About Clare Thackway

Clare Thackway paints people and the structures of meaning we build in our lives. Best known for her forthright portraits and figurative paintings, Thackway understands the figure as a form of communication, embodying and interpreting our ideas about the self and representation. She considers how internal and collective experiences affect the ways in which we hold ourselves. She frequently depicts people she knows well, with a particular focus on the bonds in intergenerational relationships.

Motifs of drapery, grids, and stripes recur in Thackway’s paintings, recalling memory, connection, and the relationships between people. She draws on religious iconography as a system of association and codification. Together, these elements present a complex enquiry into bodily agency, sexuality, and networks of meaning. Informed by psychoanalytic and feminist theory and the history of painting, she explores the tensions we feel as we navigate desires for connection, interdependence, and autonomy.

Her decisive and scratched back painted marks drag light off the surface of the body, exposing luminous translucent skin. This prudent use of paint gives pulsing life to flesh, revealing the layers that exist subtly underneath.

Thackway studied visual art at the Australian National University, including an exchange at the Glasgow School of Art, and graduated with Honours in Fine Art from the National Art School, Sydney. Since 2007, she has exhibited regularly in Australia and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions in London, Paris, Melbourne, and Beijing. Her work has been presented at Art Basel Hong Kong with Tabula Rasa Gallery and is held in private collections in Australia, the UK, Germany, and France. She has been a finalist in several of Australia’s most prestigious art prizes, including the Archibald Prize, the Sir John Sulman Prize, the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, and the Blake Art Prize, and was awarded the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship in 2009.

She currently lives and works in Paris, France.