Vivi­enne Shark LeWitt

Born Sale, Vic­to­ria Aus­tralia 1956

Lives and works in Dayles­ford

Vivi­enne Shark LeWitt is a painter whose wit­ty and sub­ver­sive art­works have been wide­ly exhib­it­ed for over four decades. Draw­ing upon an idio­syn­crat­ic cache of artis­tic and lit­er­ary ref­er­ences, her enig­mat­ic paint­ings recon­fig­ure influ­ences, sources and tra­di­tions in iron­ic and sur­pris­ing com­bi­na­tions, cre­at­ing alle­gor­i­cal and ambigu­ous nar­ra­tives that explore the pecu­liar­i­ty, com­plex­i­ty and absur­di­ty of being human.

Shark LeWitt has been exhibit­ing since the late 1970s, with numer­ous solo shows at Anna Schwartz Gallery, as well as the Gipp­s­land Art Gallery and the Ian Pot­ter Muse­um of Art, Uni­ver­si­ty of Mel­bourne, Roslyn Oxley9 and Tolarno, Mel­bourne. Her work has been shown at major insti­tu­tions across Aus­tralia, the Unit­ed States, Ger­many, France, the Unit­ed King­dom and New Zealand, includ­ing the Nation­al Gallery of Vic­to­ria (Mel­bourne), Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art (Syd­ney), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Hei­de Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, Insti­tute of Mod­ern Art (Bris­bane), Muse­um of Mod­ern Art (Paris) and the Guggen­heim (New York). In 2023, Vivi­enne was exhib­it­ed as part of Mel­bourne Now, Nation­al Gallery of Vic­to­ria and in 2024 in the 18^th Ade­laide Bien­nale of Aus­tralian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia. 

Vivi­enne Shark LeWit­t’s career is a study in the psy­chol­o­gy of human rela­tions and the res­o­nance of arche­typ­al truths and mean­ings. At the begin­ning of the 1980s, in her ear­ly twen­ties, she exhib­it­ed small alle­gor­i­cal paint­ings that became icon­ic for their time. Shark LeWitt per­son­i­fied a crit­i­cal shift in the estab­lished art his­tor­i­cal hier­ar­chy. Her motifs were tem­po­ral and sub­con­scious, involv­ing an order and con­fi­dence with­in scenes of con­straint and qui­et seduc­tive­ness. She has avoid­ed the lit­er­al­ism of con­cep­tu­al tele­olo­gies and self-con­scious­ly expres­sive strate­gies. Her inter­est is in a less medi­at­ed form.

Through the 1990s Shark LeWit­t’s paint­ings became more eco­nom­i­cal in nota­tion — a lin­ear def­i­n­i­tion of thin­ly atten­u­at­ed fig­ures, flat near-abstract­ed sur­faces and sub­tle com­bi­na­tions of tonal colours — sketch­ing out the nuances of feel­ing and sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ties between human and some­times ani­mal sub­jects. These paint­ings were rem­i­nis­cent of the most ele­gant of John Brack­’s fig­u­ra­tive stud­ies in their phys­iog­no­my and artic­u­la­tion of character.

Shark LeWitt trained at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tasmania’s School of Art and Alexan­der Mack­ie Col­lege in Syd­ney, and her work is held in many sig­nif­i­cant pub­lic and pri­vate col­lec­tions, includ­ing those of the Guggen­heim, Nation­al Gallery of Vic­to­ria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art, Aus­tralian Nation­al Gallery, Par­lia­ment House and the uni­ver­si­ties of Mel­bourne, Queens­land and West­ern Australia.

CV

Bib­li­og­ra­phy