BUSH, STEPHEN (1958-)

“The Mine” (1978)
Oil on canvas
75 x 102cm
Signed on verso
*exhibited at RMIT, Melbourne
*private collection, Adelaide
 
Bush is internationally renowned as the artist of sublime, cryptic works that seek to confound and provoke through their incongruous juxtaposition of elements and tantalisingly playful repetition of motifs. He completed his BA Fine Art at RMIT in 1976-79. He began work as a professional artist in the early 1980s, with large Industrial-inspired landscapes, in a style reminiscent of Jeffrey Smart and Tim Storrier. In 1984 he travelled throughout the USA. In the early 1990s he shifted focus to producing paintings inspired by 19th-century European and American landscape art. He painted post-colonial frontiersmen and log cabins in dramatic settings. The theatricality parodies art history conventions. More recently Bush has combined abstract areas of paint poured onto the canvas with realist imagery but in high-keyed pop colours. Bush’s visual language is inventive and increasingly pop-oriented while continuing to refer to traditional genres such as alpine landscape painting. He has exhibited widely and his works are represented in most National Galleries and important private collections, including the NGV and Art Gallery of NSW. He is widely regarded as one of the most collectable Australian Contemporary artists. This impressive work is one of Bush's earliest paintings, believed to have been produced as a major work at RMIT.