Jane Guthleben ‘In the Sticks’

Jane Guthleben has been announced as a finalist in the inaugural Pymble Values Art Prize. Her work 'It takes a Village' depicts eleven species of Australian native birds and their nests, exploring diversity and home making.

Each year the prize will be awarded to an Australian female artist, presenting an original two dimensional artwork that resonates with one of the Pymble's Ladies College values. This year the theme was Respect - 'I value diversity, my worth and the worth of others.'

The winner of the prize is announced 11 November, and the finalists exhibition will be open 12 - 14 November at Pymble Ladies College, Sydney.

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IMAGE:
JANE GUTHLEBEN
It takes a Village 2025
oil on linen
183 x 122 cm

Congratulations to Jane Guthleben who is a finalist in the 2025 Portia Geach Memorial Award with her self-portrait ‘I see myself in you’.

Her seventh recognition in this award speaks to her remarkable talent and strength of her ongoing practice.

Her 2025 finalist work is a self-portrait inspired by the fantastical still-life portraits of 16th-century artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, whose works she saw for the first time during a visit to Vienna earlier this year.

First awarded in 1965, the $30,000 non-acquisitive Portia Geach Memorial Award is Australia’s most significant portrait prize for women artists, established by Florence Kate Geach in memory of her sister, Portia Geach. The prize is awarded annually for the best portrait painted from life of a man or woman distinguished in art, letters, or the sciences.

The 2025 finalists’ exhibition will be on view at S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney until 2 November 2025.

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IMAGE:
JANE GUTHLEBEN
‘I See Myself in You’ 2025
oil on linen
50 x 50cm

We are delighted to share that Jane Guthleben has been named a finalist in the prestigious 2025 Calleen Art Award. Presented by Cowra Regional Art Gallery, the award encourages originality, creativity and excellence in the visual arts and has been a key cultural event in regional NSW since its founding in 1977.

Guthleben’s finalist work, ‘Semi-Arid Bouquet, after the Goats’, was inspired by a recent trip through Western NSW. “We soon noticed a thriving feral goat population, and the damage they cause. They vastly outnumber wildlife and decimate native vegetation. My large-scale floral arrangements tap into the symbolism of Dutch Golden Age painting, where flora symbolises morality and the brevity of life. I imagined a large bouquet of outback flora set upon by goats – perched on every limb, consuming every petal, leaf and stem – with bare hills in the background hinting at their devastation.”

The finalists’ exhibition will be on view at Cowra Regional Art Gallery from 31 August – 5 October 2025.

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IMAGE:
Jane Guthleben at the Calleen Art Award with her painting 'Semi-Arid Bouquet, after the Goats' 2025

Congratulations to Jane Guthleben who is a finalists in the 2024 Portia Geach Memorial Award with her self portrait 'The Female Artist'.

This painting is part of an ongoing series of portraits of women that I call ornament-portraits; small in size and designed to be the opposite of monuments, which have historically been mostly of men. I stand the subject on a little plinth so that she appears rather like an ornament on a shelf. I usually choose women I admire in the Arts, Politics or the Media. This series is not to diminish the achievements of these women, but rather to draw attention to the fact that women’s appearance continues to be a subject of discussion – that women continue to be “ornamental” - despite their work and stature.

Inspired by Wendy Sharpe’s Self Portrait as Circus Banner 2019, I decided to paint a self-portrait. In her portrait, Wendy pointed to the continuing pitfalls of being a female artist, including being known as a “woman artist” rather than just an artist, having no visible means of support, and wearing a cloak of invisibility.

Female Artist is a nod to this and is painted in the style of a still life, which is often seen as female subject matter. I have imagined myself as a porcelain ornament, standing in front of an easel with a flower painting. The apron and the pastel colours add to the domesticity of the subject matter.

Jane Guthleben, 2024

Finalists exhibition will be held at the S.H Ervin Gallery, 25 October – 15 December 2024, Sydney

IMAGE:

JANE GUTHLEBEN
‘The Female Artist (self-portrait)’ 2024
oil on marine ply
40 x 20cm

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Jane Guthleben has been participating in an Artist in Residence program at Tanks Arts Centre in Cairns. The residency is designed to support a diverse range of arts practitioners from visual arts and music to writing, performance, multimedia and community cultural development, with projects that connect to the Tanks’ vibrant community and landscape.

During her residency, Guthleben collaborated with fellow artists Joanne Sisson and Carole Wilson to present Latitude 16.9013° south. This exhibition brought together three distinct artistic voices, each exploring botanical specimens from locations across Australia. Guthleben’s own practice reimagines Dutch still-life traditions by inserting endangered Australian flora into neo-Baroque compositions, referencing Vanitas symbolism to reflect on habitat loss and climate change.

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IMAGE:
Jane Guthleben's exhibition 'Latitude 16.9013° south' at Tanks Art Centre.

Jane Guthleben has been selected for the Portia Geach Memorial Award, for her painting of the bird photographer, Leila Jeffreys.

Renowned photographic artist Leila Jeffreys is internationally recognised for her bird portraiture, video installations, books, films and her contribution to bird conservation. Recently she undertook an assignment in sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island, where she observed penguin populations. She sent me pictures from the trip of penguin parents doting on their fluffy brown babies. With recent news that shrinking ice has had a devastating impact on penguin populations in Antarctica this year, her trip and research couldn’t have been timelier.

For our Portia Geach sitting we went to Sydney Aquarium where we spent a few hours looking at penguins. Leila is a bird whisperer, and the penguins there climbed all over her and were fascinated by her camera equipment. It seemed right that a portrait of Leila would include a bird.

