About
Martin George (b. 1993, Sydney) is an artist from Melbourne working in painting and drawing. He has an experimental and lighthearted approach to making art, informed by inventive artists like Paul Klee. Martin is interested in painting and drawing being generative for new ideas, like a notebook or diary. Checkered patterning and simplified forms are commonly seen is his work, which he repeats and reconfigures to create new meanings. Over time, Martin has constructed an imagined world that continues to evolve with each work.
‘Relatively simple & breezy in painterly handling, sly in their apparent nonchalance, summary & graphic in their investigation of figure & ground, harking back to a reductive yet playful early modernism…’ — Random (re)View, October 2022
Martin has been exhibiting since 2016, the year he graduated from RMIT with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours and held his first solo exhibition at Fort Delta in Melbourne. In 2017 he completed a residency at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, spending time in California and New York which informed new directions in his work, leading to two major exhibitions in Melbourne at NKN Gallery (2018) and Haydens (2019). In 2022–23, Martin lived and worked in Rotterdam for fourteen months, producing a body of work that was shown at Bempostinha, Lisbon (2023), and later at Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne the same year.
His paintings have been shortlisted for several Australian art prizes including the Bayside Painting Prize (2024; 2021; 2019), Churchie Emerging Art Prize (2020), Redland Art Awards (2018) and the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize (2017).
Represented by
Nicholas Thompson Gallery
155 Langridge Street, Collingwood VIC 3066
Contact
martingeorge1993@gmail.com