King is recognised as one of Australia’s foremost contemporary printmakers. As well as completing residencies in France, Morocco, India and Antarctica, he has won numerous awards, including the WAMA Art Prize (2023), National Print and Drawing Prize (2022), Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award (2022) and Muswellbrook Drawing Prize (2019). His work can be found in public collections at the British Museum, National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria and Art Gallery of New South Wales, among others.

Martin King’s lighting the way for the journey of lost souls is a meditation on the merging of creative mediums. A bold print centered around the repeated image of a stylized bird rendered from a photographic negative, the work explores the shifting dynamics of space and form — simultaneously immediate in its graphic clarity and deliberately ambiguous in its meaning. Each bird, solid in tone and stripped of internal detail, resists identification; species and individuality are obscured, allowing the figure to function more as an emblem than a portrait.

This abstraction transforms the bird into a symbol—of memory and the act of seeing. Viewers are invited to project their own meanings, evoking the fleeting, often elusive quality of recollection. Rooted in the artist’s boyhood fascination with birds and creative exploration of print and photgraphic media Lighting the way for the journey of lost souls holds particular appeal for those attuned to the symbolic weight of flight. It speaks to a space where presence and absence co-exist, where clarity gives way to mystery—and where the visual becomes a vessel for both personal and collective memory.

Senior Printmaker at the Australian Print Workshop since 1994, King’s work is elegant, evocative and esteemed. For collectors of contemporary prints, this work offers collectors a contemplative work that explores memory, motion, and the enduring allure of flight through minimalist repetition and abstracted avian imagery.

Martin KING (1957 - )
'lighting the way for the journey of lost souls' 2022
photopolymer gravure, chine colle on burnt paper
Edition of 1
Image Size: 60 x 138 cm
Dimensions: 69 x 148 x 4 cm
Signed: Signed, editioned and titled under image
Comes with Letter of Provenance
Condition:Excellent:
(c) The Artist or Assignee