b. 1956, Melbourne, Australia

Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia

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Jon Cattapan has exhibited extensively since 1979, his works deal primarily with ways of representing urban topographies and narratives.

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As a painter he is known for panoramic layered city vistas, fragmentary works and figurative groupings and has a long held preoccupation for the way human beings negotiate territories. Within his paintings, drawings and prints we see influences of contemporary global culture, the fluidity of life and recent history that range from science fiction and film through to urban social debates. His extensive travels in Asia and living in cities such as New York, London and Venice have deeply influenced his practice.

In 2006, Jon Cattapan was honoured with a major retrospective The Drowned World: Jon Cattapan works and collaborations at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne. In 2008 he took up a commission through the Australian War Memorial to become Australia’s 63rd Official war artist and was deployed to Timor Leste, where he explored Night Vision technology as an aesthetic tool, which continues to inform his work. In his most recent work the artist has returned to exploring figurative interplays as a way of commenting on our unstable times.

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Cattapan was announced as the recipient of the Bulgari Art Award Fellowship in 2013 and in 2016 he won the Rockhampton Art Award. Cattapan’s works can be found in the collections of all Australian state museums and many regional galleries including the National Gallery of Australia, The National Gallery of Victoria, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Gallery of Modern Art/Queensland Art Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. His work is also held in major private and corporate collections.

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With over sixty solo exhibitions, Cattapan’s paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and experimental prints have been collected by all state museums in Australia, including the National Gallery of Australia, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and many important regional and university collections as well as collections overseas including The British Museum. In 2013 he was awarded the $80,000 Bulgari Art Award, the most prestigious and richest award for painting in Australia at the time).