MORGAN ALLENDER

BIO

Morgan Allender’s evocative paintings are commanding, melancholic and dark, but also transcendent and gentle with bursts of light. Her works draw on Dutch and Flemish vanitas painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but in a modern twist, elements from still life and landscape genres interweave, with rich visual composition, nuanced use of texture and a dramatic interplay between light and colour. A past recipient of the Fleurieu Peninsula Youth Scholarship, Allender has been a finalist in several art prizes and is represented in major collections.

Allender portays the emotive process of something felt, resisting graphic representation, rather using scale, depth and distortion to create mysterious spaces that blur the interior and exterior, large and small, soft and wild. Gestural and expressive, the works instill a sense of wonder and awe, celebrating the everyday, and rendering concrete the notion of nature as dynamic and revelatory.