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 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