" My paintings emerge from an ongoing exploration of love, desire, belonging and displacement"

Joël Richard is a French-Australian contemporary artist based in Sydney.

His practice moves between expressive figuration and abstraction, primarily through oil painting. His work explores the relationships between people, place and movement, and the ways memory, emotion and experience shape our perception of place.

Coming from a background in black-and-white film photography, Joël gradually shifted towards painting. Largely self-taught, he has continued to develop his practice through ongoing artistic education and mentorship, including studies at Gilbert Wolfisberg academy while developing a visual language in which colour, gesture and form occupy a central role.

His paintings emerge from an ongoing exploration of love, desire, belonging and displacement. Figures and landscapes often appear in states of tension or movement, suspended somewhere between what is observed, felt and remembered.

Born in France and based in Australia since 2009, his work is deeply influenced by these two geographies and by the movement between them.

Joël Richard currently lives and works in Sydney, Australia. His work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Australia. See CV

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