Joe Furlonger: Land

Joe Furlonger is widely regarded as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary landscape painters. A nine-time finalist in the Archibald Prize, Wynne Prize and Sulman Prize, he is also the recipient of the Moët & Chandon Fellowship and the Fleurieu Art Prize. A major retrospective of his work was recently presented at Queensland Art Gallery (QGOMA) and is currently touring throughout Queensland until 2028. His works are held in leading public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery, Art Gallery of New South Wales and The British Museum.

Furlonger’s practice is grounded in an enduring engagement with the Australian landscape — not as static terrain, but as a living, volatile force shaped by time, weather and human endurance. Drawn to floodplains, drought-stricken earth and remote regional environments, his paintings emerge from extensive drawing and watercolour studies made en plein air. These works capture landscapes in states of tension and transformation: swollen rivers, scorched fields, shifting skies and the fragile architectures of habitation that persist within them.

Central to Furlonger’s work is a lifelong commitment to drawing. His paintings retain the immediacy of direct observation through gestural mark-making that feels instinctive yet deeply resolved. Oscillating between figuration and abstraction, his visual language balances spontaneity with compositional precision, producing works that are at once raw, lyrical and spatially complex.

Furlonger has developed a distinctive pictorial structure in which landscape is compressed, elevated and brought insistently toward the viewer. Horizons are often pushed high within the frame, collapsing conventional depth and creating a dynamic tension between surface and space. Through rhythmic accumulations of colour, line and form, his paintings generate an immersive spatial experience — simultaneously expansive and intimate, turbulent and meditative.

While his work engages with the legacy of the Australian sublime, Furlonger approaches landscape less as spectacle than as a site of sustained attention and contemplation. His paintings convey an acute sensitivity to the psychological and spiritual dimensions of place, revealing the landscape as both physical reality and emotional terrain. Across the work, nature appears restless, vulnerable and profoundly alive.

'…painting is the best way I can express myself, perhaps the clearest way I can express myself. Not so much the beauty or the colour but actually, the feeling of contentment that people get in large open spaces, almost as a meditative thing. Once you get into landscapes, it bites you and takes over a bit.’ - Joe Furlonger