Joel Dickens

Joel Dickens was born in London, grew up in Essex and obtained his Fine Art BA at the Cumbria School of Art in the Lake District. Upon graduating he returned to London, where he exhibited consistently, mostly around Shoreditch and London’s East End.

Joel has lived and worked in Sydney since 2003 and has enjoyed long periods of representation with Arthouse Gallery, Rushcutters Bay, and Piermarq Gallery, Surry Hills. His current exhibition, Range Anxiety, is showing at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf until 6th April. In 2021 Joel was featured in The Australian newspaper as one of Australia’s ‘most collectible artists’. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and his work is held in private and corporate collections.

Joel’s work combines expressionistic gesture and minimalistic restraint, exploring the notion that Expressionism and Minimalism are two irreconcilable disciplines. In his work, the ‘splicing’ of these two approaches provides an enduring metaphor for the ‘human condition’ and works as a vehicle for Joel’s sociopolitical narratives.

Whilst each series is uniquely experimental, Joel’s underpinning philosophy gives his work its conceptual cohesion. Joel’s complex compositions, unorthodox colour-play and a performative awareness of ‘time taken’, are of key importance as he sets out to reconcile a ‘raw’, spontaneous approach with a controlled, ‘sophisticated’ execution.

It is possible, when viewing Joel’s paintings, to feel both exuberance and melancholy, triumph and defeat, protest and resignation. And it is due, ultimately, to the ‘layering’ of these emotions, on the picture plain, that the viewer is left in a state of continued investigation.