‘Shapes For Gods’

Shapes For Gods, 2023, 122 x 91 cm, oil on canvas

Media release –

Exhibition @ Mitchell Fine Art  – Brisbane

10 October – 4 November 2023

“One of the abiding features of Lopes’ work is its powerful humanism. He is interested in the everyday rather than the exceptional. He tries to get under the skin of a place by looking at the way ordinary people go about their daily activities.” 

John McDonald, Australia’s leading art critic, April 2022

Over the past 25 years, Steve Lopes has had more than 45 solo exhibitions across Australia and around the world. In 2022, his touring survey show, ‘Encountered’, with accompanying book, was held at Sydney’s SH Ervin Gallery and toured to Orange Regional Gallery to great acclaim. Lopes has been awarded numerous art prizes, including the Gallipoli Art Award and the prestigious King’s School Art Prize. His work is held in numerous institutions, including the National Gallery of Australia and Parliament House Canberra.

In this new series, Lopes thinks deeply about the world around him and excitedly tries to express it visually. These ambitious new works aim to show people in the natural world now, with their new realities and accompanying paraphernalia. The artist himself says; “Sometimes the figure is stripped bare, sometimes totally absent, leaving behind only remnants of their existence. I am trying to capture and reveal the secrets and stories behind these eclectic subjects through their connections to objects, icons and their encompassing surroundings.”

The paintings are colourful, free and unafraid. Filled with curiosity, the artist’s growing fluency aims to bridge worlds between reality and memory, and to reveal a strange, difficult truth both materially and subliminally through paint. 

Lopes’s figurative works are uniquely his own, with a sought-after, highly recognisable style. These new works have a life of their own, and with each work comes a rush of great perception and insight.

Register your interest @www.mitchellfineartgallery.com

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