Gary Willis

Handsomely illustrated, this 300-page, case-bound monograph surveys 55+ years of works by post-Conceptual painter Gary Willis, circa 1970-2025.

As a fledgling artist in late 1960s Australia, Gary Willis was amongst a vanguard of post-object artists. His interests spanned conceptual art, performance, video, installation and postmodernism. Over the ensuing five decades, Willis eschewed a singular mode of practice, opting instead for a succession of conceptual moves to produce contrasting bodies of artworks. Studying the early performance works staged by Willis, one could scarcely connect them with the artist’s later bodies of paintings, at times harking back to 18th century modes of production.

Surviving his notorious ‘Leopard’ performances (with Richard Boulez) for the Adelaide Festival and ACT #2 ACT Performance Festival, wherein Willis sustained a knife wound to the hand, he goes on to exhibit with such noteworthy galleries as Reconnaissance, Roslyn Oxley9, and the Tin Sheds, University of Sydney.

While many of his peers sought to critique all that had come before, Willis emerges as one who, having initially rejected conventional art practice, has ultimately effected a return to visual language as the foundation for his artistic expression. His later involvement with the painter Arthur Boyd proved decisive.

Willis has operated as both an insider and an outsider within Australia’s artistic scene – curated into significant exhibitions such as Australian Perspecta at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and collected by many of his artistic associates. He has proven nothing if not perplexing, due in no small part to a restless creativity, refusing to settle on any one style or mode of creation.

As a case study, Willis covers an extraordinary array of scenes, modalities and localities, including life as a Zen monk in Japan, a New York punk, cruising clubs such as the Mudd, CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, amongst many other sites of consciousness, many of which are self apparent in his work.

While artist monographs tend to reflect consistent practices, developed through early, mid, late stages, Gary Willis has eschewed predictability in favour of diverse meanderings through a wide range of media - Performance - Video - Painting - Drawing - Etching - Art theory. For an artist whose career commenced in the late 1960s, Willis is revealed as a seminal figure in Australian art, charting new ground before moving to fresh creative territory.