Rick Amor’s landscapes and cityscapes are based upon Melbourne’s buildings and docklands and his childhood memories from the 1950s of the beaches of Frankston on the shore of Port Philip Bay, Melbourne, Australia. Amor’s images are both familiar and unsettling environments in which isolated figures appear all too conscious of the brevity of their existence.
Read MoreAmor attended the Caulfield Institute of Technology, Melbourne (1965), and was tutored by John Brack at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, from 1966 to 1968. A committed socialist, Amor has exhibited at the Melbourne Trades Hall (1978) and also illustrated trade union magazines. In the early 1980s his depiction of a running, solitary figure in his painting became a crucial theme, appearing in his work throughout this period. Amor recalls that he only retrospectively recognised the symbolic potency of this unidentified individual. Amor’s realism is decidedly conceptual and confronts his audiences with an experience of alienation that is existential and familiar.
His work was included in the survey and touring exhibition, Federation: Art and Society 1901-2000 and is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.