Gregory Cliffe

Gregory Cliffe is an Australian artist whose practice has evolved from early explorations in Abstract Expressionism, Sculptural Formalism, and Performance/Installation Art into a sustained engagement with painting. Following formative experiences in Paris in 1984 through the Cité Internationale des Arts, supported by an AGNSW Moya Dyring Studio residency and an Australia Council travel grant, he returned to Australia and gradually shifted his focus toward painting, later completing a Master of Arts at the University of Western Sydney.
Over four decades, Cliffe's practice has explored the relationship between memory, identity, and place. Early investigations of individual experience expanded into examinations of collective behaviour and social systems, culminating in projects such as Fragmented Values: Compulsive Lives and Groupthink. These works considered how shared beliefs, cultural values, and social narratives shape human experience.
In recent years, his work has evolved toward landscape as a repository of cultural memory, environmental change, and lived experience. Working primarily in oil on linen, Cliffe investigates the intersections of landscape, history, and memory, considering place as a palimpsest shaped by successive g...

1999-2001 University of Western Sydney, Nepean. Master of Arts (Honours). Contemporary Arts. Painting research, exhibition and exegesis.
1979 Diploma of Education, Sydney Teachers College.
1978 New South Wales Department of Education Teachers’ Scholarship.
1976-78 Alexander Mackie C.A.E., Diploma of Art (Design, Electromedia, Performance Art, Sculpture and Installations).
1974-5 The National Art School. Art Diploma Qualifying (Sculpture, Painting, Objective Drawing, Photography, Graphic Design, Silk-Screen and Block Printing, Design, Media Studies, Weaving).

2025: Finalist, Milburn Art Prize, Brisbane Institute of Art.
2025: Finalist, St. Columba’s Art Prize, Springwood, NSW.
2024: Finalist, Basil Sellers Art Prize, Moruya, NSW.
2024: Selected, Circle Arts display Amsterdam EuropFair.
2023: Finalist, Salon Des Refuses for The Lethbridge Small
Art Prize. 2022: Selected Group Show, Out of The Blue Exhibition at NSW Parliament House. BMCAN.
2019: Group show: Picturesque. Blue Mountains Artists’ Network at Braemar Gallery, Springwood
2019: Group Show, Brunswick Street Art Gallery 50 Squared prize.
2019: Group Show, Gallery 188 BMCAN Group Show: "Art Is the Reason".
2018-19: Blue Mountains Artists' Network Summer Spring and Autumn Shows at Edge Theatre Gallery, Katoomba.
2018: Finalist, Brunswick Small Art Prize, Brunswick Street Gallery.
2018: Online Finalist for The Lethbridge Art Prize.
2018: Finalist, Bald Archy Travelling Exhibition.
2016 One Artist Show: Lost Bear Gallery, Katoomba: “Groupthink”. Painting.
2001 Tin Sheds Art Gallery, University of Sydney: "Fragmented Values: Compulsive Lives".
1994 Wentworth Falls School of Arts. “Wild & Domesticated”. Paintings.