Liz Gridley is a member of the Beautiful Bizarre Artist Directory
From an artistic interest spurred through Life Drawing sessions, Liz Gridley’s work centers on her emotional experiences of the human body, internal stresses, and how a painted human subject can affect the emotional state of the viewer.
Liz had her debut solo exhibition ‘Empathy, My Witness’ in 2018 at Off The Kerb Gallery following her Major Prize win at the Graeme Hildebrand Art Prize in 2017. She has been a Finalist in a number of awards including the Kennedy Art Prize, Cliftons Art Prize, the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Art Prize (USA), Fortyfive downstairs Emerging Art Prize, was awarded a commendation by judge Prudence Flint for her piece in the 2019 Rick Amor Self Portrait Prize.
She was also a resident of the ‘Growing Pains Initiative’ Artists Residency at Burrinja Gallery in Upwey in 2019, creating oil paintings that spread organically across the gallery walls before demolition.
Liz is currently working from her studio in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia).
Liz has been awarded a place in the “2024 Inaugural Victorian Artists Society Coterie” sponsored by the Hansen Little Foundation in Australia. The residency will support her in mentorship, life painting sessions, and studio development time. She was also a resident of the ‘Growing Pains Initiative’ Artists Residency at Burrinja Gallery in Upwey in 2019, creating oil paintings that spread organically across the gallery walls before demolition.
In Liz Gridley’s most recent work she has been utilizing female figures accosted by fantastical cloudscapes that envelope and interact with the figure. Influenced by realism with surreal colour, the pieces often analyze traditional themes from history and religion such as Allegories and Memento Mori.
From 2023, Hunting for universal moments of human connection: the personal, inevitability of death & death care is a point in which discussion can be culturally celebrated or silenced. Here Liz’s experience with hyper-emotion is immune to medications and coping strategies and has space to allow for conversation that is otherwise often assumed knowledge or pushed aside as taboo.
Gridley is enamored by psychological conflict of external stressors on the body and finding visual catalysts for universal human connection between the portrait and viewer.
Vulnerability, fear, strength and consummation. Utilizing the language of high drama subject paintings, she pushes to look past the vagueness of beauty in representational painting and analyze how your external influences have elevated or plagued you in your own story.
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