Guy Warren, former Archibald winner and Australia’s oldest working artist, has died.
William’s King Street Gallery in Sydney, which represents him, announced the 103-year-old’s death on Friday.
Warren died at 5am on Friday, June 14, after a short period in palliative care.
“Our thoughts are with his two children, Paul and Joanna, of whom Guy said, ‘they are the best thing I’ve ever done,'” gallery directors Robert and Randi Linnegar said in a statement.
They said they would miss Mr Warren greatly and described him as “a wonderful, kind-hearted, incredibly intelligent, funny and thoughtful person and artist” who was “dedicated to the education, expression and encouragement of the visual arts”.
Acclaimed artist Guy Warren (pictured in his studio in Greenwich) has died
A portrait Warren painted of himself decades ago. He was later awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia.
Warren was a dedicated painter for the past 80 years and mentored hundreds of young artists during his career.
“He mentored hundreds of young artists throughout his long and significant artistic career,” the couple said.
“The world will be worse for having lost this 103-year-old painter, teacher, philosopher, history-keeper and pioneering storyteller.”
Warren was born in Goulburn, New South Wales, in 1921, and completed some time in the army deployed to Papua New Guinea as a teenager.
He returned to Australia to study art, where he spent the next 80 years painting and had more than 50 solo exhibitions around the world since 1955.
A portrait of him by Peter Wegner won the Archibald Prize in 2021
His work varied in genre throughout his career, with his portrait of Bert Flugelman, The Wingman, winning him the Archibald Prize in 1985.
Warren also won the Art Gallery of New South Wales Trustees’ Watercolor Prize in 1979 and the Bronze Medal at the Fourth International Drawing Triennial in Poland in 1988.
He was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to the arts in 1999 and the Australia Medal in 2013.
The artist was also awarded two Honorary Doctorates in Visual Arts from the University of Wollongong and the University of Sydney in 2007 and 2008.
His work is featured in collections of all Australian State Galleries, as well as the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the British Museum, the National Library in Beijing and the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts.
