Sydney Contemporary 2026: Derek Ogbourne, 6 years: from Lockdown to Upside-down Land

BCFA is thrilled to present a survey of Derek Ogbourne’s painted works for Sydney Contemporary Art Fair 2026 - ranging from his Lockdown Series of 2020 to the present day. 

Ogbourne’s work has evolved over the past 40 years through many media, forms and ideas. It ranges from the production of postage stamps to full sized invented laboratories, automated machines to delicate drawings and photographs, organic paintings to transmitted performances and cinematic video works. The result tends to be a play between extreme human physicality and something that resonates or remains as an after-image or still. Whilst Ogbourne applies no set medium or work methodology, he has consistently returned to painting as his primal pull and first love.

The ‘romance’ or the notion of belonging, being a part of nature or of a particular land or landscape, has been an enduring motif across Ogbourne’s oeuvre. Recently he moved back to the house where he was born; the hills that surround him are home, and are body – they bleed, they writhe, they are in turmoil, ailing in a world turned upside-down. The poetry of place and belonging is an enduring physical and emotional bond, where earth is base, and sky is the mind. The rational counting mind merges with the surreal, dreamlike one.

Ogbourne’s paintings eschew realist representation and inhabit the freedom that is manifest in a form that can be loosely called abstraction; and yet they powerfully evoke human experience and perception at once. In both the grey background 2020 works made during the epidemic, with their raw oil paint applied directly from the tube or with his hands, as well as in the later, mid-period works that evolve away from grey to blue, the artist’s direct physicality is tangibly present. 

Ogbourne’s new body of post-covid paintings immerse the viewer into mindscapes and visual experiences of powerful resonance. In paintings from 2023-24, blue predominates as dawn or dusk landscapes, or the wild high seas. Sometimes exquisitely and delicately conceived, and sometimes disquieting, crude and playful, the paintings suggest an impending tragedy or a dramatic explosion which gives voice to the unsayable. Later works from 2025-26 become increasingly otherworldly, unearthly and strong in colour, while still retaining an underlying physical unease.

BCFA's Sydney Contemporary 2026 presentation will bring Ogbournes most recent work to the survey that are post Sydney Biennale in mind. The whole presents a powerful solo exhibition from an internationally acclaimed artist which speaks directly to Australian audiences about what it is to be fragile and to be human.