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.
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