This painting is part of an ongoing series of portraits of women I admire that I call ornament-portraits; small in size and designed to be the opposite of monuments (which have historically been mostly of men). The subject stands on a little plinth, rather like an ornament on a shelf. In this case the plinth can also be read as a shrinking iceberg floating in Antarctic waters.

Image:

'Leila and the Baby King' 2023
oil on marine ply
40.2cm x 22.6cm

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Jane Guthelben was featured in the Sydney Morning Herald article 'How does it feel to be painted for the Archibald Prize? Terrifying' by Helen Pitt.

You can read the article here.

The alternative Archibald and Wynne Prize selection

5th June – 26 September 2021

The Salon des Refusés was initiated by the S.H. Ervin Gallery in 1992 in response to the large number of works entered into the Archibald Prize which were not selected for display in the official exhibition. The Archibald Prize is one of Australia’s most high profile and respected awards which attracts hundreds of entries each year and the S.H. Ervin Gallery’s ‘alternative’ selection has become a much anticipated feature of the Sydney scene.

Each year our panel is invited to go behind the scenes of the judging process for the annual Archibald Prize for portraiture and Wynne Prize for landscape painting and figure sculpture at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, to select an exhibition from the many hundreds of works entered in both prizes but not chosen for the official award exhibition.

The Salon des Refusés exhibition at the S.H. Ervin Gallery has established an excellent reputation that rivals the selections in the ‘official’ exhibition, with works selected for quality, diversity, humour and experimentation, and which examine contemporary art practices, different approaches to portraiture and responses to the landscape.

JANE GUTHLEBEN Greetings from Bibbenluke (Lucy Culliton, artist)

ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

Jane Guthleben’s subject is author and journalist Annabel Crabb, who is also known for her cookbooks and TV shows about cooking, Australian politics and history. The pair met some years ago when Annabel bought one of Guthleben’s paintings.

‘I admire Annabel because she energetically juggles full-time work and excellent cooking and has written about the pressures of modern domesticity in The wife drought,’ says Guthleben. ‘The painting aims to portray the public persona of Annabel as a baker, while celebrating the domesticity she writes and podcasts about.

‘I’ve painted her as an ornament on a small pedestal, wearing an apron and holding a wooden spoon – part of a series of ornament-portraits where the subject is transformed into a shelf ornament in a mundane pose. The work is deliberately small in scale to be the opposite of monumental, and pastel colours play upon the stereotype of woman as homemaker, which Annabel somehow manages to transcend.’

A former journalist herself, Guthleben was born in 1966 in Bairnsdale, Victoria. This is her first time in the Archibald Prize.

Jane Guthleben was the recipient of the international NG Art Creative Residency which is a two week placement at the 15th century Provincial homestead in Eygalières, Provence, Southern France in November 2019.

Directed and founded by Nicky Ginsberg, the NG Art Creative Residency is a prize that aims to provide creatives an opportunity to embark on imaginative endeavours and immerse themselves in an environment of reflection and creative freedom in the studio and en plein air.

Jane's new body of work from Eygalières will be exhibited in her upcoming show, Grandiflora at Edwina Corlette Gallery 17 March - 9 April 2020.

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As an acquisitive art award for painting, the winning artworks in the Mosman Art prize form a splendid collection of modern and contemporary Australian art, reflecting all the developments in Australian art practice since 1947. Artists who have won the Mosman Art Prize include Margaret Olley, Guy Warren, Grace Cossington Smith, Weaver Hawkins, Nancy Borlase, Lloyd Rees, Elisabeth Cummings, Adam Cullen, Michael Zavros and Natasha Walsh.

In 2019 Jane Guthleben is a finalist with her work 'North Shore arrangement with superb fruit doves'. She says of the painting:

This work is based on the 17 century Dutch still life floral works by Rachel Ruysch, which have inspired my large floral compositions. For this work I have researched indigenous flora and birds from the Mosman Municipal area that are under pressure from urban encroachment and weeds.

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Jane Guthleben is a finalist in 2019 with her work The scratching post (self, artist).

The Award was established by the will of the late Florence Kate Geach in memory of her sister, Portia Geach. The non-acquisitive prize is awarded by the Trustee for the entry which is of the highest artistic merit, ‘…for the best portrait painted from life of some man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters, or the Sciences by any female artist resident in Australia during the twelve months preceding the close date for entries.’

The 2019 exhibition will run from August 2 to September 15, 2019 at Sydney's S.H. Ervin Gallery.

READ MORE HERE

The alternative Archibald and Wynne Prize selection

11 May – 28 July 2019

The Salon des Refusés was initiated by the S.H. Ervin Gallery in 1992 in response to the large number of works entered into the Archibald Prize which were not selected for display in the official exhibition. The Archibald Prize is one of Australia’s most high profile and respected awards which attracts hundreds of entries each year and the S.H. Ervin Gallery’s ‘alternative’ selection has become a much anticipated feature of the Sydney scene.

Each year our panel is invited to go behind the scenes of the judging process for the annual Archibald Prize for portraiture and Wynne Prize for landscape painting and figure sculpture at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, to select an exhibition from the many hundreds of works entered in both prizes but not chosen for the official award exhibition. Of the 978 entries to the Archibald Prize the AGNSW Trustees selected 52 works, and from 734 entries to the Wynne Prize the Trustees selected 29 works.

From the remaining submission our selectors have chosen 30 works from the Archibald Prize entries and 23 works from the Wynne Prize entries for this alternative exhibition. The 2019 selectors were Brian Langer, director, Cowra Regional Art Gallery and Jane Watters, director, S.H. Ervin Gallery

The Salon des Refusés exhibition at the S.H. Ervin Gallery has established an excellent reputation that rivals the selections in the ‘official’ exhibition, with works selected for quality, diversity, humour and experimentation, and which examine contemporary art practices, different approaches to portraiture and responses to the landscape.