Travis MacDonald is a figurative painter of intimate social spaces and urban arcadias. Atmospheric veils of colour envelop incidental pictorial reveries and liquid monuments. Light, perspective and transparent materials operate together in the expansion of conventional two-dimensional supports to sometimes include the spatial depth between a painting’s surface and the wall upon which it hangs. MacDonald’s paintings carry influences: contemporary activations of Clarice Beckett’s tonal reckonings of landscape, utopian spaces of the Nabis unified by soundtracks of colour.
Travis MacDonald (b. 1990 NZ, l. Berlin DE) was awarded the 2024 Geelong Prize by judges Josè Da Silva, Jane Devery and Jason Smith. He is a second-generation artist who graduated from Victorian College of the Arts in 2011. MacDonald has had a significant international trajectory. In recent years, he has exhibited in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom as well as on significant contemporary art platforms online.
Key exhibitions
- 2024 Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, judged by José Da Silva, Jane Devery, Jason Smith, Geelong Gallery, Geelong, 2024
- Travis MacDonald: I’ll be back tomorrow, Painters Painting Paintings, online and Instagram, painterspaintingpaintings.com and @painterspaintingpaintings
- Painting. More Painting, curated by Max Delany and Hannah Mathews, at the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2015
Key readings
- Rhonda Dredge, ‘Clever storytelling impresses judges – 2024 Geelong Contemporary Art Prize’, Australian Arts Review, https://artsreview.com.au/clever-storytelling-impresses-judges-2024-geelong-contemporary-art-prize/, 20 August, 2024
- Katie Eva Gaj, Travis MacDonald: Fly by night, exh. text, JVDW, Dusseldorf, 2024
- Travis MacDonald: The Cavern, Perimeter Editions, Melbourne, 2018, 64pp
-
Painting. More Painting, exh. cat., the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2016
Collections
Artbank
Geelong Gallery