BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY

 

Since graduating from England’s Bath Academy of Art in 1976 (where he was taught by the modern masters Frank Auerbach and Howard Hodgkin) Downs exhibited his striking and unusual shaped paintings in over 50 solo shows and 300 group shows in twenty countries around the world, including the Pompidou Centre, Paris, the Centro de Cultura Contemporanea, Barcelona, the Barbican Centre, London. the Museum of Contemporary Art, Beijing, and the Osaka Triennale of Painting in Japan.

 

He is represented commercially by Hua International Galleries of Beijing and Berlin and Matthias Kuper Galleries of Stuttgart and Songzhuang. He also has exhibited with TAKSU Galleries of Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, Redgate/Surge Galleries of Beijing, Traveling Gallery of Songzhuang, The EMG Foundation in Guangzhou and Beijing and E-Hive Gallery in Melbourne. In years past he has exhibited with Annandale, Defiance and Syndicate Galleries in Sydney and Tolarno in Melbourne.

 

He has been an artist in residence in many countries and many diverse environments and has also been a visiting lecturer at more than fifty art schools and academies across the world including the Royal College of Art, London, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Statens Kunstakademi, Oslo, the VCA, Melbourne, COFA, Sydney, Hong Ik University, Seoul, the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art and the Hong Kong Art School.

 

Between 1982 and 1985 he worked in studios in New York including those of Frank Stella and Richard Smith.

His striking shaped paintings have featured in two major surveys of twentieth century art; ‘La Ville’, the definitive survey of urban landscape painting between 1900 and 2000 held at the Pomdidou Centre, Paris, and ‘Dreams in Twentieth Century Art’ curated by Lyn Gamwell in New York in 2002.

 

In 1990, he moved to Australia where he gained his MFA at the University of New South Wales and, soon after, became Head of Drawing and then Head of Postgraduate Studies at the National Art School, Sydney. Following this period of his life, he embarked on a long series of journeys across Asia, painting shaped works which took on aspects of each environment and exhibiting wherever he went. He has spent considerable time in Indonesia, working firstly in Bali and then Yogyakarta, where he produced many of the South East Asian works in his multi-year ‘Urban Energies’ project. This major series of radical shaped paintings explores the multitude of issues around the growth of Asian megacities including Jakarta, Seoul, Bangkok, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

 

China is an important centre of his professional world these days. He has long held a fascination with the country, having first visited it in 1990 and spent time in Beijing in 1998. The enormous changes under way in China drew him back in 2010 and he located his studio in Songzhuang Artists’ Village, an hour east of Beijing city centre, soon after. He has made twenty-five working visits to China, including spells in Kunming, Guangzhou, Xingtai and Hangzhou.

In 2021/22, Michael Downs will be painting in studios in Batam, Bogor and Ubud, before taking up an International artist in residence post at the Shangyuan Art Museum in Huairou, north of Beijing. He will also be exhibiting his Chinese urban energy paintings at EMG Shenzhen and other venues around China.