New Paintings
- Peter Churcher

Peter Churcher is a leading Australian figurative and portraiture painter, who currently lives and works in Barcelona, Spain. Australian Galleries, Melbourne is delighted to welcome Peter Churcher back to Australia for his upcoming exhibition, ‘New Paintings’. Featuring a selection of new figurative and still life works, these exceptional paintings showcase Churcher’s dedicated exploration of beauty in the physical and natural world.

‘My last exhibition focused on the theme of the figure under running water and behind the veil of the shower screen. This exhibition begins with a group of works continuing the idea of viewing the subject through a veiled screen and moves on to more recent themes I have been exploring, such as the figures in the landscape and the still life.

The veiled screen between myself, the painter, or between the viewer and the subject, creates an intermediary plane which diffuses much of the detail, setting the subject back into a more mysterious world ‘on the other side’. After working with this theme I decided to lift the veiling screen and bring the figure back into clear view, but this time also set into a other world, that of the landscape. With the landscape setting, the veiling effect continues, with imagery such as dappled light and foliage creating another sort of ‘screen’. It is the intention of these veiled settings to heighten the voyeuristic nature of the viewer’s role; peering through the screen of a shower, or a mesh of foliage, into the world the subject is inhabiting.

Finally in this exhibition is a group of still lifes, where I move away from the figure entirely and the inanimate object takes the protagonist role in the painting. Always a painter primarily of the figure, it is a nice diversion to attempt to imbue a painterly drama of light falling across objects with no human figure present at all.’

 – Peter Churcher, 2023