Collection: 'Picnic at Black and White Mountain' | Matthew Cheyne
17 November - 19 December 2026
OPENING EVENT: Friday 20 November, 5:30 - 7pm
ARTIST TALK: Saturday 5 December, 11am
Matthew Cheyne is a Queensland based artist, working in oil painting, drawing and sculpture. He graduated from the Queensland College of Art in 2001, having also studied film and literature.
Cheyne's work is part oil painting, part hyper-colour drawing. Subjects as diverse as volcanoes, street hawkers and looters are rendered with the same dark humour. Though a figurative painter at heart, his subjects inhabit deliciously tonal, abstracted backgrounds, inviting the viewer to flesh out the scene, also due in part to his colour blindness. His paintings observe people, scenarios, and the built environment.
The vibrant colours are often set in tension with the subject matter. Volcanoes, a recurring subject that Cheyne refers to as “nature’s middle-finger to bucolic landscape painting”, are nevertheless dealt with in innocuous candy pinks or transformed by serene indigo.
Now based in Queensland, Cheyne spent a number of years much living in Germany and France with regular exhibitions in Cologne, Berlin and Luxembourg.
In Australia, his work has been shown at Casula Powerhouse in Sydney and at the Australian National Archives in Canberra, as well as with numerous commercial and public galleries.