James Gleeson was born in Sydney in 1915. Australia's foremost Surrealist painter and one of the most erudite and intellectually rigorous artists this country has produced, he spent a lifetime creating a body of work of extraordinary ambition and sustained imaginative power. Deeply versed in European art history and the Surrealist tradition, he brought to Australian painting a visionary intensity and psychological depth that placed him in a category entirely his own.

Gleeson studied at East Sydney Technical College before travelling extensively in Europe, where his encounter with the great Surrealist painters confirmed and deepened a direction he had already begun to pursue at home. His mature paintings are vast, turbulent compositions in which organic and geological forms collide and dissolve — seascapes of the unconscious, landscapes of dream and myth rendered with a technical mastery that makes the impossible feel utterly convincing. He was also a distinguished art critic and the biographer of William Dobell, bringing the same precision and passion to words that he brought to paint.

His collaboration with Fred Genis at the Kenthurst studio produced The Judgement of Paris — a portfolio of six lithographs completed in 1981, together with a single standalone work, The Sibgle. The classical subject — the mythological beauty contest that sparked the Trojan War — was entirely suited to Gleeson's sensibility, allowing him to inhabit the territory where antiquity, dream, and the erotic imagination meet. The suite represents some of the finest printmaking of his career, the lithographic medium carrying the full weight of his visionary imagery with remarkable fidelity.

James Gleeson died in Sydney in 2008. His work is held in every major Australian public collection. see more

Allan Gamble was born in Fremantle, Western Australia in 1907. An architect, painter, illustrator, printmaker, and gallery director, he brought a professional architect's eye to his art — a precision and feeling for structural beauty that made him one of Sydney's most accomplished recorders of its built heritage. He lectured in architecture at the University of Sydney from 1945 to 1951, after which he became Director of the Gallery of Fine Arts at the university. His series of books and prints documenting Sydney University remain valued records of that campus's extraordinary Gothic Revival architecture.

Gamble worked across watercolour, pen and ink, and printmaking, consistently drawn to the historic buildings and streetscapes of Sydney — churches, post offices, university buildings, and the grand Victorian commercial architecture of the city centre. His work is that of someone who understood buildings from the inside out, who knew what made them stand and why they were beautiful.

His portfolio Queen Victoria Building (1986) — six lithographs produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Kenthurst studio, edition of 35 — devoted itself entirely to one of Sydney's most beloved landmarks, newly restored after years of neglect. Each print approaches the building with an architect's informed appreciation, capturing the ornamental detail, the soaring ironwork, and the grandeur of its Victorian interiors.

Allan Gamble died in 2001 at the age of ninety-three. His work is held in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. see more

Donald Friend was born in Sydney in 1915. One of the most gifted and cosmopolitan Australian artists of the twentieth century, he was a draughtsman of extraordinary natural ability — fluid, witty, and endlessly inventive. His work ranged freely across painting, drawing, printmaking, and illustration, and his restless temperament took him from Australia to West Africa, Ceylon, Italy, and Bali, where he lived for an extended period.

Friend’s art is warm, pleasure-loving, and technically accomplished — figures rendered with an elegant economy of line, compositions suffused with colour and pattern, a world view that celebrated beauty, pleasure, and the richness of human experience without apology. He was also a gifted writer and diarist, and his published journals remain among the most entertaining documents in Australian cultural life.

His collaboration with Fred Genis produced one of the most distinctive publications in the Australian collection — Songs of the Vagabond Scholars, published by Beagles Press in Sydney in 1982, comprising fourteen original lithographs in a limited edition of one hundred. The four seasonal prints — Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer — form the lyrical heart of the suite, reflecting Friend's characteristic delight in the human figure moving through a sensuous, beautifully observed natural world. It is a publication that reflects the best of both artist and printer — generous, beautifully crafted, and made with genuine love for the medium.

Donald Friend died in Sydney in 1989. His work is held in every major Australian public collection. see more

John Firth-Smith was born in Birmingham, England in 1943, moving to Australia in the 1960s where he became one of the most significant and original abstract painters of his generation. Settling in Sydney, he developed a practice rooted in the Australian coastal landscape — the ocean, light, and the particular quality of the Pacific horizon — translated into large, luminous abstractions of extraordinary spatial freedom and lyrical intelligence. His canvases breathe; they carry the feeling of water, wind, and open sky without ever depicting them literally.

