Philip Wolfhagen was born in Launceston, Tasmania in 1961. One of Australia's most distinctive and meditative landscape painters, he has spent a career developing a visual language of extraordinary restraint and luminous beauty — vast, spare compositions in which the Tasmanian landscape is reduced to its most essential elements. Sky, earth, and the thin line of a horizon carry the full weight of his imagery, rendered in tones of such subtle gradation that his paintings seem to breathe and shift as the light around them changes.

Wolfhagen studied at the Tasmanian School of Art before establishing himself as a significant presence in Australian contemporary painting. His work is deeply rooted in the specific character of the Tasmanian landscape — its particular quality of light, its ancient geology, and the profound silence of its open spaces. There is nothing dramatic or theatrical in his approach; instead he pursues a quietness that accumulates slowly into something genuinely moving.

His three prints Nocturnal Landscape I, Nocturnal Landscape II, and Nocturnal Landscape III, produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Byron Bay studio, represent his vision translated into the nocturnal register — the Tasmanian landscape at night, stripped of colour and rendered in the deep tonal range that lithography handles with unmatched subtlety. The darkness in these works is not empty but full — alive with the particular quality of attention that Wolfhagen brings to every surface he works on.

Philip Wolfhagen continues to live and work in Tasmania. His work is held in major Australian public collections including the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. see more

Judy Watson was born in Mundubbera, Queensland in 1959. A painter, printmaker, and installation artist of considerable power and cultural significance, she is one of Australia's most important contemporary Indigenous artists. Of Waanyi descent, Watson draws on her ancestral connections to country in far north-west Queensland, weaving together personal and collective memory, land, water, and the ongoing experience of Indigenous Australians in work that is at once visually beautiful and politically engaged.

Watson studied at the Queensland College of Art and the University of Tasmania before completing her Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her international profile was cemented when she represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1997 — the year before her collaboration with Fred Genis — alongside Tracey Moffatt, in an exhibition that drew significant critical attention.

Her work is characterised by a fluid, organic quality — pigment and paint allowed to pool, bleed, and settle across the surface in ways that evoke both the movement of water across country and the layering of memory across time. Beneath the lyrical surface lies a persistent engagement with difficult histories — frontier violence, land rights, and the enduring presence of Indigenous culture on a continent that has not always acknowledged it.

Her print Red Rock (1998), produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Byron Bay studio, carries this same quality — colour and form settling into the paper like water into stone, the deep ochre and earth tones of the Australian interior held within the lithographic surface with quiet intensity.

Judy Watson continues to live and work in Brisbane. Her work is held in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. see more

Jan Senbergs was born in Riga, Latvia in 1939. He came to Australia as a refugee after the Second World War, settling in Melbourne where he would become one of the most significant and intellectually engaged painters of his generation. His experience of displacement, exile, and arrival in a new country left a permanent mark on his art — work that is dense, layered, and charged with both personal and cultural memory.

Senbergs studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and developed a visual language of considerable complexity — combining gestural abstraction with fragments of text, map-like structures, and imagery drawn from history, politics, and the experience of migration. His paintings and prints feel like documents of a restless, searching mind, surfaces accumulated over time rather than resolved in a single sitting. There is always more to find the longer one looks.

His two prints produced in collaboration with Fred Genis — Best Wishes Fred from Jan (1987) and Landscape for Lona(1987) — are among the most personally inscribed works in the collection. The first, dedicated directly to Fred, carries the warmth of a friendship expressed through the act of making. The second, Landscape for Lona, suggests an equally personal dedication — a landscape made for someone loved, given the weight and tenderness that only a print can carry.

Both works were produced at the Kenthurst studio.

Senbergs was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2000. His work is held in every major Australian public collection including the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Jan Senbergs continues to live and work in Melbourne. see more

William Robinson was born in Brisbane, Queensland in 1936. One of Australia's most quietly celebrated painters, Robinson spent years teaching before the full force of his creative vision found its expression in the rainforest landscapes of south-east Queensland. His home and farm at Beechmont in the Scenic Rim became the emotional and spiritual centre of his art — a place where rainforest, sky, and earth collided in ways that demanded an entirely new pictorial language to describe.

Robinson is best known for his extraordinary curved-earth landscape paintings, in which the conventions of perspective are overturned in favour of something far more immersive and true to lived experience. His celebrated Creation series presents the natural world as a place of simultaneous wonder and upheaval — skies that curve overhead, horizons that tilt and wrap, trees that reach in every direction at once. These compositions drew on his conviction that human beings perceive the world not as a flat plane receding to a vanishing point, but as a spherical, enveloping reality.

