One of today’s leading international visual artists working in photography, film and video, Tracey Moffatt is known as a powerful visual storyteller, and many of her works have achieved iconic status both in her home country of Australia and around the world. She approaches all her work with a film director’s eye for setting and narrative, and her photographs play with a dynamic array of printing processes. Moffatt was the first Australian Indigenous artist to represent Australia for the 2017 Venice Biennale, in a solo presentation of two new photographic series Passage and Body Remembers in the Australia Pavilion in the Giardini. These series were subsequently shown at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in 2018.
Born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1960, Moffatt studied visual communications at the Queensland College of Art, from which she graduated in 1982. Since her first solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 1989, she has exhibited extensively in museums all over the world. She first gained significant critical acclaim when her short film, Night Cries, was selected for official competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. Her first feature film, beDevil, was also selected for Cannes in 1993. She was selected for the international section of the 1997 Venice Biennale and was also featured in the biennials of Sydney (1993, 1996, 2008), Singapore (2011), São Paulo (1998) and Gwangju (1995). A major exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1997-98 solidified her international reputation. In 2003, a large retrospective exhibition of Moffatt’s work was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, to record breaking attendances. She had her first retrospective exhibition in Italy, at Spazio Oberdan, Milan, in 2006. Her photographic series, Scarred For Life, was exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum and her video, LOVE, at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2007. Also that year, she was awarded the Infinity Award for art photography, selected by an international panel at the International Center of Photography in New York City.
Moffatt’s newest photographic series, Portals, was exhibited at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in 2019. This exhibition marked the international debut of this body of work, and comprises a series of six photographic diptychs, each telling a “short story” imbued with mystery and nostalgia, and featuring the artist herself in various guises. The images were shot in remote, unidentified locations using low lighting and a low shutter speed, and were then subtly manipulated to achieve ghost-like effects. The result is a series of powerful images that embody an eerie dream world, filled with wonder and foreboding.
In 2011, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York hosted a retrospective exhibition of her video work, and in May 2012, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented a comprehensive retrospective of Moffatt’s film and video work, featuring screenings of all her major works and a ten-day series of artist talks at the museum. In 2013, she was honored with the Australia Council Visual Arts Award and was included in the major survey exhibition, Australia, at the Royal Academy, London. Her works are included in numerous major museum collections, including: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum; Centre Pompidou; Stedelijk Museum; Tate Modern; Moderna Museet, Stockholm and the Yale Center for British Art.