Firth-Smith studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology before travelling extensively, and his work reflects a deep engagement with both the American abstract tradition and the specific sensory world of the Australian coast. He taught at the City Art Institute in Sydney and has been a respected and generous presence in the Australian art community across five decades.

His collaboration with Fred Genis was one of the longest and most prolific in the entire collection — spanning from the mid-1980s through to the mid-1990s across both the Kenthurst and Byron Bay studios. The sheer range and number of prints speaks to a creative partnership of genuine depth and mutual trust. The Large Banjo series, the Bottle and Boatportfolio of seven, the 1994 suite — Dreams, Yours, Ours, Make, Luck — and individual works including Sea Music, Shanty, Moon, Spirit, and Sun form a remarkable body of work that mirrors the sustained arc of his painting practice. Untitled for Fred, among them, is a quiet and personal dedication from one craftsman to another.

A video record of Firth-Smith speaking about his collaboration with Fred Genis preserves a firsthand account of this remarkable working relationship.

John Firth-Smith continues to live and work in Australia. see more

Brian Dunlop was born in Sydney in 1938. A painter and printmaker of quiet intensity, he worked within a realist tradition that placed him somewhat apart from the more gestural and expressionist currents dominant in Australian art during his lifetime — and all the more distinctive for it. His paintings and prints are characterised by stillness, precise observation, and a luminous handling of light that owes something to the great European realists while remaining entirely grounded in Australian experience.

Dunlop was a close friend of Fred Genis and a regular presence at the Kenthurst studio, where the two collaborated across an extended period in the early 1980s. The prints reflect his range — from the dappled light filtering through trees at Bawley Point on the New South Wales south coast, to intimate interior studies, floral compositions, and landscape. The Sleep portfolio of seven prints and the multiple states of Anna — a portrait of Anna Waldman — demonstrate the sustained attention and technical seriousness he brought to printmaking as a medium worthy of his finest efforts. Rosimonte and Barossa Valley Landscape extend his gaze to South Australia, while Adolescent shows his sensitivity as a figure painter.

Throughout his career Dunlop exhibited widely and was represented in major Australian collections. He was admired by fellow artists as a painter of exceptional integrity — someone who pursued his own quiet vision with complete commitment regardless of prevailing fashion.

Brian Dunlop died in Sydney in 2011. see more

Kevin Connor was born in Sydney in 1932. A painter and printmaker of long standing in the Australian art world, he developed a career rooted in figuration and the close observation of urban and suburban life — the interiors, streets, and people of Sydney rendered with a warm, humanist eye and a painter's instinct for light and atmosphere. His work sits within a broad Australian realist tradition while carrying its own particular quality of tenderness and quiet social observation.

Connor studied at East Sydney Technical College and went on to become a significant presence in Sydney's artistic community, exhibiting widely and maintaining a consistent commitment to figurative painting across five decades. He was a member of the Sydney Printmakers and engaged seriously with printmaking as a medium throughout his career, finding in it a natural extension of his drawing practice.

His print Lights from Redfern (1990), produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Kenthurst studio, is characteristic of his urban sensibility — Redfern, one of Sydney's oldest and most culturally layered inner suburbs, observed at night, its lights carrying the particular warmth and melancholy of a densely human place. It is a subject that rewards the lithographic medium's capacity for tonal depth and atmospheric gradation, and speaks to Connor's enduring interest in the city as a place of human story and feeling.

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

John Coburn was born in Ingham, Queensland in 1925. One of the most distinctive and spiritually engaged Australian artists of the twentieth century, he developed a visual language of bold, symbolic forms — suns, moons, trees, flames, and elemental forces — rendered in rich, resonant colour that drew equally on his Catholic faith, his study of Eastern philosophy, and the great traditions of decorative and sacred art. His work is immediately recognisable and entirely his own.

Coburn studied at East Sydney Technical College and later in Paris, where exposure to the European decorative tradition deepened his interest in pattern, symbol, and the relationship between art and sacred space. He is perhaps best known internationally for his two monumental tapestries — Genesis and Apocalypse — commissioned for the Sydney Opera House and unveiled in 1973, works that brought his symbolic visual language to one of the world's great public buildings.

