New Paintings: Intimate Portraits of the Cudgegong River

Achieving significant success in a few short years after having been a finalist in a number of important art prizes, Rowen Matthews’s paintings have been exceptionally well-received by collectors, curators and public gallery directors. As Peter Haynes, Director, ACT Museums & Galleries has noted:

“For Rowen Matthews the Romantic era provides a philosophical base from which he has ventured on his own highly individual path. The landscape as pictorialised in the 19thC may provide historical precedent but it is the land as encountered in an Australian context which has spurred his creative impulses to make something individual and independent from its ostensible sources… For him the painted surface is as alive, moving and pulsating as the motif (here a range of places/sites that he has visited) which instigated his imaginative responsive… His paint is thick and palpable, its existence as an entity in itself never in question, and the viewers’ awareness of this clearly achieved. His canvases are amalgams of sensations and impressions promulgated both by his confrontation with his landscape motifs and his need to communicate the physical activity of painting and the metaphysical meditations that arise from that activity.” (extract from catalogue essay, “Weatherscapes”, April 2010).

Encouraged by the success of his sell-out solo show at the New England Regional Art Museum in 2000, and his subsequent inclusion in a survey exhibition of New England artists in 2004, Matthews commenced painting full-time in 2007. He has enjoyed considerable success in the subsequent years, including several solo shows in NSW , and participating in group shows, and art prizes, culminating in his being awarded the prestigious Calleen Art Award in 2009 at the Cowra Regional Art Gallery. Rowen’s work is held in private collections throughout Australia, Germany, Norway, the UK and the USA .

This will be Rowen’s second solo show with the gallery, and one which is keenly awaited by our collectors!