Mark Schaller 'Arid Bloom'

18 December 2025 – 22 January 2026

Words by John Martin

The Lennox Gallery is proud to present Arid Bloom: an exhibition of new paintings by beloved Australian artist, Mark Schaller. This collection emerged through his perception of two trips taken to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre more than twenty years apart, a place in which time and space appeared indeterminable. Schaller’s works here carry the same distinct sense of playful rapture that has informed the artist’s career.

The paintings of Arid Bloom offer a freedom he has spent his life propounding, with their expressive landscape vistas and elements that at once suggesting romantic reverie and mystical irreverence. Schaller’s classically bright palette, often reminiscent of fauvist works, is here softened in order to merge with the colour and light of the Australian outback and depict its common treasures.

These paintings emphasise the foreground, depicting, as the name suggests, an aridity typical of the landscape, as well as the blooming of its flora. In Blue Wildflowers, shifting colours of ground and dirt reflect the aesthetic richness and variety of the country’s wilderness, ranging from deep brown to gold to subdued crimson hues set against and fading into one another. They contrast with the blue petals asway upon them, with Schaller’s flowers appearing forever vibrant, poised, bright and alert. Wilting here is an unknown thing.

The artist’s particular focus on wildflowers is no coincidence. The name gives it away. Schaller shows his fragrant, variegated subjects in the fullness of their delicacy and liberty. Lake Eyre Wildflowers and Flinders Ranges with Wildflowers depict purple and burgundy petals beneath skies of grey and pale lilac. Both freckle them amidst jagged rocks and, in the case of the latter, set them beneath arid peaks. Here the flowers contrast even more starkly with their environs in an interplay of perpetuityand ever-renewing life.

In Thorny Devil the artist turns his eye to fauna, rendering the endemic lizard in cubist form. Its peculiarities are celebrated in a golden, spiky contortion, both juxtaposition and complement to the diversity of the background terrain.

Schaller’s style pays tribute to landscape and place. The treatment of his subject matter with tenderness and awe reflects an ethic of care for the country, and a consequent warning emerges. The artist’s devotion to Australian beauty nods not only to its pictorial qualities but also to its fundamentally creative essence, shown here in undimmed splendour, a ceaseless dance of sky, water and earth.

An iconic name in Australian expressionism, Mark Schaller has his roots in the Victorian College of the Arts and in Roar Studios, which he founded (alongside others) in the 1980s. Like the works shown in Arid Bloom, Schaller’s oeuvre speaks to a fervent sense of freedom and possibility so often obscured or faded by contemporary preoccupations with industry, productivity and other dubious notions of progress. An archaic longing permeates his paintings, actualising a vision that still lies latent within us. In this way he is not only successor to the Fauvists and Expressionists, but also to Van Gogh and other post-impressionist visionaries. A similarly rapturous, mythic gaze is turned to present-day Australia throughout his works, never shying away from the joy and exuberant nature of creation.

Artist Statement

The dry red riverbed fills with water from the Diamantina all the way from Queensland. The landscape flourishes and transforms into a bed of wildflowers. I went to Lake Eyre/Kati Thanda in 2001 and again this year with filmmaker, Patrick Troy to see if my perception ofthe landscape had changed. It was as though the NeverNever was waiting, where time andspace were indeterminable. I chanced upon the inspiration for a collection of paintings called Arid Bloom.

Mark Schaller, November 2025

Artist Bio

Mark Schaller studied Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts and was a founding member of ROAR Studios, established in Fitzroy in the early 1980s. Since his first solo exhibition in 1982, he has held over 45 solo exhibitions throughout Australia and internationally.

His major commissions include the Art Series Hotel Schaller Studio in Bendigo, where an original painting is featured in every room, as well as a series of paintings at Kati Thanda – Lake Eyre alongside artists John Olsen and Tim Storrier. His works are held in major public and state collections across Australia, including the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and the National Gallery of Australia (NGA).

Schaller lived and worked in this building, that is now The Lennox for more than 24 years.