Ivan Durrant

Ivan Durrant has spent five decades being called the enfant terrible of Australian art, and has rarely done much to argue the point. Entirely self-taught, he held his first exhibition at Tolarno Galleries in 1970 under legendary dealer Georges Mora, and has spent the years since building one of the country's most provocative and technically exacting bodies of work.

He remains best known for a single afternoon in 1975, when he deposited the carcass of a slaughtered cow outside the National Gallery of Victoria — a direct challenge to a public happy to eat steak but horrified to see how it got there. Confronting, deliberate and impossible to ignore, the gesture set the tone for everything that followed.

Durrant developed his own strain of photorealism, since dubbed "supraphotolism," painting with a precision that pushes past mere accuracy into something closer to unease. His subjects have ranged across movie stars, racehorses, wool sheds and his own family, but the instinct behind them has stayed constant: a picture earns its meaning by admitting what's uncomfortable, not hiding from it.

His retrospective Barrier Draw, staged at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2020–21, gathered more than a hundred works spanning his full career. He won the Sulman Prize in 2010 for Anzac Match at the MCG, and his 1992 screenprint Overdosed, made in response to the death of fellow artist Brett Whiteley, is held by the British Museum.

He was raised largely in a Melbourne orphanage after his father returned from the war unable to cope, a childhood he has spoken about candidly and one that shaped a body of work built on looking directly at what most people would rather not. He now lives and paints on the Mornington Peninsula, and continues to contribute to Essentials on art and the practice of seeing.