Vernon Treweeke

Vernon Treweeke (1939 – 19 March 2015 ) was an Australian psychedelic artist. He has been termed the "father of psychedelic art in Australia". In the late 1960s he was deemed to be "Australia's leading practitioner of abstract eroticism."

His work is held in various Australian and international collections, including the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Early life

Treweeke grew up in Sydney, Australia. He attended boarding school at Scots School in Bathurst where he became a close friend of Brett Whiteley.

Career

In 1966 Treweeke returned to Sydney via New York and San Francisco. In the late 1960s Treweeke regularly showed his work at Central Street Gallery in Sydney. His work of this time can be seen as developing a prototype for methods of exhibition practice that have subsequently become known as installation, multi-media and electronic art. A typical Treweeke exhibition during the Central Street years included silkscreen images on modular canvas panels coated in fluorescent paint, a sound component and then the whole space would be saturated in ultraviolet neon light. and virtuoso jazz pianist Luke Treweeke, whose mother was the artist Wendy Paramor. Treweeke died on 19 March 2015.