Wayne Eager

Wayne Eager was a founding member of ROAR STUDIOS, a dynamic artist-run exhibition space in Fitzroy, Melbourne, and the first venture of its kind in Australia. His early works were exhibited there in 1982. ROAR STUDIOS’ contribution to the revival of Australian painting has been explored in three significant texts, each of which acknowledges Eager’s role in its development.

Eager has held 30 solo exhibitions throughout Australia, and his work is represented in 13 public collections, as well as numerous private collections in Australia and overseas. In 1990, he spent an extended period at Kakadu, where he produced a body of work responding to the Top End environment. These works were exhibited in Melbourne and Sydney in 1991–92. The following year, Eager moved to the Central Desert, where he worked with a number of Indigenous organisations supporting the development of the Aboriginal painting movement, initially at Haasts Bluff and then with Papunya Tula. He subsequently worked throughout the APY Lands for a decade.

Eager’s extensive experience of the Northern Territory landscape has been a fundamental influence on his oeuvre for more than 30 years. His work reflects the integrity of an artist whose life has been devoted to an ongoing exploration of the possibilities and purity of painting.

“My paintings are arrived at through a distillation process of a series of overlaid marks and shapes. In the 1990s I was more interested in a depiction of the landscape surrounds, whilst now the paintings are more non-representational (abstract) although the basic inspiration remains the central desert landscape, where I live.”
— Wayne Eager, 2019