IMANTS TILLERS | FINALIST in The Hadley's Art prize, Hobart

📍 Hadley's Art Prize, Hadley's Orient Hotel, Tasmania

📆 1 August - 23 August, 2026

Judges: Abdul Abdullah, Judith Ryan AM and Sarah Wallace.

Congratulations to TILLERS for his selection as a finalist in the Hadley's Art Prize. TILLERS was selected for his painting, 'Pikilyi', created by him as a celebration of the late Walpiri elder, Michael Nelson Jagamara, with whom he collaborated on several major projects.

Worth $100,000 the acquisitive prize will awarded ‘for the best portrayal of the Australian landscape’.

IMAGES:

1. TILLERS, 𝘗𝘪𝘬𝘪𝘭𝘺𝘪, 2026, synthetic polymer paint, gouache on 16 canvasboards, 101.6 x 142.2 cm.

IMANTS TILLERS | FINALIST in Mandorla Art Award, 2026.

Imants Tillers in front of Kangaroo Blank 1988. Photo credit: Janie Barrett.

Mandorla Art Award, 2026.

📍Holmes a Court Gallery, 10 Douglas St, Gooyaman, West Perth.

📆 9th -30th May 2026

Congratulations to IMANTS TILLERS for his selection as a finalist in this year’s Mandorla Art Award. The prize invites Australian contemporary artists to engage with a biblical text and contribute to the cultural life of Australia. Selected by judges Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Anna Davis and Dr Glenn Morrison, artists were asked to respond to the theme of ‘What is Truth?’. The finalists’ artworks will be exhibited at Holmes a Court Gallery in Gooyaman, West Perth.

IMANTS TILLERS & JANET LAURENCE featured in HOLDING GROUND at S.H. Ervin Gallery

HOLDING GROUND, curated by Gavin Wilson, investigates how the places we live in sustain the fragile web of life, and how local landscapes shape cultural identity, ecological awareness and human connection. With artists drawn from Sydney, Blue Mountains, Northern Rivers and regional NSW, the exhibition offers perspectives shaped by rural, coastal and non-metropolitan environments, while also reflecting on urban development, environmental stewardship and our relationship to land and water.

Artworks by IMANTS TILLERS, widely recognised as one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, feature alongside Sydney-based artist JANET LAURENCE, whose internationally recognised practice engages with ecology, environment and place. They are joined by a diverse group of established and emerging artists whose work reflects deep engagement with landscape, land use and lived experience across New South Wales.

The exhibition runs at S.H. Ervin Gallery until Sunday 3 May 2026.

PAT BRASSINGTON & IMANTS TILLERS feature in A Moment in Time - Collecting Contemporary at Geelong Gallery

PAT BRASSINGTON & IMANTS TILLERS feature in the current exhibition A Moment in Time—Collecting Contemporary at Geelong Gallery.

The show celebrates works acquired over the last decade through the fundraising efforts of Geelong Contemporary, one of the Gallery’s key support groups. Since its establishment in 2016, Geelong Contemporary has focussed on acquiring works by Australian artists working across diverse media, whose works reflect the issues of our times.

The exhibition continues until Sunday 15 Feb 2026.

IMANTS TILLERS features in Memo Magazine

IMANTS TILLERS features in the latest issue of the Memo Magazine in Keith Broadfoot's captivating essay "Crossing the Divide: Von Guérard after Tillers."

Exploring the relationship between Von Guérard's 1863 painting 'North-East View from the Northern Top of Mount Kosciusko' and Tillers 1985 painting 'Mount Analogue', Broadfoot highlights that 'the original and the copy have been placed side by side for the very first time' in the current exhibition 'A Bigger View' at the Home of the Arts (HOTA).

Keith Broadfoot, Memo Magazine, Issue 4, Summer 2025. 'Crossing the Divide: Von Guérard after Tillers', pg 44 - 51.

IMANTS TILLERS - Upcoming International Exhibition

UPCOMING EXHIBITION

IMANTS TILLERS: Fierce Paradise; Conversations with Aboriginal Art

In his most significant international retrospective exhibition since ‘Journey to Nowhere’ IMANTS TILLERS presents ‘Fierce Paradise,’ an exhibition of works spanning five decades, including a number of collaborative works with Warlpiri Elder Michael Nelson Jagamara AM.

Co-curated by Museum director, Hubert Sawatzki and Isidore Tillers, the exhibition highlights Imants Tillers’ ongoing exploration of identity, displacement and locality, as well as his longstanding interest in Australian Aboriginal Art and its possible connections to his own experience as a member of the Latvian Diaspora.

’Fierce Paradise’ will include a selection of paintings by Indigenous artists from the personal collection of the Tillers family including works from Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Michael Nelson Jagamara, Sue Elliott and Peter Pijaju Skipper and Sam Tjapanangka. Tillers has also created several new works specifically for the exhibition.

