LYNDELL BROWN / CHARLES GREEN

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One of Australia’s landmark collaborative artistic duos, LYNDELL BROWN and CHARLES GREEN have worked together since 1989. A fundamental characteristic of Brown & Green's work is their bravura compositions, painted with astonishing trompe l’oeil methods. Created through the layering, modifying and copying of found images, the artists select their source material specifically for its visual charge and historical context. Art, culture, and turmoil are three large, related themes that reoccur in their work. Brown and Green make art for our troubled world.

Cosmopolitanism, the concept of a global, communal culture, is significant to Brown & Green’s collaboration. This is why their sophisticated quotation of found images are drawn from a rich archive of world visual history. They have painted the Apollo 11 moon landing from NASA’s documentation images since the late 1990s, an iconic example of human effort and performance. The artists are interested in both iconic and specific expressions of human culture. Many reappearing symbols and snapshots are selected from the artists personal family history or travels they have made to important historical sites. 

The duo was an inspired choice for Official War Artists, appointed in 2007 to document the complex conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Brown & Green are conscious of the tensions between documenting and representing, both being crucial to historical connections that they are making and that others have not seen before. For these artists, there is no singular event in history, and this is evident in their powerful, constructed tableaus. Brown and Green are interested in addressing the most difficult problems that face humanity. In their profound art they preserve a role for the “fragile emotional vision” of art and culture among the cascade of catastrophic turbulence.

In their most recent work, their response to 2020 is coupled with images of distance and atmospheric tension, hopelessness and hope. All evoked through their signature, fragmented style with history pinned in place by our contemporary world-shift. Uniquely qualified to tackle this seismic moment in global history, Brown & Green have created the strongest and most thoughtful response to our fraught times yet seen in Australian art. As they say: “we have always painted paintings of the past surviving into the present.”

Biography:

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green they have held more than 40 solo exhibitions and have been included in more than 50 curated exhibitions. Their work has been included in a number of museum surveys and they are represented in all of Australia’s significant public art collections and institutions, including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, the Australian War Memorial, as well as in many major private collections in Australia and overseas. Charles Green is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Melbourne and Lyndell Green is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

In 2007, they were Australia’s Official War Artists, deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and between 2011 and 2019 worked on a follow-up project in collaboration with artist Jon Cattapan (assisted by two Australian Research Council Discovery Grants) about the aftermath of Australia’s wars since Vietnam, which the three artists exhibited in Melbourne across two galleries in late 2014, accompanied by a book (Framing Conflict: Contemporary War and Aftermath, Macmillan, 2014). In 2017 Brown and Green were commissioned to design a major tapestry, Morning Star, woven by the Australian Tapestry Workshop, to celebrate the opening of the Sir John Monash Centre at Villers-Bretonneaux, France.

Brown’s and Green’s art has been written on extensively. For writing on the artists and more information, visit the artists’ website.

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i Blair French, ‘Tranquillity,’ in Natasha Bullock (ed.), Tranquillity, Exh. Cat., Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2005, p. 4.
ii Andrew Stephens, ‘Once were witnesses,’ A2, The Age Newspaper, Saturday 26.11.2008.