Renée Estée
(Australia)
Renée is an Australian-born, New York-based artist. She’s a recent Hunter MFA Graduate (Dec 2022) and graduated with a BFA Honors (First Class Honors) from the Victorian College of the Arts (Melbourne, Aus) in 2016.
Renée’s practice highlights myth-making and rituals surrounding mourning, celebration and commemoration. Operating as visual love letters and epitaphs, her large-scale oil paintings coalesce figuration and abstraction to conjure spaces where she can commune with the deceased and contend with future loss. Renée’s figures evoke apparitional characteristics, materializing from layered, loose, gestural mark-making they merge in and out of their surrounding environments, whilst animals wander in the peripheries, simultaneously observing departures and transformations taking place.
Renée was the recipient of the Hunter College Ruth Stanton Grant (2020, 2021) and the Hunter College Summer Scholarship (2020), the National Gallery of Victoria Painting Award (2016), Stirling Collective Award for Painting (2016). Renée has shown across Australia, including Sarah Scout Gallery, Daine Singer Gallery, GAGProjects, etc. And in NYC has exhibited at SFA Projects, 205 Hudson St Gallery and Anna Zorina Gallery. She has work included in the Art Gallery of South Australia Archival Collection, Tolarno Collection, Hunter 68th St Collection, and private collections across Australia and America.
