Colin Lanceley (b. 1938), painter, printmaker and sculptor, arrived in Australia from New Zealand as a baby. In the 1950s he undertook a diploma in painting at the National Art School under John Passmore. In 1961, while still a student at the East Sydney Technical College, he became a founding member of the trio known as the Annandale Imitation Realists, who exhibited their zany collaborative assemblages of paint and junk at the Rudy Komon Gallery and Melbourne's Museum of Modern Art and Design. Although the group dissolved when Lanceley left for Europe in 1965 on the Helena Rubinstein scholarship, the iconography of the constructed world continued to evolve through his whimsical Miro-like prints, as well as in his paintings embellished with three-dimensional tubular shapes. Through the sixties and seventies Lanceley established a reputation in London; he taught at the Chelsea School of Art and his works were acquired by the Tate and the V&A. He exhibited regularly in Australia and returned to Sydney to live in the 1980s. He is the subject of several monographs and an ABC documentary.
