Yvette Coppersmith

For those of you interested in portraiture in Australia, Yvette Coppersmith needs no introduction.

She has painted dozens of portraits, including a collection of fascinating self-portraits, and is regularly shortlisted in the country’s most competitive portrait awards. In 2018 she was awarded the one that would place her in Australian art history – the Archibald Prize.

What has captured my attention more recently, though, are Yvette’s abstract works, particularly a body of work I saw in her exhibition ‘Presage’ at Sullivan + Strumpf in Sydney last year. They were thickly textured, swirling abstractions and how she came to create that show is as interesting as the paintings themselves.

Yvette has been painting for over 20 years and her work is held in many public and private collections. In addition to winning the Archibald Prize, she has won the Metro 5 Art Award and has been a finalist multiple times in nearly every prestigious portrait prize in Australia, including the Doug Moran, Portia Geach, and Darling Portrait prizes.

In this episode we follow her career from her early photorealistic works to her present-day experimentation with paint and genre, encompassing still lifes and interiors along the way.

To hear the conversation click ‘play’ below the above photo. See below for images of the works we talk about in the show.

Photograph of Yvette Coppersmith by Mel Savage