His print The Ferns in Sunlight (2000), produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Byron Bay studio, reflects a more intimate register than his large-scale curved-earth paintings — the rainforest interior observed up close, light filtering through fronds and canopy with the particular luminosity that defines his engagement with the natural world. Lithography, with its capacity for rich tonal depth and atmospheric gradation, suited the dense, layered quality of rainforest light beautifully.

Robinson has been the subject of major retrospectives across Australia and his work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and numerous other institutions. He was named Queensland's Living Treasure in 1999.

William Robinson continues to live and work in south-east Queensland. see more

Jeff Rigby was born in Australia in 1948. A painter and printmaker with a quiet but consistent commitment to the Australian landscape, he worked within a realist tradition that valued close observation, honest craft, and a genuine feeling for the particular qualities of place. Known for his meticulous, atmospheric landscapes and urban scenes across New South Wales, his work was drawn especially to historical and industrial architecture — the structures that speak most directly of how Australians have worked and lived on the land.

His two prints produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Kenthurst studio capture two of Australia's most distinctive regional landscapes. Barossa Landscape (1981) turns its attention to South Australia's famous wine country — the rolling hills and particular golden light of the Barossa rendered with economy and precision. Cowra Silo (1982) takes as its subject one of the great vernacular structures of rural Australia — the grain silo rising from the flat plains of inland New South Wales with an almost architectural grandeur. That Rigby chose such an unassuming subject and treated it with such seriousness is characteristic of the best Australian realist tradition — finding the monumental in the ordinary.

Jeff Rigby died in August 2012 at the age of 64. see more

Lloyd Rees was born in Brisbane, Queensland in 1895. One of the most beloved figures in Australian art history, he spent a long and prolific career as a draughtsman, painter, and printmaker of extraordinary sensitivity. Seeking out the varied landscapes of Tasmania, New South Wales, and Central Australia, he made a veritable catalogue of their physical features — mountains, cliff faces, rocks, and valleys rendered with the precision of a master draughtsman. He found in the Australian landscape an inexhaustible source of luminous, meditative imagery that sustained him across nine decades of creative life.

In 1980, after much persuasion from Rankin, Rees agreed to try lithography. With Fred Genis as his printer, he undertook The Caloola Suite — and what followed was one of the most remarkable late flowerings in Australian art history. Bold and fresh, with vitality flowing through every sheet, Rees ultimately produced 67 lithographs spanning over 10 years in collaboration with Fred — a body of work that stands among the finest achievements of his entire career.

The Tribute to Light series of seven, the Caloola Suite, and A Day on the Derwent — tracing the light on Tasmania's great river from dawn through to nightfall — represent printmaking of the highest order. Tasmania, which Rees discovered late in life, became as central to his imagination as Sydney Harbour had always been.

Lloyd Rees died in Sydney in 1988. His work is held in every major Australian public collection.

Note: Refer to the Book of all the lithographs More info to come: see more

Little biographical information is currently available about Jan Rae, an artist who collaborated with Fred Genis during the Australian period of his career.

What the two prints reveal is striking. Litho I — a printer's proof signed by the artist — presents a figure in close profile, lips pressed to a cup or vessel, rendered in bold, confident black hatching with strong tonal contrast and an immediacy that fills the picture plane completely. The second print brings the same intensity to a close-up face, built up through dense, swirling cross-hatching in warm tones that give the surface an almost sculptural depth and weight. Both works demonstrate a draughtsman of real accomplishment — someone thoroughly at home with the lithographic medium and unafraid of scale, darkness, and the human face observed at very close range.

These are not decorative works. They are serious, searching figurative studies that speak of an artist with a strong and confident vision and the technical command to realise it fully.

We welcome any further biographical information about this artist. see more

Patsy Payne was born in Hammersmith, London in 1955. A close personal friend of the Genis family, she moved to Australia and built a practice of remarkable range — drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and tapestry weaving — underpinned by an equally wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Education and Archaeology from the University of Sydney in 1976, a Postgraduate Diploma in Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts in 1983, and later a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Studies from the Australian National University in 2005. Few artists can claim such a breadth of formal study, and it shows in the layered intelligence of her work.

Payne's prints explore the interior landscape of everyday emotional life — the small dramas, quiet negotiations, and gentle absurdities of being human. Her titles signal her sensibility perfectly: Storm in a Teacup, I Hurry Up to Sleep, Thinking About It, Trying to Reflect — works that find humour and tenderness in familiar struggles without ever tipping into sentimentality.

Her prints produced in collaboration with Fred Genis — including Falling Out, Weaving Dreams, I Can Hear My Heart, Possibilities, Acting Balanced, and Through and Through — span a range of emotional registers from the contemplative to the playful. Weaving Version for Fred is a particularly personal dedication, a print made for the man who brought her work to life on the stone.

