LEO COYTE
BIOGRAPHY
Leo Coyte has a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (1999) and has held solo exhibitions since 2008 in Sydney, Melbourne and Broken Hill Regional Gallery. His work has been included in group exhibitions internationally in London and California, and nationally in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Bendigo, Bathurst, Hazelhurst, Coffs Harbour, Dubbo and the Gold Coast. Coyte has held residencies at the Sydney Guild (2013), Any Space/Serial Space (2010), Fraser Street Studios (2010) and First Draft Emerging Artist Studio Program (2008). He was awarded an Australian Postgraduate Research Award (2000-02) and has been a finalist in the Paul Guest Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery (2020), the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery (2019), the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award, Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery (2016), the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize, Griffith University Art Gallery, Brisbane (2016, 2013), the John Fries Award, UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2015), the Hazelhurst Art Award, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery (2015, 2013, 2009), the Sulman Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales (2014) and the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney (2001). Coyte has been featured in Art Guide Australia, Vault, the Art Life, Belle Magazine and was commissioned to create the cover art for Artbank’s Sturgeon Magazine (issue 5, 2016). His work is in the collections of Artbank, the University of Queensland Art Museum and the University of Sydney.
ARTIST CV
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WORKS
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PAST EXHIBITIONS
PARADISE
12 TO 19 OCTOBER 2022
The domestic labour of cultivating layers of organic matter and food scraps – otherwise known as composting – describes not only the careful and attentive ritual at the heart of a dedicated gardener’s “terraforming” practice, it also provides an ontological model for Leo Coyte’s accretive approach to painting. The parallel between his gardening and painting practices, speaks to the way these prominent daily routines have come together to give an overall shape to his life as (sub)urban farmer, primary caregiver, and painter.[1]
For this current body of work Coyte’s paintings employ wry humour to embrace the entangled and relational everyday routine of feeling at once empowered by a connection to the seasonal life-cycles of the natural world, as he focuses time and energy into growing edible plants to nourish himself and his loved ones, whilst also grappling with the existential dread of wondering how to go on providing for family in the face of the climate emergency. Working on paintings in the studio becomes an arena where he observes the underlying tension felt as anxiety occupies the same space as a sense of freedom. In these works, he continues to develop a painterly logic employing vivid colours and playful dark humour to develop an idiosyncratic visual language that cycles through his everyday encounters and subconscious fears; layering and unearthing seemingly unlimited combinations of material and matter: silhouetted leaves, sunny side-up egg forms, cherry plums with faces, palms of hands, and soles of feet. This playful process of free association can also quickly give way to sometimes awkward and exposing reoccurring motifs: bums, testicles, and leaking orifices. Utilising a shallow picture plane with a frontal figure-ground relationship as a stage, Paradise presents a series of paintings set to play-out psychic tableaux where fragmented bodily forms gesture towards sensations we each understand through the visceral biological intensity of being human: that of trying to find a way of living the good life in an era of radical uncertainty.
[1] Haraway, Donna. Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016. p. 120.
SHELTER
9 TO 27 SEPTEMBER 2020
EXHIBITION PRESS
"Bendigo based artist Leo Coyte will show a new body of work entitled 'Shelter' at Nicholas Thompson Gallery, his third
exhibition with the Melbourne gallery. Coyte has quickly developed a following for his visually complex paintings that meld abstraction and figuration with a post-pop post-punk sensibility. As Coyte explains: “Vivid colour, dark humour and macabre subject matter combine to form an idiosyncratic visual language that cycles through my everyday encounters and
recollections – a marking of time, place and accumulated sensation. I draw on those typical nervous tensions and anxieties almost all of us feel in some way or another, those feelings that are so often reflected in the choices we make to navigate our way through life. I enjoy the inherent immediacy of painting; the use of a shallow picture plane and frontal figure-ground relationship provides me with a simple stage to play out any manner of psychic tableaux.” Coyte has a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours (1999) from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, and has held solo exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne since 2008. His work is held in the collections of Artbank, the University of Queensland Art Museum and the University of Sydney. Coyte will show at Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne, from September 9 to 27, 2020."
Alison Kubler 'Upfront: News and Previews' in Vault, issue 31, p 24
SEASONS
15 AUGUST TO 2 SEPTEMBER 2018
In Seasons Leo Coyte’s idiosyncratic visual language continues to cycle through everyday encounters and subconscious recollections. The directness of a shallow picture plane and frontal figure-ground relationship provides Coyte with a simple yet sophisticated stage to play-out a series of psychic tableaux.
UNDER THE ARCHES
6 TO 28 FEBRUARY 2016
NEWS
NICHOLAS THOMPSON GALLERY’S SPRING 1883 EXHIBITON REVIEWED BY CHELSEA HOPPER FOR ‘MEMO REVIEW’
Collingwood & Fitzroy: Nicholas Thompson Gallery Arts Projects Australia FUTURES Sutton Gallery by Chelsea Hopper 08 August 2021 It wouldn’t be an art fair without abstract painting. Thick gestural lines, bright colour palettes and titles alluding to memory or “the body” are always a given. I step into @14, the satellite venue for Nicholas Thompson…
NICHOLAS THOMPSON GALLERY’S SPRING 1883 EXHIBITION IN ANDREW BROWNE’S FEATURE FOR ‘THE REVIEWBOARD’
Commerce, curatorial or carnival? Gallerists stake out various positions when wrangling the art fair as ‘form’. Some might stuff their booths with the unsold stock from their bulging backrooms, hoping to finally place those space-hogging works. Others think more carefully about the image they want to project – their brand – the participation in a…
LEO COYTE FINALIST IN THE PAUL GUEST PRIZE 2020 AT BENDIGO ART GALLERY
Leo Coyte is a finalist in the Paul Guest Prize 2020 at Bendigo Art Gallery with his work ‘All in a heap (Bumpheads Surrender)’ The Paul Guest Prize is an award and exhibition held biennially that highlights contemporary drawing practice in Australia. The Prize was initiated by former Family Court Judge and Olympic rower, The…
LEO COYTE EXHIBITION PREVIEWED IN ‘VAULT’ ISSUE 31, 2020 P 24
“Bendigo based artist Leo Coyte will show a new body of work entitled ‘Shelter’ at Nicholas Thompson Gallery, his third exhibition with the Melbourne gallery. Coyte has quickly developed a following for his visually complex paintings that meld abstraction and figuration with a post-pop post-punk sensibility. As Coyte explains: “Vivid colour, dark humour and macabre subject…
