Belem Lett is a graduate of the Sydney College of the Arts (BFA 2008) and UNSW Art and Design (MFA 2012). In 2010, he was the recipient of the prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, the highest award for an Australian artist under the age of 30, administered by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, including a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.
Lett regularly exhibits nationally, including at Sydney Contemporary, and has had solo shows at Artspace, Wellington St Projects, Firstdraft Gallery and several at Gallery9 in Sydney, Edwina Corlette Gallery in Brisbane and James Makin Gallery in Melbourne, as well as a 2011 solo at the Cité International des Arts in Paris.
Belem has been a finalist in the Chippendale New World Art Prize, Sunshine Coast Art Prize, Fishers Ghost Art Award, Elaine Bermingham National Watercolour Prize (Highly Commended), Paddington Art Prize (Highly Commended) and Sulman Prize.
Belem is now the winner of the 2022 Kangaroo Valley Art Prize, the artist’s first major art prize. The $8,000 prize was generously donated by Rosie and Simon Lempriere and Angus and Katherine Grinham.
Playing with light, colour and movement as inseparable phenomena, Belem considers the act of painting through the history of gestural abstraction. Through a deft application of paint with a colour-loaded brush, He creates physical momentum: the push/pull, twist, drag of the brush; the drip, stop and start.
Individual works explore gesture, minimalist reduction and the traditional constraints of the surface and picture plane. The result is a work that bounces off its own edges and then returns inwards to explore the interior space of the painting which implies a broader, perhaps even limitless world just beyond our view.
Not surprisingly, Belem is also a sculptor.
Belem’s current paintings are the most sculptural to date. Crossed Legs is a giant, luminously colourful painting of oil, gesso and marble dust on aluminium composite panel. Hehas created transparent plastic pipes winding amongst each other in 3-dimensional space, walking, running from somewhere to somewhere.
A solo show of these works – Limbo – was held earlier this year at Edwina Corlett Gallery in Brisbane. Belem wrote “Limbo has been a familiar state of mind over the past few years. This show takes its title from this shared experience of waiting within a transitional space, isolated, unsure of when or if it will end or change … an existential space in which to ponder the various structures present within it. In doing so acknowledging the space and time we have had to ponder our own position within the structures of our modern society.
“While we navigate these twisted forms, certain works speak to affirmation, introspection, or support… There is also a sense of hope and frivolity in the joy of colour and movement. There is a light-hearted playfulness to the simple gesture of applying paint to a surface with a big brush. It’s enjoyable. The physically meandering and looping brush movement is further explored through these sculptural works … [pulling] itself out of the flattened plane of the painting … the gestured colour across its surface shifts the personality of the work as you move around it. Creating new compositions as you lean in and out from the work.”
Curator director, Megan Monte, said about the winning work: “The work by Belem Lett stands out for its boldness, yet sensitive understanding of colour and paint. This work takes on both playfully and experimentally. The colourful gestural tubes bend and fold over the canvas. Glowing because of the white backgrounds, giving a heightened sense of scale a depth. All tough perspectives to achieve, while carefully considering colour theory.”
The work was sold during the exhibition and how resides with a local private art collector.
Gary Moore
Visual Arts Director
Arts in the Valley