📍 Museum im Schafstall, Neuenstadt am Kocher, Baden Württemberg, Germany
🗓️ 26 October 2025 – 31 May 2026

IMANTS TILLERS Awarded the Order of the Three Stars

We are thrilled to share that Imants Tillers has been awarded Latvia’s highest national honour. Last Sunday, 4 May, at Riga Castle, Tillers was presented with the Three Stars Award by the President of Latvia, Edgars Rinkēvičs, and the Chapter of Orders. This award acknowledges exceptional service to the nation, including in the field of culture. 

This prestigious award recognises Tillers’ outstanding contributions to contemporary art and his enduring connection to Latvia, expressed through a deeply poetic and conceptual practice that spans five decades.

With over 100 solo exhibitions since the late 1960s, Tillers has represented Australia at major international events, including the São Paulo Biennial in 1975, Documenta 7 in 1982, and the 42nd Venice Biennale in 1986. Tillers is one of Australia’s most significant and internationally recognised artists. His work weaves personal and cultural histories, with a sustained focus on themes of diaspora, displacement, memory, and belonging—narratives that profoundly resonate with the Latvian experience.

IMANTS TILLERS Artist Talk @ Bundanon Trust

ARTIST TALK SUNDAY

In NSW this weekend, Imants Tillers is giving an artist talk at Bundanon.

Tillers will be in conversation with Sophie O’Brien (Head of Curatorial & Learning, Bundanon), exploring the cultural landscape for young Australian artists in the 1980s, both here and internationally.

In 1984, Tillers was one of three young artists in the exhibition An Australian Accent, presented at MoMA PS1, New York. Also including the work of Mike Parr and Ken Unsworth, the exhibition was one of several to articulate new Australian art to an international audience.

Tillers’ incredible painting ‘Pataphysical man’ (1984), from the collection of the AGNSW, is currently on display at Bundanon Art Museum as part of the group exhibition ‘Wilder Times: Arthur Boyd and the mid-1980s landscape’. ⁠

Tickets available here >

Imants Tillers: In Conversation
📅 Sunday, 6 October, 11am-12pm
📍 Bundanon, 170 Riversdale Road, Illaroo

IMANTS TILLERS featured in 'A Bigger View' at HOTA, Gold Coast

IMANTS TILLERS' iconic 1985 painting Mount Analogue is on display in A Bigger View at HOTA on the Gold Coast. Made possible through the Australian Government’s Sharing the National Collection initiative, this exhibition brings monumental works of art from the National Gallery of Australia to Queensland, where it will be on display for two years.

Mount Analogue has travelled with David Hockney's piece, A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998). These two works will be on display with major works from Bridget Riley, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori and William Robinson from HOTA's Collection.

IMANTS TILLERS' Pataphysical man (1984) on display Bundanon Trust

IMANTS TILLERS' magnificent Pataphysical man (1984) is currently featured in Wilder Times: Arthur Boyd and the Mid-1980s Landscape at Bundanon Trust.

Responding to fourteen powerful paintings by Arthur Boyd, WILDER TIMES brings together over 60 works by seminal Australian artists from the same time Boyd created this momentous body of work. The exhibition provides a window into a period of cultural dynamism in Australia, when ideas of landscape, land ownership and environmental protection were actively interrogated.

The exhibition continues until 13 October 2024.

IMAGE: Wilder Times: Arthur Boyd and the Mid-1980s Landscape. Installation view. Bundanon, 2024. Photography: Courtesy of Bundanon / Zan Wimberley

IMANTS TILLERS Reviewed by John McDonald in the Sydney Morning Herald

'Imants Tillers: The Mosman Years' has been reviewed by John McDonald in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Imants Tillers: The Mosman Years looks at the works produced from 1981-89, when the artist and his family lived on Sydney's North Shore. Tillers started to experiment with small, store-bought canvas boards that could be laid side-by-side, like tiles, to create wall-sized compositions.

The survey exhibition continues until Sunday 4 Feb at Mosman Art Gallery

Photo: Jacquie Manning

'Imants Tillers: The Mosman Years' opens at Mosman Art Gallery

Today marks the opening of 'IMANTS TILLERS: THE MOSMAN YEARS' curated by Kelly McDonald at the Mosman Art Gallery in Sydney.

The exhibition explores the pivotal moment in the 1980s when Tillers began creating large-scale canvasboard paintings while living in a small Federation duplex in Mosman. IMANTS TILLERS: THE MOSMAN YEARS features 25 works from the last four decades, and will include the first canvasboard work Tillers ever created in 1981.

Imants Tillers, View, 1989, oilstick, gouache, synthetic polymer paint on 72 canvasboards, nos. 21007–21078 228.6 x 304.8 cm Private collection

Imants Tillers awarded the University of Sydney's 2023 Alumni Award

Congratulations to Imants Tillers who has been awarded the University of Sydney's 2023 Alumni Award for Cultural Contribution. Awarded to alumni who have achieved excellence in the arts, culture or creative sectors, it recognises those whose efforts have promoted the understanding and values of cultural diversity.

Though he was studying architecture, Tillers was drawn to the arts and the culture around the newly-formed Tin Sheds galleries. The style he developed in this period has made him one of Australia's most recognisable post-modern artists.

