Artist
Thomas was awarded the John McCaughey Prize in 1990 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Thomas was one of the two Aboriginal Australians to exhibit in the Venice Biennale in 1990, alongside Trevor Nickolls.. He was the subject of the important solo exhibition Roads Cross: The Paintings of Rover Thomas, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra in 1994.
In 2000, Thomas's work was amongst that of eight individual and collaborative groups of Indigenous Australian artists shown in the prestigious Nicholas Hall at the Hermitage Museum in Russia. The exhibition received a positive reception from Russian critics, one of whom wrote:
This is an exhibition of contemporary art, not in the sense that it was done recently, but in that it is cased in the mentality, technology and philosophy of radical art of the most recent times. No one, other than the Aborigines of Australia, has succeeded in exhibiting such art at the Hermitage.
Thomas and Emily Kame Kngwarreye were amongst the most successful Australian artists in the national and global art markets.
Read more about this topic: Rover Thomas
Famous quotes containing the word artist:
“The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, who follows blind instinct, strives to duplicate the reality of nature. The first one elevates art to its highest peak; the second one lowers it to its basest level.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist.... We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.”
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“A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it.”
—Harry S. Broudy (b. 1905)