative process to create form. Bawden’s paintings refigure his relationship to both real and imagined worlds, whilst his sculptural works are grounded in a sustained fascination with more oblique approaches to articulating aspects of the human condition.
Bawden was recipient of the 2009 Art Omi International Artist Residency, New York, USA, (through Art Omi Australia committee) and the 2003 Creative New Zealand residency at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand, creating the exhibition ‘the spring tune’. In 2005 Bawden shared a 3-month Red Gate Gallery artist residency, Beijing with Sydney artist Nell.
Bawden was the recipient of the 2009 Wynne Prize, through the Art Gallery of NSW and the 2004 ABN Amro emerging Artist Award, Sydney.
Lionel Bawden has exhibited in over 40 group exhibitions including: Form and Substance, Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane (2014); Benglis 73/74, TCB Art inc., Melbourne (2014); Domestic Bliss, Deakin University Art Gallery, Melbourne (2014); burster flipper wobbler dripper spinner stacker shaker maker, Christchurch Gallery, New Zealand (2014); New Contemporaries, Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney (2014); Nature Nurture, Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne (2014); Wonderworks, The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong, China (2013); Wood-Art, Design, Architecture, Jam Factory, Adelaide, travelling nationally (2013); Zhongjian: Midway, a Wollongong City Gallery project at Yuan Center of Art Beijing, China (2009); I walk the line: new Australian drawing, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, (2009); Beijing International Art Biennale, China (2008); The Roving Eye, Gigantic Artspace, New York (2006); Un-Australian, Anna Bibby Gallery, Auckland (2005); True Love, Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2004); Colour, Queensland Art Gallery (2003) and The National Sculpture Prize, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2001).
Lionel Bawden will be exhibiting a solo exhibition of new works at Karen Woodbury Gallery in November 2015.
Text courtesy Karen Woodbury Fine Art.
