Karen Woodbury Gallery is very pleased to announce the representation of acclaimed artist Lionel Bawden in Melbourne. Lionel Bawden is an Australian artist working in sculpture, performance, installation and painting. Bawden’s core practice exploits hexagonal coloured pencils as a sculptural material, reconfigured and carved into amorphous shapes, mining the material’s rich qualities of colour, geometry and metaphor. Bawden explores themes of flux, rhythm and repetition as preconditions to our experience of the physical world, essential  to the construction of identity. Bawden’s sculptural works harness landscape as a stand-in for the body, personal themes of desire, longing and interconnection become abstracted in a generative process to create form.

Bawden was recipient of the 2009 Art Omi International Artist Residency, New York, USA, (through Art Omi Australia committee) and the 2003 Creative New Zealand residency at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand, creating the exhibition ‘the spring tune’. In 2005 Bawden shared a 3-month Red Gate Gallery artist residency, Beijing . Bawden was the recipient of the 2009 Wynne Prize, through the Art Gallery of NSW and the 2004 ABN Amro Emerging Artist Award, Sydney.

Lionel Bawden has exhibited in over 40 group exhibitions including: Curious Colony- A twenty first century Wunderkammer, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle (2010); SOME THING IN THE AIR- collage and assemblage in Canberra region art, Canberra Museum and Gallery, A.C.T. (2010); Zhongjian: Midway, a Wollongong City Gallery project at Yuan Center of Art Beijing, China (2009); I walk the line: new Australian drawing, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2009); Beijing International Art Biennale, China (2008); The Roving Eye, Gigantic Artspace, New York (2006); Un-Australian, Anna Bibby Gallery, Auckland (2005); True Love, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2004, Colour, Queensland Art Gallery, 2003 and The National Sculpture Prize, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2001.

Lionel is widely represented in corporate and public collections that include: Artbank, Newcastle Region Gallery, Queensland Art Gallery, National Gallery of Australia, Macquarie Bank Collection, Queensland, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand, in addition to many significant private collections in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and America.

Karen Woodbury Gallery has a range of selected work by Lionel in the gallery available to view by appointment.