Garry Shead

Who is Garry Shead?

Garry Shead is an Australian artist and filmmaker who won the Archibald Prize in 1992/93 with a portrait of Tom Thompson, and won the Dobell Prize in 2004 with Colloquy with John Keats.

He won the Young Contemporaries Prize in 1967 and travelled to Japan, Papua New Guinea, France, Vienna and Budapest. He returned to Australia in the 1980s. His paintings are in many galleries in Australia and overseas.

Born in Sydney, New South Wales, he studied at the National Art School in the 1960s. He was a founding member of the Ubu Films collective in the late 1960s, with whom he made numerous experimental film works, and he also worked for the ABC as an editor, cartoonist, filmmaker and scenic painter before his first major solo exhibition with Watters Gallery in Sydney. He was a friend of Brett Whiteley and participated in the famous Yellow House activities. He has shown in more than seventy group exhibitions and had over fifty solo exhibitions, as well as illustrating numerous books. He won the Archibald Prize in 1993 with a portrait of Tom Thompson. He also painted a portrait of Brett Whiteley's ex-wife Wendy Whiteley for the Archibald Prize, but that entry did not win. He was a finalist in the Archibald Prize in 2009 and 2012.