Teo Treloar
b 1974, Sydney, Australia
Qualifications
2006: Master of Visual Art, Sydney College of the Arts, New South Wales
2003: Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours, 1st Class), Sydney College of the Arts, New South Wales
Grants and Awards
2023: Winner, Kedumba Drawing Award: The Kedumba Collection of Australian Drawing.
2022: NSW Government, Create NSW Visual Arts Commissioning Grant.
2021: Winner, Waverly Art Prize: Drawing Award. Waverly Woollahra Art School.
2020: Winner, JADA Acquisitive Drawing Award, Grafton Regional Gallery.
2012: Australia Council for the Arts, New Work Grant.
2005 – 2006: Australian Postgraduate Award, University of Sydney.
Selected Exhibitions
2024: Detail: 07 March - 31 March, DRAWSPACE, Sydney, NSW.
2022: 30 November - 17 December. And Now, The Plague, Olsen Gallery, Sydney, NSW
2022: 17 September - 13 November. And Now, The Plague. Grafton Regional Gallery, Grafton NSW.
2019: The National 2019: New Australian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney.
2019: The Black Captain, Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane
2018: Fieldwork, ALASKA Projects, Sydney.
2018: Couplings, Dominik Mersch, Sydney.
2017: How to Disappear Completely, Garage Rotterdam, The Netherlands
2016: Dark Symmetries, PS Project Space, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2014: Fractured Beauty, Wollongong City Gallery, New South Wales
2012: Remarking remaking: contemporary Australian drawing connections, Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney
Award Exhibitions
2023: Winner, Kedumba Drawing Award, Kedumba Collection of Australian Drawing.
2020: Winner, JADA Acquisitive Drawing Award, Grafton Regional Gallery.
2021: Winner. Waverley Art Prize Drawing Award, Waverley Woollahra Art School.
2023: Finalist, The Dobell Prize for Drawing: National Art School, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
2022: Finalist, Hazelhurst Works on Paper Award.
2017: Finalist, Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize, PLC Gallery, Sydney
2015: Finalist, The Churchie National Emerging Art Prize, Griffith University Art Gallery, Brisbane
2009: Finalist, Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Travel Scholarship, Sydney College of the Arts
2009: Finalist, Works on Paper Award, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, New South Wales
2008 Finalist, ABN Amro Art Awards, ABN Amro Building, Sydney
Collections.
The Kedumba Collection of Australian Drawing.
Jacaranda Drawing Award Collection, Grafton Regional Gallery, Grafton, NSW, Australia.
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Permanent Collection, Sydney, NSW, Australia
National Gallery of Australia, Drawings and Prints, Permanent Collection, Canberra, ACT, Australia.
Artbank, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Selected Bibliography.
2023: Australian Art Collector #102 OCT - DEC 2022, Profile by Daniel Mudie Cunningham. Pg 158 - 161.
2023: The Dobell Drawing Prize, Review by John McDonald, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age. 01/05/23
Treloar’s The Plague is one of the simplest and smallest drawings on display, but it carries a lot of weight. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, there were many people, self incuded, who took Camus’s great novel of 1947 down off the shelf. Treloar says he has acquired 35 separate editions. One of them must be the same as my copy, with the lurid Michael Ayrton dustjacket, but it was important for this work that the artist drew the plain early Penguin edition. This careful drawing of a worn paperback, on a densely cross-hatched field of grey, conveys a feeling of isolation, such as many people experienced during the lockdowns. One source of relief was through reading, particularly books such as The Plague that seemed to relate in a very deep way to our contemporary experiences. In both reading and drawing, Treloar seems to be saying, there lies an antidote to the chronic state of distraction in which most of us live our daily lives.
2023: The Dobell Drawing Prize, Review by Christopher Allen, The Australian.
But of all the drawings that remain in the mind and float back up to the surface of memory days after viewing the exhibition, I should especially mention Teo Treloar’s drawing of the Penguin edition of Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947); the quiet but absolute care with which every detail of the book and its background have been rendered in graphite pencil, an inherently slow and patient medium, is like an analogue of the attention of reading itself.
2019: The National, New Australian Art, Review by Erin McFadyen. Artist Profile.
It’s refreshing here to see drawings by Teo Treloar that take up the aesthetic of earlier Modernism. Treloar’s work, running across several wall spaces, gives us flat planar shapes in perspectively ambiguous space, looking Surreal at times and Constructivist at others. Treloar uses this drawing practice to reflect on personal experiences of mental health, and to throw a spanner at the cliché of the tortured (male) genius artist.
https://artistprofile.com.au/the-national-new-australian-art/
2019: The National, new Australian Art, Review by Craig Judd, Artlink Magazine.
in The Black Captain Teo Treloar re‑purposes motifs from Albrecht Durer’s Melancholia (1514) for the 21st century in a series of meticulous and extraordinarily detailed pencil drawings. Rather than an androgynous angel with an epic case of thwarted creativity, the classic writers block, Treloar employs the figure of a middle‑aged businessman with a white shirt and encroaching paunch to search the dimensions of visual reality. He is locked into a nightmarish Moebius strip of imagination, creation and distillation. There is no way out and no languages to redeem this landscape of infinite pointless production that is neither representational illusionism nor abstraction.
https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4754/the-national-2019-new-australian-art/
2019: Domonic Kavanagh, Teo Treloar, The National: New Australian Art, Pg 153 / 154,
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Carriage Works, Art Gallery of NSW.
2019: Daniel Mudie Cunningham, MOP Projects, 2003 – 2016, The Science, pg 172, Formist Editions.
2016: FAUVETTE, Teo Treloar, pg 84 – 85, Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney.
2019: The National, 2019: Art Gallery of NSW, Carriageworks, and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2019.
2014: Louise Brand. Fractured Beauty [ex. cat.], Wollongong City Gallery, 2014.
2012: Björn Hegardt, Fukt Magazine for Contemporary Drawing, Issue 11, Germany, 2012
https://www.fuktmagazine.com/#/fukt-11/