Collection: Matthew Cheyne

Matthew Cheyne is a Queensland artist, working in oil painting, drawing and sculpture. He graduated from the Queensland College of Art in 2001, having also studied film, and literature.

Matthew Cheyne's work is part oil painting, part hyper-colour drawing. Subjects as diverse as volcanoes, street hawkers and looters are rendered with the same dark humour. “I want to make work that presses forward, without sentimentality, but which invites people in and pulls them forward too.” Cheyne’s painting is full of that urgency, fuelled by the artist’s need for reinvention.

Though a figurative painter at heart, his subjects inhabit deliciously tonal, abstracted backgrounds, inviting the viewer to flesh out the scene. The effect is deliberate. “It’s a move that frees me of some of the more rational symbolism of my earlier work. My art has become much more about my own internal world, but I’d like the viewer to be complicit.” In embracing a more intuitive approach, Cheyne allows his own work to surprise him. 

Matthew Cheyne has lived in Germany and France and has had solo exhibitions in Cologne, Berlin and Luxembourg.

In Australia, his work has been shown at Casula Powerhouse in Sydney and at the Australian National Archives in Canberra, as well as with numerous commercial and public galleries.

'DON'T GET TOO COMFORTABLE' @ IPSWICH ART GALLERY (MAR - JUN 2025)
'THROUGH MY EYES' GROUP EXHIBITION (NOV - DEC 2023)
ARTIST PROFILE FEATURE (JUN 2023)
'KEEP OFF THE GRASS' (JUN 2023)
'MONOCHROME' GROUP EXHIBITION (MAY 2022)
'PICNIC' EXHIBITION (AUG - OCT 2021)
'PRIMAVERAL' GROUP EXHIBITION (SEP - OCT 2020)
DIRECTOR'S CHOICE EXHIBITION (JAN - MAR 2020)
PETITE | ABORIGINAL AND CONTEMPORARY ART EXHIBITION (NOV - DEC 2019)