Rick Amor is a painter, printmaker and sculptor. After studying in Melbourne and winning many prizes and grants, from 1975 to 1983 he produced a series of cartoons attacking the Fraser government. After 1983 he began to paint more personal and emotionally-charged works, often incorporating a haunting ‘solitary watcher’. Some of his paintings of suburban and inner Melbourne now number amongst the defining images of the city. He is a regular exhibitor in the Wynne and Sulman Prizes, as well as the Archibald, in which he was a finalist nine times between 1976 and 2005. During the 1990s Amor was awarded several art residencies and worked in Barcelona, New York and London. In 1999, appointed Australia’s first official war artist since Vietnam, he travelled to East Timor to record the reconstruction efforts of peacekeepers. The resulting works are in the collection of the Australian War Memorial. Although he describes himself as an amateur sculptor, his disturbing black dog has crouched outside the National Gallery of Australia since 2004, and he won the $100 000 McClelland Sculpture Prize in late 2007. Amor has painted scientist Peter Doherty and governor-general Peter Cosgrove on commission for the National Portrait Gallery, which mounted the exhibition Rick Amor: 21 Portraits in 2014–2015.
Gift of the artist 2005. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program.
© Rick Amor/Copyright Agency, 2024
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Australian author David Malouf discusses the creation of his portrait by artist Rick Amor.
Artist Rick Amor and author Shane Maloney relate divergent experiences of the creation of Shane's portrait.