Since 1983 Payne has exhibited extensively in Australia, Switzerland, and Thailand and currently lives in Northern NSW see more

Sharon Muir is a Northern Rivers, New South Wales artist and a close personal friend of the Genis family. A master at watercolour painting her visual artist is deeply rooted in the natural environment of the Byron Bay hinterland, her work draws on the forms, cycles, and quiet processes of the natural world — finding in seeds, growth, and organic abstraction a visual language of gentle but persistent power.

Muir's connection to Fred Genis extended well beyond the professional. Sharon was introduced to Fred by his wife Rina and became a family friend. She witnessed firsthand the daily life of the studio and the particular quality of attention Fred brought to every collaboration. After his passing in 2022 she helped Lois Genis (the middle daughter of Fred and Rina) with the massive task of archiving the entire Fred Genis print collection — a labour of dedication and love that has been essential to preserving his legacy and making the work accessible to future generations. Her intimate knowledge of the collection, the artist, and the printmaking process gives her a unique perspective that no catalogue or institutional record could replicate.

Her prints Seed Form 1–5 and Seed Form Abstraction (2003), produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Byron Bay studio, reflect her characteristic preoccupations — the seed as both literal subject and philosophical metaphor, a form that contains within it the full potential of future growth. Lithography, with its sensitivity to the most delicate mark and its capacity for subtle tonal variation, suited the quiet, meditative quality of her imagery beautifully.

Sharon Muir continues to live and work in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. see more

Daniel Moynihan was born in Melbourne in 1948. A painter and printmaker of considerable range and wit, he studied at Preston Technical College and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology under Udo Sellbach and Tate Adams, before building a distinguished career as both an artist and educator. He lectured widely across Melbourne's major art institutions and served as Head of Printmaking at RMIT University from 1992 to 1997, where he shaped generations of Australian printmakers. In 2016 the Art Gallery of Ballarat held a major retrospective spanning fifty years of his printmaking practice.

Moynihan's work is figurative, narrative, and often darkly humorous — populated by archetypal characters, animals, and the particular textures of urban and suburban Australian life. The tiger is a recurring presence in his imagery, appearing across multiple series as a symbol simultaneously powerful, comic, and strangely domestic.

His prints produced in collaboration with Fred Genis — Genis Black Walk Tiger and Anzac Bridge Tiger — draw on one of Australia's most haunting symbols: the Thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, hunted to extinction in the twentieth century. That Moynihan named one print directly after his printer is a telling gesture, speaking to the warmth of the working relationship between the two men. The Thylacine stalking the Anzac Bridge and the streets of Sydney carries a quiet melancholy alongside the wit — a ghost animal moving through a contemporary city that no longer has a place for it.

Daniel Moynihan continues to live and work in Australia, represented by Australian Galleries in Melbourne and Sydney. see more

Hal Missingham was born in Hastings, England in 1906 and came to Australia as a young man, becoming one of the most influential figures in Australian cultural life across the middle decades of the twentieth century. A painter, draughtsman, and administrator of considerable ability, he served as Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 1945 to 1971 — a tenure of twenty-six years during which he shaped the gallery's collection, its public profile, and its relationship with Australian artists in ways that are still felt today. He was also a gifted cartoonist and writer, bringing the same wit and directness to words that he brought to images.

As a painter Missingham worked primarily in watercolour and drawing, with a particular feeling for the Australian bush — its light, its particular quality of silence, and the way the landscape holds and deflects the human gaze. His work is unpretentious and observant, rooted in direct experience of the land rather than in art world fashion.

His collaboration with Fred Genis produced Bush Images — a portfolio of sixteen lithographs celebrating the Australian bush with the same direct, affectionate observation that characterised all his finest work. Produced at the Kenthurst studio in 1984, the suite reflects a deep familiarity with the bush landscape and a printmaker's sensitivity to tone and texture. It is the work of an artist who had spent a lifetime looking at the Australian landscape and knew exactly what he wanted to say about it.

Hal Missingham died in Sydney in 1994. His work is held in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and major Australian public collections. see more

Colin Lanceley was born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1938, moving to Australia as a child. One of the most inventive and wide-ranging artists of his generation, he studied at East Sydney Technical College before travelling extensively in Europe, where he absorbed the full breadth of the Western tradition — from medieval tapestry to Surrealism — and wove it into a practice that was exuberantly, distinctively his own. His work combines painting, collage, assemblage, and printmaking with a restless creative energy and a deep love of music, poetry, and the natural world.

Lanceley's collaboration with Fred Genis at the Kenthurst studio was one of the most sustained and productive in the Australian collection, spanning from the mid-1980s through to the late 1990s. The 1985 Places series of seven prints — ranging from the Blue Mountains and Kakadu to the French countryside at La Tranche Sur Mer and the road to Chablis — reflects his cosmopolitan sensibility and his gift for distilling a sense of place into lyrical, richly layered compositions. The positive and negative variants of Vintage Landscape, Blue Mountains, and Balmoral demonstrate his systematic exploration of how the same image transforms through tonal reversal — a printmaker's curiosity that speaks to genuine engagement with the medium.