His prints Aftermath, Burning Land, and The Burning, produced in collaboration with Fred Genis, sit at the heart of his most characteristic preoccupations — fire, land, and the elemental forces that shape and destroy. The burning landscape is a subject with deep resonance in the Australian context, and Coburn brings to it both the urgency of direct cultural experience and the meditative weight of his spiritual practice. Lithography, with its capacity for warm, saturated colour and bold graphic form, suited his visual language with great naturalness.

Coburn was a member of the Sydney Printmakers and exhibited widely throughout Australia and internationally across a long and distinguished career.

John Coburn died in Sydney in 2006. His work is held in every major Australian public collection. see more

Judy Cassab was born in Vienna, Austria in 1920. She came to Australia in 1951 as a refugee, having survived the Second World War in Hungary, and went on to become one of the most celebrated portrait painters this country has ever produced. Twice winner of the Archibald Prize — Australia's most prestigious portrait award — she built a reputation for capturing the inner life of her subjects with a directness and psychological acuity that placed her in the front rank of twentieth century portraiture. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 2001 received the Order of Australia.

Cassab's portraits are not merely records of appearance but penetrating encounters — works in which the sitter's character, intelligence, and inner world are present as palpably as their physical likeness. Her handling of paint was confident and gestural, the surface alive with the energy of a painter who trusted her instincts completely.

Her collaboration with Fred Genis produced two significant bodies of work. Australian Portraits — a portfolio of ten lithographs produced in 1984 — brought together some of the most distinguished figures in Australian cultural life: Dame Joan Sutherland, Sir Robert Helpmann, Peter Sculthorpe, Donald Friend, Sir Sidney Nolan, Lloyd Rees, Rosemary Dobson, Judith Wright, Morris West, and Thomas Keneally. The portfolio is a remarkable document of Australian cultural life at a particular moment, each portrait a distillation of a lifetime's achievement rendered with Cassab's characteristic warmth and precision. That she also made a portrait of Fred Genis himself places him in distinguished company — a quiet acknowledgement from one master of her craft to another.

Judy Cassab died in Sydney in 2015. Her work is held in every major Australian public collection. see more

John Caldwell was born in Australia in 1942. A landscape painter and printmaker of considerable reputation, he has spent a career capturing the raw, elemental character of the Australian terrain — from the sandstone escarpments of the Blue Mountains to the remote outback, and extending his gaze as far as the ice fields of Antarctica. His work is rooted in direct experience of place, driven by a desire to record landscape in its most dramatic and unmediated form.

Caldwell's style is expressive and gestural — fluid tonal shifts and confident mark-making evoking the atmosphere and texture of rock formations, valleys, and the great sweeping skies of the Australian interior. His prints and paintings do not sentimentalise the landscape but confront it directly, responding to its scale, its light, and its indifference to the human presence within it. There is a physicality to his work that speaks of an artist who has spent real time in difficult and remote terrain, and who brings that bodily knowledge back to the studio.

His print Untitled (1990), produced in collaboration with Fred Genis, reflects this characteristic sensibility — gestural, atmospheric, and rooted in a deep familiarity with the Australian land. Lithography, with its capacity for fluid tonal gradation and expressive mark-making, suited his approach naturally.

Caldwell's work is held in Australian public and private collections and he remains a respected figure in Australian landscape painting. see more

Marion Borgelt was born in Moree, New South Wales in 1956. One of Australia's most thoughtful and consistently original abstract artists, she has built a practice over four decades that moves between painting, works on paper, and installation — always in pursuit of the luminous, the meditative, and the relationship between the mark, the void, and the light that exists between them. Her work is quiet but never passive, drawing the viewer into a sustained and rewarding contemplation.

Borgelt studied at the City Art Institute in Sydney and later in New York, where exposure to American abstraction deepened her understanding of scale, space, and the expressive possibilities of pure form. Her paintings typically employ circles, spheres, and organic forms rendered in rich, layered surfaces that build slowly toward a quality of inner light — works that feel simultaneously ancient and entirely contemporary, rooted in both Western abstraction and Eastern meditative traditions.

Her prints Magical Decay No. 1 and Magical Decay No. 2 (1995), produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Byron Bay studio, are characteristic of her mature practice. The title itself is quietly paradoxical — decay as a magical rather than a mournful process, transformation rather than loss. The works reflect her sustained interest in natural processes, organic form, and the beauty that emerges from impermanence and change.

Borgelt has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally, and her work is held in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Marion Borgelt continues to live and work in Sydney. see more