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Shaun Wake-Mazey is one of Western Australia’s most highly regarded senior painters, with a practice spanning more than four decades. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout Australia and internationally and is represented in major public, corporate and private collections including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Artbank, Wesfarmers, Holmes à Court Collection, Lord McAlpine Collection, Reuters International, Royal Perth Hospital, Curtin University, Alexander Library, Balsamo Collection in Italy and DOC Art Gallery in Italy. His inclusion in a 1993 Roslyn Oxley9 exhibition curated by John Stringer marked the emergence of a painter already operating with unusual authority and ambition, qualities that have continued to define his place within Australian painting.

Born in Albany, Western Australia, Wake-Mazey studied at Curtin University before establishing his practice in Perth and subsequently living and working in Sydney, Melbourne, Italy and Queensland. He returned permanently to Albany in 2016, where the landscape and atmosphere of the Great Southern continue to inform his practice. Monumental paintings on plywood have been central to his work since the early 1990s, with a remarkable continuity between those early paintings and the work he makes today.

Wake-Mazey’s paintings occupy a shifting territory between abstraction and landscape, often moving into something more metaphysical. They are characterised by intense colour and deep tonal contrasts, with light appearing to emerge from or disappear into darkness. Physical landscape gives way to something less tangible, where memory and mortality begin to surface.

Working predominantly with large panels laid horizontally, Wake-Mazey floods and pours oil paint across the surface, allowing gravity and movement to become active parts of the painting. Brushes are often introduced later, particularly where recognisable forms begin to emerge. The resulting paintings can feel geological or even cosmic. Wake-Mazey has described the paintings not as representations of an experience, but as the experience itself.

A period away from sustained studio practice followed a double lung transplant, before Wake-Mazey returned to painting with renewed intensity and ambition. Now working at full scale again from his Albany studio, this period marks a genuine re-emergence in his practice and an ambitious new body of work in which long-held ideas have become sharper and even more assured.

Wake-Mazey is represented by KolbuszSpace and will present a major solo exhibition of new paintings in 2027.

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