CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Elizabeth Barnett

Upcoming Exhibitions

Abundance: The Pleasure of Plenty

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Elizabeth Barnett’s vibrant still life paintings introduce exotic and visually compelling botanicals to domestic scenes of treasured objects, books and furniture. This introduction gives new dimension to Barnett’s intimate still life scenes. Her subjects do not sit flat upon the canvas, but instead reach up from it, enlivened by the wild and natural world. This liveliness belies the ‘stillness’ of still life painting and along with Barnett’s painterly gestures of shadow, line and colour creates a visual dynamism that reaches beyond tradition. Barnett’s revisioning of tradition, similarly plays to perceptions of domesticity and daily life. Far from a sense of duty or routine, there is an implicit celebration of the everyday in Barnett’s work. In a bustling cosmopolitan world Barnett draws her viewer into scenes of daily life at her Macedon studio and its bushland surrounds, offering a gentle and wondrous escape.

Elizabeth Barnett studied a Bachelor of Fine Arts Printmaking at The Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne 2002-2004; Bachelor Fine Arts Honours – Printmaking, RMIT, Melbourne, 2006; and a Masters of Arts- Illustration, Camberwell College of Art, London, 2008-2009.

Barnett was awarded the Collie Print Trust scholarship at the Australian Print Workshop in 2006. In 2010 Barnett founded Schoolhouse Studios Inc with Alice Glenn in 2010, a not-for-profit artist studios complex in the former St. Joseph’s Technical College in Abbotsford.

She has been a finalist in the Hawkesbury Art Prize 2021, the Eutick Still Life Award 2019, the Ravenswood Women’s Art Prize 2017. In 2022 she collaborated with Review and Nancy Bird and in 2021 was featured in Amber Creswell Bell’s Thames & Hudson publication, Still Life: Contemporary Australian Painters. Barnett is a Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial committee member and project producer.

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