Tillers recent exhibition at ARC ONE Gallery ‘After De Chirico’ explored a relationship which transcends the usual definitions of homage and influence. Maintaining an intimacy with the work of Giorgio de Chirico over five decades, Tillers interest in de Chirico is spurred on not only by the early so-called ‘metaphysical’ paintings that made him legendary amongst the early Surrealist artists, but also the once-controversial, much reviled ‘late’ paintings.

IMANTS TILLERS 'Credo' reviewed in Artist Profile

IMANTS TILLERS’ selected essays ‘Credo’ is reviewed by Brooke Boland in the newest issue of ARTIST PROFILE:

‘The recycling, mosaic-like, pieced together nature of Tillers’s practice is similar to the pieced together feeling of his new collection of essays, ‘Credo’, 2023, published by Giramondo Publishing. “Everything exists to end up in a book,” he quotes the French poet Mallarme in this essay “Journey to Nowhere,” 2018. Tillers’s various essays and contributions to journals including Art & Text, Art and Australia, and Heat, among others, art no exception.” – Brooke Boland on ‘Credo’ in Artists Profile

Pick up a copy of Credo when visiting Tillers’ new exhibition AFTER DE CHIRICO at ARC ONE Gallery.

IMANTS TILLERS 'Thrown into the World' Documentary Screening

SPECIAL CINEMA EVENT

Please join Art Atlas for an exclusive screening of the feature-length documentary 'Thrown into the World', directed by Antra Cilinska of Juris Podnieks Studio , which offers unique insight into Tilers’ creative proces and cross-cultural identity.

See the documentary at Kino Cinemas in the CBD, before heading across to ARC ONE to view Tillers' current exhibition 'After de Chirico'. Bookings essential (see below for details)

DATE: Wednesday 31st May
TIME: 10am for a 10.30am start
VENUE: Kino Cinema , 45 Collins St, Melbourne BOOKING: Places are strictly limited. Please book via this link to reserve your ticket: htps:/www.trybooking.com/CIFUU

IMANTS TILLERS - After De Chirico Exhibition Opening & Artist Talk

OPENING THIS AFTERNOON

IMANTS TILLERS: AFTER DE CHIRICO opens at ARC ONE Gallery today, Saturday 27 May, 3-5pm.

In a relationship that transcends the usual definitions of homage and influence, Imants Tillers has maintained an intimacy with the work of Giorgio de Chirico over five decades.

Please join us for an artists talk with Ian McLean and Clare Fuery-Jones on Tillers, de Chirico and the nature of influence and homage in his work.

IMANTS TILLERS in 'Photography and the Performative'

Imants Tillers has a fascinating work comprised of 189 Polaroid images that is now on display at 'Photography and the Performative' exhibition at the Chau Chak Wing Museum in Sydney curated by Katrina Liberiou.

'If I close my eyes' (2021) is a conceptual work comprises Polaroids made between 1980 and 1982. Tillers documented those he encountered, asking his sitters to close their eyes. Interspersed with these portraits are landscape scenes depicting the view from his flat overlooking Sirius Cove.

IMANTS TILLERS, [details from:] If I close my eyes, 2021, 189 Polaroids 1980–1982, nos. 112966–113161, 10.7 x 8.9 cm (each); 75 x 239 cm (overall). Collection: University of Sydney

IMANTS TILLERS presenting at The Bendigo Writers Festival

BENDIGO WRITERS FESTIVAL

Today and tomorrow (5-6 May 2023), IMANTS TILLERS is speaking at two events at the Bendigo Writers Festival.

Catch Tillers with art historian Ian McLean on the topic of 'Art and Influence', today at 1PM.

Tomorrow at 3PM, Tillers will join botanist Tim Entwisle and festival director Rosemary Sorensen as they discuss the significance of 'Influence and Inspiration' in their careers.

IMANTS TILLERS 'Credo' Reviewed in the Canberra Times & Saturday Paper

Imants Tillers' ‘Credo’ was reviewed by Sasha Grishin in The Canberra Times and Miriam Cosic in The Saturday Paper last Sat 18 Feb.

“Now aged in his early 70s, there is a distilled wisdom in his late pronouncements, where he makes no attempt to dazzle or impress the reader and admits that, as a university graduate, he had never heard of Duchamp and that many of the breaks and changes in his career came about by chance. He frequently happened to be at the right time at the right place and encountered people who were to have a profound impact on his art.” - Sasha Grishin

Click the link to read the articles >

NEW RELEASE: IMANTS TILLERS 'Credo'

NEW RELEASE

A collection of Imants Tillers' writing, 'Credo: Selected Essays', has just been published by Giramondo Press:

"These essays express an aesthetic credo which has larger implications for both literature and art created out of the experience of migration . . . What he calls ‘the revolt of the margins’ is evident in the provocative nature of his writing too, in its wit and irony and intelligence."

Perfect Christmas gift for the art lover in your life. Available now in stores and on Giramondo Publishing’s website.