WARREN, GUY (1921 - )

"Grey Green Figure" (1974) 
oil on cotton
177.5 x 94cm
signed upper left
*Estate of the late Pro Hart, Bonhams 2007
*private collection, Sydney
 
Warren is an award-winning Australian Abstract Expressionist. He served with the Australian army in New Guinea during the Second World War & subsequently studied at East Sydney Technical College under the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Training Scheme, established to assist returned servicemen, alongside artists including Tuckson and Bert Flugelman. His war-time experiences with the people & jungles of New Guinea became fodder for recurring imagery in his work. Travelling to London in 1951 with his wife Joy, Warren undertook further training at the London School of Art and Central School of Arts & Crafts & spent eight years there before returning to Australia. In the 1970s he purchased 50 acres of land at Jamberoo, on the South Coast of NSW, & built a shack from local timber. He has visited there regularly over the past five decades, absorbing the rainforest landscape which provides an ongoing source of personal energy & inspiration for his work. Warren has said: ‘My paintings frequently shift between the figurative & the abstract as they experiment with the placement of figures in a landscape. My themes are mythology and the metaphors we construct… to make sense of man in nature – and, equally, the presence of nature in man.’ Warren won the Archibald Prize in 1985 with a portrait of Flugelman and has been a finalist in the Sulman, Wynne and Dobell Prizes several times. He was awarded the Wynne’s Trustees’ Watercolour Prize in 1979. He received the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in 1999 and the Australia Medal (AM) in 2013.