Announcing Representation of Tom Polo
18 Mar 2023
Yavuz Gallery is pleased to announce representation of Australian-artist, Tom Polo.
Polo is one of the most acclaimed painters of his generation in Australia. He uses painting and painted environments to explore how conversation, gesture and exchange are embodied acts of portraiture. Incorporating text and figurative elements, his works draw upon acute personal observations, absurdist encounters and imagined personas. An ongoing interest across his practice is the emotional and performative relationships between people and the social and psychological spaces they occupy.
Employing a vibrant palette, Polo stages the surfaces of his canvases with a cast of characters, partially obscured or fragmented figures. Submerged within complex layers of paint, pastels and varied techniques these figures blur the distinction between foreground and background, and of where one ends and begins.
Tom Polo was born in 1985 in Sydney, Australia, and holds a BFA and MFA from the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He has exhibited extensively across Australia. Recent curated shows include: Video Commission at Ngununggula, New South Wales (2023); FREE/STATE, the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art; Contact Us, Cement Fondu, Sydney (2020); The National, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2019); Beyond Reason: exploring the logic of the imagination, Queensland University of Technology Art Museum (2018); and Primavera 2017: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2017).
He has been a finalist of many prestigious art prizes in Australia, including the Archibald Prize (2018), the Sir John Sulman Prize (2021, 2019), the Ramsay Art Prize (2021), amongst others. He is the winner of the 2015 Brett Whiteley Traveling Scholarship and the Parramatta Creative Fellowship, City of Parramatta, Australia; and in 2011 was awarded the Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award. Polo’s works are in numerous public and private collections, such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia; Artbank, Australia; and Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney Australia.
Yavuz will be presenting new works by Polo at Art Basel Hong Kong 2023. Polo is represented in Australia by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery and STATION, Melbourne.
Image: Tom Polo. Photo: Garry Trinh.