Juan Ford – A Survey: Benalla Art Gallery

Juan Ford

8 Nov 2024 - 26 Jan 2025

Bennett Gallery | Curated by Dr Vincent Alessi

“Art involves observation, contemplation, reaction, flow, resistance, time, feeling; all processed by the body, and filtered through a medium. The medium’s filtering produces unexpected results, and the totality of the process is a slow form of thought itself.” – Juan Ford

This survey exhibition presents 20 years of Ford’s practice, revealing the key conceptual questions with which he has engaged and which over time have manifested in more complex, refined and mature ways. It is an exhibition that reveals the trajectory of Ford’s thinking, technical virtuosity and visual language. It reveals the new ways Ford has developed to speak with his audience about concerns which have always interested him.

Presented thematically, the exhibition reveals how Ford has been consistently engaged with certain questions throughout his career, evidence of his deep intellectual engagement with ideas and concepts and artistic traditions. The exhibition celebrates one of this country’s most accomplished painters, not solely owing to his technical brilliance but more so because of his commitment to engage with questions that are incredibly contemporary, pressing, and central to who we are, what we might be, and where we are going.

For over 20 years Juan Ford has single-mindedly pursued an artistic practice that has engaged with the art historical canon, the Australian landscape painting tradition and broad universal questions about the human condition and the relationship between humans and the natural world.

The outcome has been a diverse practice, defined by his magisterial painting, and informed by his intellectual curiosity and a commitment to the idea that art has the capacity to make us think, contemplate and act. It is a practice that has developed both conceptually and technically, but has always been defined by Ford’s interest in how we engage and navigate the world in which we live; a world that is now at the crossroads as we edge ever closer to catastrophic and irreversible impacts of climate change.

Born in Melbourne in 1973, Ford holds a Master of Arts (Fine Art) by research and a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting), RMIT University. He has been awarded numerous significant grants and art prizes, including the Basil Sellers Art Prize People’s Choice Award [Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne]; Fletcher Jones Contemporary Art Prize [Geelong Gallery]; and the Conrad Jupiters Art Prize [Gold Coast City Art Gallery]. Ford has presented over 35 solo exhibitions since the late 1990s, and has been featured in significant curated groups exhibitions at institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, and the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

Juan Ford’s work is held in private and public collections in Australia and internationally, including Artbank, Benalla Art Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery, Geelong Gallery, McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park, Monash University Museum of Art, National Gallery of Victoria, RMIT University and RMIT Union Arts, and the Parliament of Victoria.