" My paintings emerge from an ongoing exploration of love, desire, belonging and displacement"
" My paintings emerge from an ongoing exploration of love, desire, belonging and displacement"
" Drawing from lived experience between Australia and Europe, my paintings emerge from love, desire, belonging and displacement"
Bio
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 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 below.
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Joël Richard is a Sydney based painter working mainly with oil. Drawing on lived experience between Australia and Europe, his practice centres on people, places and movement.
CV
Exhibitions
Solo
2026 Sublime Terminal, 14 Oct - 16 Dec, Online release.
2026 Romantic Radical Lovers, St-Jean-de-Luz, France.
2026 What do you want me to say now, North Bondi Studio
2025 Barking Dreams, Comber Street Studio, Paddington, Sydney
2024 If You Leave Can I Come, Chippendale, Sydney
2022 Sense of Guilt, Room 205, Darlinghurst, Sydney
Group
2026 Surface tension, Lowes and Leckie Gallery , paddington
2026 Good Together, Bondi Pavilion Art Gallery, Bondi Beach
2025 Welcome Others x Curly Lewis, Sydney
2024 Frontiers, Comber Street Studio / Art Club at Our House, Sydney
2024 Water, SOHO Gallery, Sydney
2024 Utopia, Twenty Twenty Six Gallery / Art Club, Sydney
Education / Professional Development
Courses and masterclasses in composition, pictorial language, and colour theory
Art Prize
2024 SOHO Art Prize Finalist
Selected Projects
2026 Card Gift Australia November December Artist of the month
2024 Philip Shaw Winery wine label and cellar door painting
2022 Brown Sugar Restaurant dining room painting
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