Neil Frazer

B. 1961

Neil Frazer, Tide Sweep 2020, acrylic on canvas, 1360 x 1360 mm $16,000

Artist Biography

Neil Frazer was born in Canberra, Australia, in 1961, and moved with his family to New Zealand in 1965. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in 1985. In 1986, he attended the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts, Sydney, in 2000. He currently lives in Sydney.

Frazer has created over 30 solo exhibitions in New Zealand and Australia since 1984, and has been awarded premier awards and fellowships in both countries. In 1992, he was awarded the Frances Hodgkin’s Fellowship at the University of Otago. In 2010, and 2011, he was a finalist in the Wynne Prize, one of Australia’s most prestigious and longest-running art awards. In 2012, Frazer won the Member’s Choice award, as part of the Tattersall’s Art Prize, and in 2013, he won the People’s Choice award, as part of the Fleurieu Art Prize. His work is included in major public, corporate, and private collections in both Australia and New Zealand, including Artbank, Deloitte Collection, and the National Bank Art Collection.

Frazer spent the first 20 years of his career as an abstract painter, although his works, while containing no obvious figurative elements, were mostly based on landscape. These roots in abstraction reveal themselves in the work he’s been making since the mid-2000s, where Frazer’s thick, impasto brushstrokes build layer upon layer of ice, rock, and snow to create animated, representational landscapes, where the physical act of painting is still very much at the forefront. These heavily textured, three-dimensional, surfaces often contrast starkly with Frazer’s trademark flat, white backgrounds, creating tension between absence and presence, and adding to the intensity and vigour of the subject. Of his practice, Frazer says, “I paint out of a deep need to do so, and painting for me is more about finding its limits and possibilities than about conveying an overt meaning”.

Solo Exhibitions

  • New work, 2020
  • New paintings, 2014
  • Neil Frazer, 2008

Group Exhibitions