CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Brett Ferry

Congratulations to Brett Ferry who recenlty won the Roi Art Prize (2019). The Roi Art Prize is an annual, acquisitive art prize of $10,000 funded and run by the ROI Owners Corporation.

Brett Ferry’s paintings challenge the tradition of landscape, teasing at viewers’ perceptions and stimulating the imagination. His bold use of colour, blend and unique style are both confronting and beautiful. His most recent work explores the “post-digital landscape” derived from observation, photography and digital manipulation.

Using a variety of techniques, Ferry places high importance on traditional acts of drawing, printmaking and painting. “For me, these techniques provide a response to time and thought, and a discourse within art history. This enables me to build conceptual layers of ideas and meanings, within each piece of work.” he states.

‘My latest series of work focuses on passing unnoticed beauty, ugliness, and the resilience of the forms that inhabit transitional spaces. I am interested in the clash between high art, the traditional cliché, and the Australian obsession of the representation of the landscape. My work embraces a deadpan realism, and a parody of marks to embrace the post digital process. For me, this describes the tension between humans, technology, and nature, and creates a discourse within art history.’
Artist Statement, Brett Ferry

‘Ferry’s art is a twofold endeavour, depicting not only the truth and beauty of nature as it struggles to survive, but also a questioning of the psychology of its reception. Filtering his own experience of landscape through a process of documentation, digital manipulation and eventual painterly reproduction, Ferry aims to ‘create a dialogue between tradition and technology using the tools of our time. In the end the act of painting for me is one of labour, time, struggle and contemplation’
Excerpt from Phe Luxford‘s Flora Obscura catalogue essay, 2019

Brett Ferry has completed a Bachelor of Fine Art Printmaking at Victorian College of the Arts, and a Diploma of Education at The University of Melbourne.
He has been a finalist in the Bayside Art Prize (2017) and winner of the Roi Art Prize (2020). Ferry first exhibited with FLG during our annual emerging artist exhibition, Exploration 18, and was subsequently signed on to the gallery stable in the same year. His work is held in the collections of the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne Library and Maurice Blackburn Pty Ltd amongst others.

CATALOGUE ESSAY

Flora Obscura, by Phe Luxford 2019

DOWNLOAD BIO / CV (PDF)