How Things Work: Adam Cullen

Adam Cullen began garnering positive reviews and collectors’ following early in his career, when he was completing his studies at the University of NSW and exhibiting at the prestigious Yuill / Crowley galleries in Sydney, being acknowledged as one of the most important exponents of the Grunge movement in Australian visual arts. Like many artists, he began entering art prizes. On his fourth attempt in 2000, he was not only selected as a finalist but was also awarded the Archibald Prize for his portrait of David Wenham.  

The award had a flow-on effect on his career and shone a spotlight on the artist. A child of white middle-class Northern suburbs, his paintings expose the darkness behind the picket fences, manicured lawns, and lace curtains. A fifth-generation Australian with strong roots in the rural New South Wales, as well as boasting Irish Catholic heritage on his mother’s side, his paintings draw upon subjects from Colonial History, including the many images of Ned Kelly, who was the subject of Cullen’s master thesis, and with whom the artist came to identify. The world of advertising and commercial television was another important source of inspiration for the artist’s works.   

It is indeed the latter—advertising and commercial television—that accounts for the lurid colour schemes within his works. The blank canvas was his greatest nemesis and the source of his numerous anxieties. He painted at night when he knew he would not be disturbed. Every painting was presaged but numerous stream-of-consciousness drawings. He laid the foundation with bright colours and expressive, gestural brushstrokes. Black outlines and slogans were applied later, demonstrating his background as a cartoonist. The black contains the myriad of colours; it animates and imparts menacing undertones to his protagonists; and, like the lead of stained-glass windows, accentuates the brilliancy and saturation of surrounding pigments.  

Adam Cullen’s legacy includes an important body of paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and graphics, which, during his lifetime, were exhibited regularly in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth. His works were included in important curated exhibitions at the AGNSW (most notably the 1993 Perspecta), MCA, AGSA, and the University of Western Australia; and in 2002 he was chosen to represent Australia in the prestigious Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil. In 2008, he was given an important survey exhibition, Let’s Get Lost, at the AGNSW, which was accompanied by the publication of a major monograph on the artist’s work.

Apart from the celebrated win of the Archibald Prize in 2000, the artist was an eight-time finalist in the Archibald Prize, two-time finalist in the MoranPrize, the winner of the 2005 Mosman Art Prize and the 2008 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize. He was honoured by the inauguration of the Cullen Hotel, apart of the Art Series Hotel Group, in Melbourne, in 2009, joining such artists as John Olsen, Charles Blackman, Michael Johnson and others to be distinguished in this particular way.  

His works have been acquired by the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria; state collections of New South Wales, South Australia, and Western Australia; regional collection of Kedumba, Gold Coast, and Geelong; the tertiary collections of Monash and Griffiths universities, as well as notable corporate and private collections in Australia and abroad.