The works of renowned Australian landscape painter Steve Lopes are the subject of a solo exhibition, ‘Island of Misfits’, at Mitchell Fine Art Gallery in Brisbane. The exhibition gets it title from Lopes’ long endured fascination with the culture of migration in Australia and particularly those who chose to move to Oceania over the last 100 years. With an extensive and prolific history in the Australian art scene, Lopes’ art enchants spectators with a well-refined and unique vision of the Australian environment, and the people that call it home.
Steve Lopes, Island of Misfits Study II, oil on board, 34 x 47cm. Courtesy the artist and Mitchell Fine Art, Brisbane
The artist’s fascinating focus on Australia is formed by his curiosity as to why people would have left the comfort of the familiar in search of the foreign lands of Australia and New Zealand, especially during earlier times when the countries had just been established. This compelling viewpoint has led the artist to create works that explore peculiar imagined environments and the interesting characters that live there. Lopes gives his characters the allusion of being both exotic and intrinsic to the surrounding landscapes. This has become a signature trope for the artist, who uses an unrefined and painterly brush stroke to give his natural settings a feeling of raw emotion and fantasy. Yet the characters of these lands are painted with sublime, realistic detail as seen in the painting, Votive Figure. Here Lopes paints a man lying down on a natural cliff-top with panoramic views of the water.
Steve Lopes, Votive Figure, oil on canvas, 78 x 78cm. Courtesy the artist and Mitchell Fine Art, Brisbane
The pairing of landscape and figure is a perfect example of the artist’s mismatched aesthetic that is rooted in a dream-like sense of unreality.
Mitchell Fine Art
Until 1 July, 2017
Queensland
