B. 1927 – 2025

Lawrence Daws was among Australia’s most significant twentieth-century artists. Having grown up on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia, he studied engineering and architecture at the University of Adelaide before moving to Melbourne to study at the National Art School between 1950 and 1953. 

In 1957 Daws won the Italian Travelling Scholarship after which he moved to London for ten years, travelling extensively throughout Europe, Russia, India, Mexico and the United States. In 1961 he was selected to participate in the Whitechapel and Tate Gallery exhibition of Australian art and in 1962 represented Australia at the Second Biennale des Jeunes in Paris alongside Charles Blackman and Brett Whiteley. 

Primarily a landscape artist, Daws’s work marks a journey of self-awareness and discovery, steered by the formal qualities of paint itself. He is represented across Australian public collections and internationally at the Tate Gallery, London, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London and Yale University, New Haven, among others. On his practice, the artist reflects: 

"Even when a painting is full of menace, I try to paint it in a beautiful way so you're seduced by the paint quality and you don't get subsumed by the horror."

To read a more in-depth biography of the artist, click here.