Australian artist Murray Walker is a distinguished printmaker, painter, sculptor, ceramicist and collage artist – as well as being an acknowledged specialist on the subject of colonial Australian art.

Celebrating the release of The Art of Murray Walker – authored by art historian and Emeritus Professor Sasha Grishin – the NGV hosts an exclusive Q&A and book signing in the NGV design store at Fed Square, hosted by visual artist and former Director of the Victorian College of the Arts, Jon Cattapan. Includes a welcome by Myles Russell-Cook, Senior Curator, Australian and First Nations Art, NGV.

Speakers

Murray Walker is now in his 85th year and is thriving. Celebrating November with exhibitions at Heide Museum of Modern Art, The Art Gallery of Ballarat, Fox Galleries and with works on display at the National Gallery of Victoria alongside his monograph The Art of Murray Walker by Sasha Grishin recently released. Adroit across disciplines, what unifies Walker’s art is the buccaneering of history, knowledge and objects characterising the frank accounts of an adventurer. Born in Ballarat, he studied at RMIT in the late 1950s before moving to London in 1960 to study at the renowned Slade School, receiving a scholarship for further study in Italy during 1961. Exhibiting since 1963, he has become acclaimed internationally, while until now remained relatively under the radar in Australia. Murray’s works feature in major national collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of Ballarat, National Gallery of Australia, British Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

Jon Cattapan is an esteemed Australian painter who has held to date over sixty solo exhibitions. From 2017 to 2020 he was the Director of the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) at The University of Melbourne. He is known for his expansive cityscape variations, social narratives and more recently colour saturated paintings where abstraction and figuration remain at play with each other. In 2008, he became Australia’s 63rd Official war artist and was deployed to Timor Leste, and amongst other accolades he was awarded the 2013 Bulgari Fellowship through the Art Gallery of NSW. Jon’s work is held in most major Australian public museum collections, with the NGV having particularly deep holdings going back to 1978. In 2022, Art Ink Australia published a new monograph on his work, Jon Cattapan Threshold Signs.