Lee Trewartha
I am an artist based in Central Victoria, Australia, working across painting, drawing, and assemblage. My practice moves between figuration and abstraction, using landscape and the natural world as a way to explore atmosphere, memory, and immersive spatial experience.
Much of my work is informed by an ongoing investigation into the Baroque, particularly the concept of bel composto — the integration of light, space, material, and sensation into a unified whole. I am interested in how light can function not only as illumination, but as a structural force capable of shaping environments that feel contemplative, immersive, and emotionally charged.
Through layered mark-making, erasure, and tonal shifts, forms emerge and dissolve within the surface. Foliage, reflection, shadow, and sculptural elements often hover between revelation and concealment, allowing ambiguity to remain active within the work. Whether working in monochrome or luminous colour, I aim to create spaces that invite slow looking and sensory engagement.
Ultimately, my practice explores how vision itself can become spatial, how painting can operate as an atmosphere to enter, rather than simply an image to observe.
Education
I am an artist based in Central Victoria, Australia, with a practice spanning painting, drawing, and assemblage. I hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts with First Class Honours and have undertaken PhD studies, reflecting a long-standing engagement with both studio practice and academic research.
Over the past two decades, I have exhibited throughout Australia and internationally, with works held in private collections and galleries in both Australia and Indonesia. My work has been recognised in several major national art prizes, including the Blake Prize and Blake Prize Director’s Cut, the John Coburn Emerging Artist Award, the Tattersalls Landscape Prize, the Hawkesbury Art Prize, the Kennedy Art Prize, and the inaugural Eckersley Art Prize.
Alongside my exhibition practice, I have received the National Gallery Trustees Award, research scholarships, and international travel grants through La Trobe University. My work has also been featured in publications including Australian Art Collector, Monument Magazine, Australian House and Garden, Vogue Loves (online), and the Herald Sun.
Acknowledgment of traditional owners.
We would like to pay our respects to the traditional owners of the land on which our building stands, their leaders, past, present and emerging.