GARRY SHEAD
Colloquy with John Keats
wins the 2004 Dobell Prize for Drawing

announced at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

 
On 20 August 2004, the announcement was made at the Art Gallery of New South Wales that GARRY SHEAD had won the 2004 Dobell Prize for Drawing for his diptych Colloquy with John Keats.

Garry Shead was awarded $20,000 for winning this prestigious prize and his work was automatically acquired for the Art Gallery of New South Wales' permanent collection.

Born in Sydney, Garry Shead studied at the National Art School in the early 1960s. He was an editor, cartoonist, film maker and scenic artist with ABC television before his solo exhibition with Watters Gallery in Sydney in 1966. Since then he has had over fifty solo exhibitions and has taken part in more than seventy group exhibitions including 13 Archibald Prize exhibitions. He won the Archibald Prize in 1993 with his portrait of Tom Thompson.

Garry Shead spent six months living in Paris in 1973. In the early 1980s he spent time in France, Spain, Italy and Holland. During a residency at the Karolyi Foundation, in Vence in southern France, he met his future wife, the Hungarian sculptor Judith Englert, and he subsequently spent a year with her in Budapest before returning to Australia. They eventually settled at the coastal community of Bundeena, south of Sydney, in 1987. During the late 1980s Garry Shead's painting style and his interest in a group of subjects crystallized with the Bundeena paintings and DH Lawrence series.

IMAGE: Garry Shead, Colloquy with John Keats 2004.
2 Panels, 161 x 121cm. Ink on paper. � Garry Shead.