Juan Ford
PROJECT
This 15-metre-long painting is Juan Ford’s most ambitious work to date. Installed alongside nineteenth-century British paintings from the NGV Collection, the work enters into dialogue with idealised visions of nature – seen in the paintings of Pre-Raphaelite artists – and the tradition of history painting, shifting the tone of the space towards uncertainty and fragility. Structured as a triptych, the three parts of Ford’s work explores the ‘divine’ nature of the muse as a force that can both generate art and alter existing images. Figures appear and dissolve within the Australian landscape, which acts not as backdrop but as an active presence that fractures the composition and reshapes the narrative.
The acquisition of this artist’s work is supported by the Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists
ABOUT
For more than two decades Juan Ford has pursued painting as a way of thinking – testing what images can hold and what they reveal about our place in the world. His work moves between the art-historical canon and Australian landscape traditions, treating landscape not as scenery but as an active field in which the human figure is measured, unsettled and at times engulfed. In Ford’s paintings, the natural world is never neutral: it is a presence attack but pushing back, reflecting the complex and often extractive relationship between people and nature.
Born in Melbourne in 1973, Ford holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) and a Master of Arts (Fine Art) by research from RMIT University. Since the late 1990s he has presented more than thirty-five solo exhibitions and participated in major curated group exhibitions at institutions including the NGV, the National Portrait Gallery and QAGOMA.
Ford has received significant recognition, including the Basil Sellers Art Prize People’s Choice, the Fletcher Jones Contemporary Art Prize and the Conrad Jupiters Art Prize. His works are held in public and private collections in Australia and internationally, including Artbank, the NGV, Monash University Museum of Art, McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park, and the Parliament of Victoria.