Lloyd Rees: Life and Light

Queensland Art Gallery Director Tony Ellwood said ‘Lloyd Rees: Life and Light’ would show in the Xstrata Coal Queensland Artists’ Gallery and feature more than 100 works created throughout the artist’s distinguished career, including a strong focus on his early drawings of Brisbane.

‘Incorporating portraits, landscapes and street scenes made in Australia and abroad and several of his late mature landscape paintings, ‘Life and Light’ traces the evolution of this important Queensland-born artist’s talent for depicting light and its effects.

‘The exhibition, drawn primarily from the Gallery’s holdings, includes an extensive set of Rees’s early Brisbane drawings recently gifted to the Gallery’s Collection from the artist’s son and daughter-in-law, Alan and Jan Rees.’

Mr Ellwood said Lloyd Rees received the Wynne Prize for landscape painting in 1950 and again in 1982 for his work, which often focused on the effects of light in its varying forms.

‘The exhibition charts Rees’s career both chronologically and by subject matter. Included are early selfportraits and figure studies, some of which appear to have been made from sculptures now in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection.

‘Brisbane interiors, street scenes and river views feature prominently, along with landscapes and other observations of nature and a series of watercolours, oils and etchings inspired by his time in Spain, Italy, France and Greece.

‘Later works include a suite of lithographs from 1980 depicting Caloola, Rees’s beloved beach house retreat in coastal New South Wales and the stunning Manton Prize-winning The sunlit tower 1986, described by the artist as a “visionary” work, on account of his failing eyesight at the time he executed it,’ Mr Ellwood said.

Lloyd Rees was born in Brisbane in 1895. He died in Tasmania in 1988.

Accompanying the exhibition is a sketchbook-style publication which will be the only book on Rees’s work in print, Lloyd Rees: Early Brisbane Drawings, available from the Gallery Store and australianartbooks.com.au

For more information on ‘Lloyd Rees: Life and Light’ visit www.qag.qld.gov.au