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

Brett Whiteley was born in Sydney in 1939. One of the most celebrated and charismatic figures in Australian art history, he burst onto the international scene in the early 1960s and never left it, producing a body of work of extraordinary energy and sensual richness across painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. His art drew on a wide range of influences — from the European figurative tradition to Japanese calligraphy, from the Sydney Harbour he loved obsessively to the darker territories of addiction and desire — and synthesised them into a style that was instantly and unmistakably his own.

His prints Lipstick and Back 1 and Back 2 were produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at his Kenthurst studio on the outskirts of Sydney — placing them within the early Australian period of Fred's printmaking career, from 1979 onward. The works reflect Whiteley's characteristic preoccupation with the female form — sensuous, fluid, and rendered with the same confident, searching line that animates his finest drawings.

Brett Whiteley died in Thirroul, New South Wales in 1992. His work is held in every major Australian public collection and he remains one of the most beloved artists this country has produced. 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

Charles Blackman was born in Sydney in 1928. One of the most lyrical and emotionally immediate painters in Australian art history, he is best known for his Schoolgirls and Alice in Wonderland series — dreamlike, tender images of young women and girls moving through mysterious, half-lit worlds that shimmer between innocence and unease. His work draws deeply on personal experience, most notably his relationship with his wife Barbara, whose gradual loss of sight profoundly shaped his visual imagination and his preoccupation with interior worlds and the nature of seeing.

Blackman studied briefly at East Sydney Technical College before largely teaching himself, developing a style of soft, atmospheric colour and fluid, expressive line that became immediately recognisable. He was a member of the Antipodean group — alongside Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, and John Perceval — who in 1959 issued a manifesto defending figurative painting against the rising tide of abstraction. His commitment to the human figure and the poetic image never wavered across a long and prolific career.

His print Paris Dreaming, produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Kenthurst studio, reflects the romanticism and reverie that runs through all his finest work — Paris as a state of mind as much as a place, filtered through Blackman's characteristic soft light and dreaming sensibility.

Charles Blackman died in Sydney in 2018. His work is held in every major Australian public collection. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Storrier was born in Sydney in 1949. One of Australia's most celebrated and distinctive painters, he has spent five decades developing a visual world entirely his own — spare, poetic, and suffused with the particular quality of light and silence that characterises the Australian interior. A member of the legendary outback journeys undertaken with Fred Genis, John Olsen, and Theo Kuijpers, Storrier's relationship with the Australian landscape is not that of an observer but of someone who has lived within it, slept under its skies, and carried its images back to the studio with the intimacy of personal experience.

Storrier studied at the National Art School in Sydney and was awarded the Archibald Prize in 2012. His signature imagery — burning objects, saddles, bivouacs, hats, and the detritus of the traveller — recurs across his paintings and prints as a personal iconography of journey, time, and the impermanence of human presence in a vast and indifferent landscape. There is always fire, always distance, always the sense of a camp made and abandoned.

His collaboration with Fred Genis was sustained and deeply felt, spanning from the early 1980s through to the Byron Bay years. The saddle series alone — across multiple states, papers, and years — speaks to an artist returning again and again to a single object until it yields everything it contains. Burning Horse, Midnight Embers, Bowl of Stars, and He Always Loved Caruso are among the most poetic works in the entire Australian collection.

Tim Storrier continues to live and work in Australia. His work is held in every major Australian public collection. 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