'I've always loved the ambiguity of paranoia in a beautiful setting.'
Since 2001, Fiona Lowry’s practice has explored the complexity of the human condition. Through the use of airbrushed pastels and monochromatic colour palettes, Lowry’s images maintain an overarching softness and ambiguity. This aesthetic serves to complement and enhance the deeply emotive undertones such as vulnerability, melancholia and danger that remain pervasive within her work.
Lowry’s paintings of the Australian landscape portray the bush as strangely beautiful, alluring and steadfast. Rendered in vibrant, dreamlike colours and made nebulous by the artist’s distinctive airbrush technique, nature is majestically stark yet also complex, imbued with a sense of foreboding and menace. Her paintings present the natural environment as a dreamlike, surreal theatre to events associated with interventions of the human kind – deeds or misdeeds that infiltrate and permeate the scene with a profound unease that extends its grip to paranoia and the psychotic.
Winner of the Archibald Prize, Moran Portrait Prize, and Fleurieu Landscape Prize, Lowry's work is also held in several public, university, and corporate Australian collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Artbank, Sydney; Macquarie Bank, Sydney; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; UBS, Sydney; and The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane.