LUKE THURGATE

Luke Thurgate is an artist living and working on Gadigal Land (Sydney). He teaches drawing and painting at the National Art School, where he graduated in 2021 with a Master of Fine Art. Luke’s exhibition history includes recent projects at Grafton Regional Gallery, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, Backwoods Gallery, Burra Regional Art Gallery, National Art School and Adelaide Central Gallery. He has been a finalist multiple times in the Dobell Drawing Prize, the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award, and in 2020 was a finalist in the Tom Bass Figurative Sculpture Prize.

Luke’s studio practice is both a love letter to the Western Canon and an open ended question about its cultural impact. His work transcribes elements of Renaissance and Baroque art making, conflating the look, feel and material sensibility of these periods with ideas of excess and monstrosity. His masked figures play out tensions between parody, sincerity, menace, pathos, transgression, vulnerability, and longing. Informed by a range of sources, including popular culture, and Catholic iconography, his practice restages the Western Canon through a lens of queer aesthetics and subjectivity.