His later works — the Stormy Weather, Rock Pool, Night Garden, and Mangroves series of four — show a deepening engagement with the Australian coastal landscape, rendered with the same poetic intelligence and technical sophistication that defines his finest work.

Colin Lanceley died in Sydney in 2015. His work is held in every major Australian public collection and the Tate Modern in London. see more

Robert Jacks was born in Melbourne in 1943. A painter, printmaker, photographer, and poet of quiet but persistent originality, he spent extended periods living and working in the United States and Canada before returning to Australia, where he became an important if somewhat independent presence in the contemporary art scene. His work resists easy categorisation — moving between minimalism, conceptual art, and a deeply personal lyricism that gives even his most spare compositions a warm, breathing quality.

Jacks studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology before travelling widely, and his years abroad brought him into contact with international currents in contemporary art that he absorbed and transformed in entirely his own way. His practice encompassed painting, works on paper, printmaking, and writing — always with the same quality of sustained, unhurried attention and a refusal to separate the intellectual from the sensory.

His prints produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Kenthurst studio span the mid-1980s through to 1989 — Lampshade, Cactus, Temple Gate, Kiss, Seven Steps to Heaven, the small series of nine lithographs, and the Sydney Harbour series of four. The range of subjects is characteristic — the domestic and the monumental, the intimate and the expansive, sitting comfortably side by side. Each work carries the same quality of careful, considered looking that defines his practice at its best.

Robert Jacks died in Melbourne in 2014. His work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and major collections internationally. see more

Frank Hodgkinson was born in Sydney in 1919. A painter, printmaker, and draughtsman of wide cultural curiosity, he spent extended periods living and working in Europe — particularly in France and Spain — where he absorbed the deep currents of Western art history and brought them into productive conversation with his Australian sensibility. He was a significant figure in the Sydney art world across five decades, respected by fellow artists for his seriousness of purpose and the breadth of his visual intelligence.

Hodgkinson's work is rooted in a deep engagement with prehistoric and ancient imagery — cave paintings, petroglyphs, ritual marks, and the earliest evidence of human image-making. The horse, one of the great recurring subjects of prehistoric art from Lascaux to the rock paintings of Spain, became a central preoccupation, connecting his practice to the most ancient traditions of mark-making while remaining entirely contemporary in feeling.

Hodgkinson lived near Fred's studio at Kenthurst during this period, and the proximity fostered a close working relationship and friendship. His prints produced in collaboration with Fred Genis reflect his deepest passions directly. The 1992 series — The Horse Crossed, Hunting Ground, Prehistoric and Romantic Horse, The Horse Lascaux to San Roman, Hunter A, and Hunter B — form a cohesive suite rooted in the imagery of the prehistoric hunt, rendered with the gestural energy and archaeological sensitivity that defined his mature work. Reef One and Paris Soire demonstrate his broader range — the Sydney coastline and the French capital both filtered through the same searching, historically aware intelligence. ions including the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Australia.

Frank Hodgkinson died in Sydney in 2001. see more

Guan Wei was born in Beijing, China in 1957. He studied at the Nanjing Normal University before moving to Australia in 1989 following the Tiananmen Square protests, settling in Sydney where he has lived and worked ever since. One of the most distinctive and widely exhibited contemporary artists working in Australia, he occupies a unique cultural position — drawing on both his Chinese artistic heritage and his experience as an immigrant navigating a new country, weaving the two together into a visual language that is simultaneously playful, politically sharp, and deeply personal.

Guan Wei's paintings and prints are immediately recognisable — figures rendered in a deliberately simplified, folk-art inflected style, set against flat fields of colour, engaged in the rituals and absurdities of modern life. His work addresses themes of cultural displacement, national identity, globalisation, and belonging with a lightness of touch that makes the serious feel accessible and the absurd feel profound. Religious iconography, political symbols, and everyday gestures sit comfortably side by side in his compositions, stripped of hierarchy and examined with equal curiosity.

His prints produced in collaboration with Fred Genis — spanning from the late 1990s to 2003 across both the Kenthurst and Byron Bay studios — reflect this characteristic range. First Supper and Last Supper, First Kiss, Last Judgment, King and Queen, and the two Trepidation Island works of 2003 move freely between the sacred and the everyday, the monumental and the intimate. Under the Southern Cross and Return to Paradise speak directly to his ongoing meditation on what it means to arrive, to belong, and to make a home in a new world.

Guan Wei continues to live and work in Sydney. His work is held in the National Gallery of Australia and major collections worldwide. see more