“Riley Payne’s meticulous photorealist drawings tease out new connections between disparate but instantly recognisable pictorial elements. By re-rendering existing photographic imagery through a labour-intensive drawing process, he attempts to stem the tide of visual information that assaults us daily. Enigmatic and open-ended, Payne’s drawings encourage new relationships between language and image that are achieved through the use of humour, subversion and recontextualisation.”
—Cathy Leahy, Senior Curator, Prints and Drawings, NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2017
Riley Payne (b. 1979, Melbourne, Australia) lives and works in New York, USA. Selected solo exhibitions include This Heat, Fish Island Gallery, Norwalk, Connecticut, U.S.A (2021); Head and World at ReadingRoom, Melbourne (2021); Nature Documentary at ReadingRoom, Melbourne (2019); Any Day Now at New Release Gallery, New York (2018); Serenader at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne (2016); and his work was included in the inaugural NGV Triennial (2017–2018). He was a finalist in the RBS Emerging Artist Award (2011), and has held a residency at Artspace, Sydney (2014).
Contact to request a catalogue of available works
Chloe Mandryk, Riley Payne: Nature Documentary, Art Almanac, February, 2019
John Thomson, Riley Payne: Humour, Profundity and Hard Labour, Vault Magazine, Issue 12, 2015