Stewart MacFarlane
Image: Peter Lamant
“Art is an attempt at making sense of a world that makes no sense.”
Stewart MacFarlane (born November 1953 in Adelaide) is one of Australia’s most compelling figurative painters. He is renowned for his psychologically charged realism, saturated colour and cinematic use of light. Following his early studies at the South Australian School of Art, he relocated to New York to complete a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in 1977. During this period, he worked as a studio assistant to Alex Katz, Chuck Close and Janet Fish, and participated in residencies at Skowhegan, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the MacDowell Colony.
Since returning to Australia in the 1980s, MacFarlane has exhibited widely across Australia, Asia, Europe and the USA, holding more than fifty solo exhibitions. His works, held in collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, often depict solitary figures in charged, ambiguous environments that hint at unfinished dramas, hidden tensions or the erotic undertow of everyday life. With their cinematic mood and narrative suggestion, his paintings explore themes of identity, isolation, and aspiration, producing images that feel simultaneously familiar and unsettling.
Works by the artist
