Shaun Gladwell (b. 1972), new-media artist, photographer and painter, gained his qualifications in art at Sydney College of the Arts and the University of New South Wales. A star student, he won COFA’s Travelling Art Scholarship in 1996. He held his first solo exhibition, Kickflipping Flâneur, at Artspace in Sydney in 2000 and received the Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship for 2001-2002. In 2002 he received grants from the Australia Council and the National Association for the Visual Arts as well as the Pat Corrigan Artists’ Grant. He first had a solo exhibition at Sydney’s Sherman Galleries in 2003; he exhibited there again in 2005 and 2007, and at Melbourne’s Anna Schwartz Gallery in 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2013. He has had solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art and the Samstag Museum of the University of Adelaide; his MADDESTMAXIMVS, shown at Sherman Galleries in 2007, showed at the Venice Biennale in 2009. He has exhibited internationally since 2001, as a participant in many group shows and with solo shows in Paris, Buffalo, San Diego, Exeter, Toronto, Basel, Connecticut, Heerlen, Zagreb and London; in 2013 the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra performed The Flying Dutchman to the accompaniment of his video art. In 2009 he became the first new-media artist to be appointed an official war artist. The exhibition Shaun Gladwell: Afghanistan has shown in at least nine venues including the Australian Embassy in Washington. In Australia his works are held by the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian War Memorial, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as corporate and university collections; internationally, he is represented in Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Orange County Museum and the Wadsworth Athenaeum, amongst others. He has recently undertaken further study at Goldsmiths College at the University of London. Although he is best-known for his new-media work, Gladwell was awarded the $50 000 Shirley Hannan Portrait Prize (judged by National Portrait Gallery curator Sarah Engledow), for a small diptych painting of the Indigenous actor Meyne Wyatt in 2014.
