Echidnas and Parrots of Dean Bowen’s Australian Art
An Australian contemporary artist with an international reputation, Dean Bowen follows his heart exploring themes of suburbia, birds, and Australian marsupials. In his dream-like humorous imaginary world, the happy world of Bowen's natural sensorium flows into abundant life.
Photography by Drew Ryan
As a multidisciplinary artist, Bowen works in printmaking, oil, and watercolour painting, alongside sculptures in bronze. He has published numerous books including books of his etchings, his work has been made into an animation in Japan, and a tapestry for the City of Melbourne.
He works in texture, from the humble grey lead to lost wax and cast bronze, each brushstroke is his own, each bird, echidna, wombat, and kookaburra created with joy, his work explodes from the canvas in colour. His rich imagination and humour depict the Australian landscape, nature, and suburbia, in the big and small things that live here.
Bowen first studied printmaking at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and, after working in several professions, went to Europe to study in a printmaking studio. It was here in France, he became acquainted with the works of Jean Dubuffet, the great master of "Art Brut" and his way of expression.
In 1994 Bowen won the Grand Prix at the Fremantle Printmaking Awards, the highest award in Australia, as well as special awards at the Osaka Triennale of Printmaking in 1994 and 1997. It was from this he started working with Galerie Miyawaki in Kyoto, Japan. Challenging himself to create in other mediums Bowen turned to sculpture with many of Bowen’s sculptures looking like "somewhat flat" three-dimensional objects, assemblages, or self-portraits that seem to spring out of Bowen's prints.
Bowen developed an affinity for the creatures that lived around him from an early age, animals that are indigenous to Australia. The echidna on the head of his self-portrait was inspired by his grandmother, who likened Bowen's tousled hair to an echidna. His work also includes owls, kingfishers, koalas, wombats, and many imaginary birds and insects.
Other work focuses on suburbia, the houses where people live, and the transport such as cars, airplanes, and boats, representing our everyday life. In 1995 Bowen was commissioned to design a tapestry ‘Suburbanology’. The tapestry was woven in collaboration with the Victorian Tapestry Workshop.
In 2010, Bowen exhibited "Argy Bargy", a publication of popular illustrations, at Galerie Miyawaki. Bowen’s work focused on his motif of ‘happy birds’, with over 40 paintings in oil, and watercolour, monotype prints, with an animation made from Bowen’s art.
This year Bowen commences a two-year major touring survey exhibition around Japan titled Australia: Land, Sky, Birds, and Creatures, with 150 works made over the last thirty years, including eighty prints and a total of seventy works across oil paintings, watercolours, bronze sculptures, assemblages, and artist books. The exhibition includes major bronze sculptures such as Smiling Kookaburra (large) 2021 and Echidna 2013. The exhibition will tour to five museums of modern art in Japan from 2023 to 2025.
A film documentary, Argy-Bargy, the life and practice of Australian artist Dean Bowen can be seen on the artist’s website.
Dean Bowen is a guest panellist at the K5 X Saturday In Design talk ‘For the love of Art’ alongside Japanese furniture maker HIDA Sangyo and Erna Walsh of K5 Furniture.